by Logan Fox
I kick and lash out, but it’s as if Gabriel is made of steel. He doesn’t even blink when I rake my nails through his skin hard enough to draw blood.
“Help!” The yell burns my throat.
I was right about the soundproofing. Gabriel doesn’t give a fuck. He grabs my foot and lashes it to the bedpost.
My toes catch his chin, sending his head snapping to the side. There’s a hush, a pause as he straightens his head.
His brown eyes resemble those of an animal head hanging above some redneck’s fireplace.
There empty. Dead.
He grabs my other foot, lashes it down. I try and untie the knot on my left hand while he’s busy, but it’s so tight I don’t make any progress by the time he’s done.
And then he climbs on top of me, straddling my stomach.
Terror pours ice through my limbs. I go stiff, panting as tears leak from the corners of my eyes.
He grabs my chin, his fingertips biting cruelly into my jaw. Then he snaps my head to the side like he can’t bear looking at me anymore.
A giant sob wracks me as he ties off my last wrist. He settles back, crushing my stomach with his weight, and studies me.
My head is still to the side, and I don’t dare look at him. Instead I squeeze my eyes shut and start praying.
Our father, which art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy—
“Look at me.”
—name. Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done, on earth as—
“Look at me!” he roars.
His fingers wrench my head to face him, but I keep my eyes squeezed closed. It’s stupid, it’s fucking juvenile, but it’s the only way I can defy him now.
I’m not going to lie here and take this.
“Trinity.” His voice is soft now, sinister. “Open your eyes.”
“Fuck you.”
A slap sends white spots dashing through the black behind my eyes.
“You like it, don’t you?” he rasps. “The fight. The struggle. The pain. Got that from your whore mother.”
My eyes fly open. I stare up at him in shock. “How dare—”
He slaps me again. “Is this the only way you’ll let me in? Is this what it will take? Because I’ve done worse.” His voice catches. “I’ve done so much worse for so much less.”
My heart thunders in my chest. What the hell is he talking about? His shoulders move back, hand raised for another slap.
“No! Stop! Please!”
He pauses, but his hand stays up.
“I don’t know what you mean. Please…” A sob cuts in, I force it down best I can. “Just…just talk to me, Gabriel.”
Pathetic, trying to reason with a mad man. But my head aches, and my cheek’s on fire, and I can’t take anymore. I’m so close to surrender, I can already feel his hands on me.
His chest rises and falls, exaggerated. His hand drops, but barely an inch.
“Please. Just talk to me. Tell me…” I have to swallow hard before I speak again. “Tell me what you want.”
“What I want,” he repeats woodenly.
His hand falls to his side. His eyes move off me, staring at nothing. Or maybe only something he can see.
“Yeah,” I manage. My voice rebels, but I push out the words anyway. “Let’s talk, Gabe. Just you and me.”
His eyes slide back to mine.
I squirm under him before I can control myself because that blank face of his ratchets up my fear a thousand notches.
“So you can use me like he did?” he murmurs. Shakes his head. His voice drops to barely a whisper. “My fault. I let him use me. I let him control me…”
The hand he’d been about to hit me with curls into a fist. But instead of slamming into my face, he leans on it, putting his head close to mine.
He stares into my eyes from an inch away. I can feel his breath on my face, still a little too hard, too hot, from our struggle. My flesh writhes beneath my skin like I have a thousand worms burrowing through my body.
“It was his idea.” Gabriel laughs, sending a puff of warm breath over my lips. “But no one will ever believe me. Know why?”
His eyes skitter over mine, searching. I keep my face neutral. Try and keep my eyes locked on his.
“Why?” I manage.
He draws back a little, and then his eyes fall to my lips. “Because he’s a clever fuck, that’s why.”
Gabriel taps my temple hard with a finger. “Always ten steps ahead of me.”
My entire body vibrates how hard my heart’s beating. “I’m sorry,” I murmur. “He shouldn’t have used you.”
“No!” he agrees, breath painting my lips again. His eyes are locked on mine now, so intense I can almost feel his pain. “No, he shouldn’t have. Not if he loved me like he claimed he did. But you know what, Trinity? I realized something a few years ago.” He glances away for barely a second before his eyes are back on mine again. “Still can’t believe it took me so long, but I realized, of course he didn’t love me. He’s not capable of love. He’d just pretend. Just like he’d pretend to be normal.”
He grabs my chin, shakes my head. But not violently this time. Almost gently.
“Had everyone fooled, didn’t he?” He smiles, bitterly, cruelly. “Me. You. Everyone.”
My head sinks into the dirty mattress when he pushes back to sit. He drags his hands down his face and then slowly climbs off me.
Relief floods me with heat, then cold. I don’t know what to say. I feel like I’m walking a tightrope, and one wrong word could send me plummeting to my death.
Literally.
But I don’t need to. He’s gone off on a tangent, and I’m merely his audience.
“I was such a fool back then,” Gabriel purses his lips. “I was so infatuated with him, his plan sounded…logical. If his urges, his compulsions, only became worse when he repressed them then he had to find an outlet for them.”
My skin grows cold. I swallow hard, and then force myself not to fixate on Gabriel, or the words spilling out of his mouth. Instead, I tug surreptitiously at the knots lashing me to the bed, trying to find a little give in them. Something. Fucking anything.
“We tried everything, Monica and I. Sick things. Things you couldn’t wrap your head around. But it was never enough. The two of us? We were never enough for him.”
He points at the bed, and I freeze. But he’s so far lost in the past, I doubt he even sees me anymore.
“I’d strap her down for him. Hurt her for him. Ropes, whips, knives. We’d fuck her raw, but it was never enough for him.”
My guts twist as I glance down at the mattress I’m lying on.
Lord, don’t let this be the same one they—
My eyes flutter closed as I will my nausea to settle down.
“It became a game, in the end.” Gabriel walks up to the bed, stares down at me. When he reaches out and grabs a lock of my hair, curling it around his finger, I do my best not to pull away or puke. “But Keith always won.”
My body sags.
I’m not getting out of these knots. I doubt I’m even getting out of this basement. Not after I see the look in Gabriel’s eyes.
Defeat.
He knows there’s no coming back from this. You can’t tie up your daughter in a basement and still expect her to love you.
If that’s even what he was after. It’s night and day with him. Like a faulty switch that keeps dimming and brightening a light even when you’re not touching it.
“You’re crazy,” I say quietly. Not with malice. Just stating a fact, that’s all.
Gabriel smiles as he huffs out a breath through his nose. “Yes.” He agrees through a sigh. “I am.” Then he releases my hair. “But not always. Not at first.” He points at himself. “He made me like this. With his tricks and his games.”
He’s nodding over and over again, like he’s stuck. “They did this to me.”
“You can’t keep blaming him. He’s dead.”
At this, he throws back
his head and laughs.
The sound is more terrifying than when he was on top of me, slapping me into submission.
“Oh, God.” A last laugh. “Yes.” Another sigh. “They both are. They are so very fucking dead.” He dips his head a little. “God answers our prayers in his own way,” he says, placing a hand over his heart. “It only took a few thousand of them before he answered mine.”
I grit my teeth at him. “It’s karma. It’s what happens if you’re a bad person.”
His face turns to stone, but he doesn’t try and stop me.
“Think you’ll get away with it? You won’t.” I lift my head, pushing my chin out at him. “And I hope God punishes you. I hope you die a slow and horrible death. Because that’s more than what you deserve for what you did to those boys, you sick fuck!”
The silence that comes after my pronouncement seems much too quiet, like the walls in here are still soaking up every stray sound wave.
Gabriel tilts his head to the side. Takes a step closer. “You still don’t get it, do you?”
I cringe away the closer he comes, but there’s nowhere for me to go. Tied spread-eagled to this bed, I can’t do anything to protect myself.
“I had nothing to do with those kids. Nothing!” He points a finger to the side, then stabs it into his chest. “He blamed everything on me. He set me up when I told him I’d take you away from him. And he couldn’t have that, could he? Oh no.”
Gabriel gives his head a furious shake.
“You were the only reason Monica stayed. You were the glue that held your dysfunctional family together. Monica wouldn’t leave him, because he told her he would hurt you if she tried.”
My ears are singing. Not hymns, but dirges filled with despair.
Gabriel lets out another bitter laugh. “And that was my fault.” He lunges forward, grabs the front of my shirt in a fist. “I’m the reason you’re alive. I’m the reason he had something he could use to control her with. To control us with.”
His other hand cups my cheek. “He used you to turn her against me. And when I threatened to expose him, he made it look like I was the one who arranged everything. All those boys, for all those sick men? Me!”
My mouth is open. My eyes wide. But I can’t digest the information flooding my mind.
“He found a film of a young boy.” Gabriel’s eyes are wide, his face sickly pale. “He made us watch it. Me and Monica. Told us that was what he needed. That was the only cure for his sickness. Just one boy. One boy, and he wouldn’t prey on anyone else again.”
“N-No, pl-ease,” I manage, but sobs cut up the words.
“Who do you think it was, found that first boy for him? Hmm?” He leans close again, twisting the fabric of my shirt. Pushing me hard into the mattress. His fingertips dig into the side of my face as he forces me to look at him.
“Who do you think brought him down here, to the dark?”
“N-No…”
“Wasn’t me,” Gabriel whispers furiously. “I refused. I told her I’d have no part in it.”
“Please.”
“But she loved him so fucking much. More than life itself. More than that boy’s life.”
He shakes my head. Twists. The fabric is cutting into my flesh. It feels like it’s compressing my lungs.
Or maybe that’s fear.
Panic.
Denial.
“He didn’t last very long down here in the dark. Keith said it was because he didn’t have any friends to play with.”
I close my eyes.
Our father, which art in heaven.
“But there wasn’t enough room down here, was there? Monica tried to reason with him. Not enough room for another boy, Keith. Where would he sleep?”
Give us this day, our daily bread.
“So they had to find somewhere else. A bigger house. Someplace out of the way.”
And forgive us our trespassers, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
“And they did. They found a lovely, big old house out in the country. A place no one would suspect. And they had to, because Keith had found himself some friends. Believers of his cure.”
And deliver us from evil.
“Nice big house. With a nice big basement. And then the boys could have friends to play with. And there was more than enough space to put them, when they were dead.”
“You’re lying,” I whisper. “Mom had nothing to do with this. She couldn’t have. She’s not—”
“Oh, you’d be amazed, child. You’d be fucking amazed.” Gabriel releases my shirt and absently smooths the fabric down over my chest as he stares into my eyes.
“Who do you think washed all that filthy money they earned?”
“No. They didn’t have money. We weren’t rich. You’re lying!”
Gabriel’s lips quirk up in a smile. “No, you weren’t rich. Monica was clever. She made sure not to raise any suspicions. But as soon as you were eighteen, they were going to disappear.”
He stands, leaving behind the ache where his fingers had been gripping my face.
“But then God struck them down. Now they’re in hell, Trinity. Right where they belong.”
“And what about his friends?” I ask, my voice hoarse, broken. “What about the boys?”
“Dead. They hid them well. His followers…?” Gabriel shrugs as he purses his lips and glances away. “They’ll find other cures.” Then his eyes are back on me, fiery and determined. “But God will seek them out, one by one, and he will strike them down.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I’ve been praying, Trinity.” A smile crawls onto his face. “I’ve been praying for each and every one of them.”
Chapter Fifteen
Rube
“This is it?” Cass says through a mouthful of smoke. He tips back his head and then shakes it as he flicks away the butt end of his cigarette. “What a dump.”
“Still can’t believe this didn’t come up before,” Apollo says. He’s got his hands in his pockets as if it’s cold outside, but the sun is shining and I’m in short sleeves.
Could be the damp. It must have rained here last night, because the ground is still soggy in some places.
“Too close to home,” I tell Apollo. “He made sure nothing led back here.”
I head for the church, leaving them standing on the sidewalk.
Cass strays away down the road and Apollo hurries after him. Maybe Cass is worried he’ll run into a priest. His hatred of the clergy borders on psychosis.
I let myself in and wander down the aisle toward the chancel. The nave is empty, which is no surprise for a Friday morning.
There’s a sister near the altar, replacing some of the gutted-out candles. She turns when she hears my footsteps and does a double take.
“Can I help you?” she calls out, hugging herself and grabbing hold of the blatant crucifix around her neck. Seems this is one of the dioceses that don’t require sisters to wear habits. But the big cross was still a dead giveaway.
“Morning, sister…?” I stop a few feet away, keeping my distance and hoping it’ll help ease her mind.
“Vicky,” she says reluctantly, giving me a small nod.
This isn’t the greatest neighborhood, but why is she so spooked?
“Reuben.” I lift a hand to shake, but she ignores it, instead watching me with wide eyes as if willing me to get to the point.
Chances were slim to none that anyone would hand over baptism records to a non-relative.
We’d stopped off at the mall on the way here and picked up fresh clothes for me. Not really something we could afford, but we all looked like a bunch of degenerates in our Salvation Army getups.
I bought a pair of dark jeans. Thankfully, it’s warm outside, so I didn’t have to get a jacket. Instead, I’m wearing a branded athletic shirt that looks a lot more expensive than it was, thanks to their 50% off sale. A little deodorant to mask the smell of new clothes, and I was set.
Ask, and ye shall r
eceive.
“I’m sorry to drop in unannounced like this, but I only just got the address and, well…” I throw her a sheepish look. “I just couldn’t wait to see it.”
“See what?” Vicky asks, but at least she’s not holding herself rigid anymore.
“The chapel.” I glance around. “She wasn’t lying. It is beautiful. And I think we’ll just about be able to fit everyone in.”
“Excuse me?”
I glance at her from the corner of my eye. “The wedding party?” I wave at the rows of pews. “I think we’d just about be able to fit everyone in.”
“Wedding? Here?” Vicky’s eyebrows dart up. “When?” She shakes her head.
“Our wedding.” I let my voice get a little deeper.
Vicky takes a step back.
I immediately hold out a hand. “I’m so sorry, but are you sure you’re booked here?” I look at the ground, my jaw bunching. “I knew that wedding planner was full of—” I cut off, and hurriedly make the sign of the cross, ending off by lifting the metal crucifix around my neck and kissing it.
Another purchase, since Cass said the black crucifix Zach got me was ‘too intense.’
I turn back to Vicky, who’s wide-eyed now.
“I’m sorry. My fiancée tossed out the last wedding planner we had, so we have a new one, and I didn’t like her from the get-go but…” I lift my hands, shrug. “You don’t want to mess with a bride-to-be.”
Vicky shakes her head. “When is the wedding?”
“In three weeks,” I tell her. “Wedding planner was supposed to call. I just stopped by because I was convinced from the way Trinity described this place that it might be too small for all the guests.”
Vicky holds up her hands. “Trinity?”
“Malone.” I move my chin to the side. “Daughter of Keith and Monica?”
Vicky puts a hand over her mouth. “Oh my…I…” She shakes her head. “I didn’t even know she was old enough too—” But then her jaw clicks shut. “I’m going to check the register straight away.”
I let her walk a few paces before following. She leads me back through the nave, to a small office beside the foyer.
“If we decide not to get married here, would you send her baptismal records over to Father Kennedy? I’ll give you his email address.”
