by Sara Reinke
“Paul, I don’t―”
“I love you,” he said, and hung up on her. He genuflected in front of his desk, dialing Jay’s house with one hand and unlocking his bottom file drawer with the other. “Jo, hey, do me a favor,” he said when his sister-in-law answered. “Is Emma up? Can you put her on the phone for a second?”
“Paul, I haven’t told her what’s going on,” Jo said in a hushed, guarded tone. “I just said that Jay had to run out this morning.”
“Mum’s the word,” he promised as he pulled his shoulder holster and nine-millimeter out of the drawer. He balanced the phone between his ear and shoulder as he rose to his feet and began to shrug his way into the leather straps. “Hey, kiddo!” he said, forcing a bright voice when Emma came on the line.
“Hi, Uncle Paul,” Emma said brightly. “How are you?”
“I’m good, I’m good,” Paul said, still with a broad, phony grin on his face, as if she could look through the telephone and see him. “Listen, kiddo, I have a question for you. Yesterday, you told me you had a message for me from Grandma. What was it again? Something about Scooby Doo?”
“She said you needed to follow him,” Emma said helpfully. “She showed me a picture in my mind of you following Scooby Doo. She said he’d help you find what you were looking for. Scooby and Claire Boyett.”
Paul finished strapping his sidearm over his chest and ran his fingers through his thin hair. “That’s the thing, Emma,” he said. “Remember when I said I didn’t know what I was supposed to be looking for? Well, I do now. I know. But I still don’t know who Scooby Doo is supposed to be―or Claire Boyett.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. I can’t believe I’m doing this. I can’t believe I’m about to do this―again. “Do you remember when I was looking for that bad man, the Watcher? You were in the hospital.”
“Yes, I remember,” Emma said.
“Grandma had a message for me then, too, do you remember? She tried to tell me who the bad man was, so I could find him.”
“Uh-huh,” Emma said.
“Can you ask her to help me again?” Paul asked, feeling monumentally foolish. He was asking his six-year-old niece to talk to his dead mother to help him find his missing brother and daughters. “I…I really need her to, if she can, kiddo, because what she’s given me so far…I’m drawing a blank.”
“Okay,” Emma said, and then she was quiet for a long moment. Paul listened to a soft, rhythmic sound―chewing. He’d caught Emma in mid-breakfast and she was eating a bowl of cereal while she tried to commune with the dead.
After a few minutes, she uttered a frustrated little sigh. “She won’t talk to me, Uncle Paul,” she said. “I can see her in my head, but when she talks, all I hear is the wind.”
“The wind?” He blinked, puzzled.
“There’s a storm,” Emma said. “She’s seen it coming. She told me it was right next door. She told me Daddy was going to be hurt.” Her voice grew small, tremulous. “Is my daddy okay, Uncle Paul?”
Please, Daddy, Uncle Jay is hurt! M.K. had pleaded. He’s hurt real bad!
“He’s fine, lamb,” Paul said gently. “I promise he’ll be just fine.”
He hung up the phone and sat at his desk, wracking his brain. He wanted to be in motion, doing something, hunting for his daughters and Jay, but he didn’t have the faintest idea where to begin. Scooby Doo and Claire Boyett. Emma said I was supposed to follow them.
“Terrific,” he muttered, slapping his hand against his desk, sending papers scattering. “A goddamn cartoon dog and a woman I’ve never met before. Piece of goddamn cake.”
He blinked down at one of the sheets that fluttered to rest beside his foot. It was a page from the sheaf of information Jason had printed off for him on the three abandoned houses downtown near where Melaine Geary’s body had been dumped. He recognized it from the black-and-white photo; it was the last one he and Brenda had searched that day, the house in which they’d stumbled across the Greater Metropolitan Ghosthunting Society.
“Ghosthunters,” Paul muttered, shaking his head. “Christ Almighty.” Maybe I need to call them, he thought. Maybe they know where I can find
His thought cut abruptly short, and he gasped, startled. “Scooby Doo,” he whispered, remembering what had darted through his mind on the lawn outside of the empty house, as he’d marched in angry circles around the gaggle of kids and their audio-visual equipment: I waste an entire afternoon creeping around a bunch of broken-down houses―illegally at that―to try and find a killer, and instead, I wind up with the goddamn Scooby Doo gang.
“Holy shit,” Paul breathed, and spun in the chair toward his computer. He opened up his web browser and Google-searched for the Greater Metropolitan Ghosthunting Society. He clicked on the link for their home page off of the search results and scrolled down, looking for contact information.
What was that kid’s name again? he wondered. Taylor, wasn’t it? Cameron Taylor.
He froze, his breath drawing still yet again when a series of images on the webpage caught his attention. The old Liberty Sanitarium, the cutline declared. Home to more than 300 documented spectral phenomena.
There were five images in all, two of the building’s crumbling exterior, as shot on a gloomy, autumn afternoon. The remaining three were of various portions of the ruined interior. The walls were covered in spray-painted graffiti, the floors littered with broken plaster and debris.
Horsehair plaster, I bet, and asbestos, too…probably a little lead paint tossed in for variety.
“Holy shit,” Paul whispered. “They’ve been there. They’ve been inside goddamn Liberty Sanitarium.”
He found a telephone number listed at the bottom of the webpage, and dialed it frantically. Now everything was making sense. M.K. had cried that she couldn’t find her way out of wherever she was. There’s nothing but rooms! Rooms and walls and busted windows!
Hundreds of people had been housed at Liberty Sanitarium during its heyday. The building was enormous, which was part of the reason Milton Enterprises kept saying that it had to be razed, that no new construction could be built to incorporate or surround it. It was simply too enormous, and had stood empty too long.
“Hello?” The girl answering the phone sounded no older than nine or ten to his ear.
“Uh, yeah. Is this the number for the Greater Metropolitan Ghosthunting Society?” he said.
“Hang on,” said the girl, and then there was a clunk as she set the phone down. “Cam!” she hollered. “Cameron! Hey, Fox Mulder, it’s for you on the freak line!”
“Get bent, Adrian, you PAP smear,” he heard a young man’s voice say, and then, more loudly into the phone, “Greater Metropolitan Ghosthunting Society at your service. The truth is out there. How can I help you?”
Oh, Christ, I’ve got to be out of my mind, Paul thought, and he stifled an inward groan. “Cameron Taylor? Hi, it’s Lieutenant Paul Frances from Metro P.D. We met the other day…yeah. Look, I got a favor to ask of you. I need your help.”
CHAPTER TEN
Bethany jerked and tugged against her bonds, feeling the ropes slip somewhat after what had to be hours of desperate, frantic effort. She had foggy, dim memories of being hefted out of the backseat of Jay’s car and into the back of a truck, a big truck, like her father’s. Whoever had shot her with the stun gun had then pressed a rag over her face. It had been soaked in something that smelled pungent and strong; she’d succumbed to the fumes in only moments.
She remembered lying on something like a metal stretcher, and being rolled down a long, pitch-black corridor. Whoever moved her had been carrying a lantern in their hand; the yellow glow fluttering and bouncing against the scooped out hollow of the ceiling and walls had been her only orienting hint of light. Everything had smelled mildewed, damp, musty and old, but she hadn’t considered this too long before she’d fainted again.
She’d come to again to find herself tied in a chair, her wrists lashed together behind her back with rope. There was a gag in her
mouth, a hard, bitter-tasting rubber ball crammed so deeply back between her lips, her teeth cut deeply into the meat of it. The ball was secured in place with straps that wrapped around her head, cinched tightly, slicing into her cheeks. She was in a large room, someplace dirty and falling apart. The ceiling was cracked and caving in; the walls crumbling, the floor covered in plaster, dirt, dust and debris. Two lanterns illuminated the room; one by a doorway leading outward into utter darkness, and the other beside the wall opposite it, which cast a wide swath of yellow light across the floor.
M.K. sat beside her, trussed similarly. Uncle Jay sat several yards away in a different chair, one that looked like an old-time electric chair from a gangster movie or something. It had manacles built into the armrests; metal cuffs that had been locked in place over each of Jay’s wrists, holding him fast, leaving his hands suspended in the open air. Someone had taken off his shirt, leaving him bare-chested in the chilly, damp room. His feet were bound together, lashed at the ankles with some kind of wire that was connected to a noose around his throat. Every time he’d move his legs, the noose would tighten, strangling him.
He might have been okay in spite of this, except the man kept deliberately hurting Jay, making him struggle, making him slowly throttle himself. At first, he’d only used the stun gun, shocking Jay with it repeatedly, over and over, making him convulse against the chair, his voice strangled and choked around the gag.
“Stop it!” Bethany had cried around the rubber ball in her mouth. “Please stop it! Leave him alone!”
Then she had watched in helpless horror as sometime later, the man―still dressed in black and wearing a ski mask―had wheeled in a little cart, the kind you see at a dentist’s office. It had all kinds of instruments and implements on it, and they had clattered and rattled as the cart had bounced over the uneven surface of the floor.
Bethany hadn’t understood what the man meant to do until he started shoving long stick pins into Jay’s body. The man had been blocking her view at first, standing between her and Jay, and she hadn’t been able to tell what he was taking from the small box on his tray. And Jay hadn’t cried out at first, as if he’d been struggling not to so he wouldn’t frighten Bethany or M.K. Bethany had listened to the hoarse, labored sound of his breathing as it quickened, deepened into pained gasps, and had realized whatever the man was doing, he was hurting Jay.
“Stop!” she had tried to scream around the gag, but it had been no use. She’d looked frantically toward M.K., but her sister had been as mute and helpless as she was. “Please make him stop!”
She didn’t know how long it had lasted, but it had seemed an agonizing eternity. Finally, Jay had cried out around the gag, but his voice had kept cutting brutally short as he would jerk his legs and snap the wire around his neck tight. Bethany had screamed. M.K. had screamed. They had both sobbed and begged the man to leave Jay alone. When the man had stepped away from Jay, Bethany hadn’t been able to see the pins, but she could see the places where he’d stabbed them―dozens of bloody places all over Jay’s torso and arms, his shoulders and neck.
“Uncle Jay,” she tried to say as she struggled to work her hands free of the bonds. The man was gone now. Jay looked unconscious, slumped in the seat. She couldn’t move her lips enough around the ball to articulate, and all that came out was a garbled groan.
The last time the man in the ski mask had come, he’d brought a pack of cigarettes with him. He’d stood in front of Jay again, so Bethany hadn’t been able to see anything, but she’d heard the snict! of a lighter as he lit up one of the smokes. She’d smelled the sweet, pungent stink of searing flesh and then Jay had screamed piteously, jerking against his bonds. She’d watched his hands writhe and wrench against the manacle cuffs, and she and M.K. had screamed his name together in horror.
“Stop it!” Bethany had shrieked, because after the cigarette, the man had lifted a scalpel off of the dentist’s tray. It had glinted in the lantern light as he’d drawn it out of her view, moving it between his body and Jay’s, and when Jay had cried out again, Bethany had sobbed for him. “God, stop it! Leave him alone!”
Now, in the dim light, with the man in the ski mask gone, she gave one last furious yank against the ropes and felt them slip loose. Her heart tangled, her breath caught, and for a moment, she was so stunned with bright, icy hope, she couldn’t move. Then she recovered her wits and shook her arms mightily, jerking them loose one at a time. She reached for her gag, pawing at it until she found the belt buckles holding it in place. She wrenched it off of her and threw it aside, gasping for breath and trying to spit the nasty flavor of the hard rubber out of her mouth.
M.K. mewled at her. She’d been mewling all along as Bethany had fought her bonds, in frantic encouragement―or in shrill, frantic warning if she’d heard or seen the man in the ski mask coming. M.K. sat at a vantage where she could see beyond the darkened doorway, and if the man came, bearing a third lantern with him, M.K. could see its light coming ahead of him.
Bethany scrambled over to M.K.’s side and fell to her knees as she struggled to unfasten the gag around her sister’s mouth. Her eyes darted, panicked and anxious, around the room. She had no idea where they were. There was another door behind them, a black, shadowed threshold, but nothing else―no windows, no light fixtures, nothing.
“Gunnngh!” M.K. gasped, spitting as Bethany pulled the rubber ball out of her mouth. The straps had sheared open the corners of M.K.’s mouth, and blood was crusted on her chin. When Bethany reached behind her to try and untie her, M.K. shook her head. “Jay…” she said hoarsely, drawing Bethany’s gaze. M.K.’s eyes were wide and terrified. “Go…go help Jay,” she whispered. “Hurry, Bethie. He…he’s hurt. You gotta get him out of that thing…”
Bethany nodded and darted across the room. “Jay!” she whimpered, her hands fluttering helplessly about him. The wire noose had drawn so tightly about his throat, it had cut into his skin, drawing blood and exposing a thin, bright red strap of meat. He’d torn his wrists raw and bloody against the manacle cuffs. She could see the pins now, the sort with the squared handles, like they used in her freshman biology lab for dissections. She moaned softly, horrified; the man had pierced the needles all over Jay’s form, anywhere and everywhere, at least a hundred of them in all. And the cigarette burns…and the cuts from the scalpel… Bethany moaned again, seeing them, wicked, glittering, messy wounds on Jay’s arms, his belly, the side of his neck.
“Oh, God,” she whispered, cradling his face between her hands. Jay’s face was flushed deeply, nearly purple with the need for air, his lips cracked around the rubber ball, crusted with dried saliva and blood. He jerked slightly at her touch, his voice escaping him in a frightened mewl, and his eyes fluttered open in alarm. Bethany began to cry. “I’m sorry!” she pleaded. “Oh, God, I’m sorry, Uncle Jay…!”
She struggled to unbuckle the straps of his gag. Jay’s eyelids drooped closed, his tenuous consciousness waning as she pulled the ball out of his mouth. He couldn’t breathe; God alone only knew how many hours he’d been struggling to draw breath through his shattered, swollen nose, and around the rubber ball, the crushing force of the garrotte. Bethany tried to hold his head up, to ease him back in the chair to relieve the stranglehold of the noose. She stared at it in desperate horror; it had cut so deeply into him, she didn’t dare try to slip her fingers underneath it and loosen it, and it was wound so deftly against the nape of his neck, she realized she’d need wirecutters to get it undone.
“I…I can’t get this thing off his neck,” she said to M.K., turning to her. “It’s too tight, M.K.! I…I need something to cut it with…!”
Her eyes flooded with tears. The man had taken his knives and dentist tray with him. There was nothing she could use. Jay was trapped there.
“Beth…” he whispered, his voice a hoarse croak. She looked down, her tears spilling against his face, and he blinked up at her. His eyes were glassy with shock.
“I’m here, Uncle Jay,” she said. “I
can’t get the wire off your neck! I…I’m sorry! I don’t…!” Her voice dissolved with tears.
“Shhh…” he said, shaking his head slightly. “Please…don’t cry, lamb…”
She fell against him, sobbing against his shoulder. “Beth,” he breathed against her cheek. “Beth…sweetheart…look. Look at me.”
She blinked, trembling and hiccupping. “My phone,” he whispered, his own breath hitching, straining around the noose. “The…the front pocket…my phone…”
“Oh, God,” Bethany gasped, looking down at his lap. She patted her hand against his jeans and felt the outline of his cellphone tucked away, hidden in his pocket. “Oh, God, your phone!”
“Get it,” Jay told her, but when she tried, she couldn’t reach down his pocket. He shifted his weight, lifting his hips, but when he moved his legs, pushing with his feet against the floor, the line of the noose drew even tighter. Bethany uttered an anguished sob as he gasped weakly, desperately for air. She shoved her hand down his hip pocket, weeping as she jerked the phone loose.
“I’m sorry!” she wailed. “Jay, I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
He’d crumpled in the seat, fresh blood drawn as the wire had cut even more deeply into his throat. Jay wheezed loudly, moistly, desperately for air. “Paul…!” he whimpered breathlessly, rolling his eyes to look at her. “Call Paul…!”
Bethany opened the cell phone, her hands shaking uncotrollably. “It’s not working!” she cried when the screen remained black, when nothing happened as she frantically punched the buttons.
“Turn…it on,” Jay whispered.
“Bethany―hurry!” M.K. cried.
Bethany turned the phone on. She quickly dialed her father’s cell phone number, pulling the phone to her ear, but then blinked at Jay in new dismayed horror. “It says there’s no service available,” she mewled. “It…oh, Jay, it says we’re out of service range!”
