The Stranger Inside

by Lisa Unger

  She slipped off the path and into the trees, crouched down. More arguing voices—heated, the tingle of panic. A man and a woman, voices swelling and deflating as they approached, then passed her.

  “There’s someone else out here.”

  “There’s no one else.”

  “I saw someone.”

  They walked right past the pack, which was just another shadow in a field of shadows. She waited, trying to control her breath, her shoulders hiked with tension, the night closing in around her.

  And when they were gone, she grabbed the pack and ran back in the direction from which they’d come, away from Greg and Lily, toward—she had no idea what.

  FORTY-ONE

  How long did she jog along that path? Finally, she came to a clearing, the moon casting the open area in silver, an icy sheen clinging to the grass. Her breath came in clouds as she stood listening. Nothing. Silence.

  Then.

  An odd, arrhythmic thumping drew Rain’s attention toward the edge of the clearing, the pack heavy on her back. Then it was quiet again, except for the sad calling of an owl. Who looks for you? Who looks for you? Rain kept looking back, around her. The trees seemed to have eyes; she felt watched, afraid.

  The sound again, another hard thump. He was out here; she could feel him. Hank.

  What binds you two together? Greg wanted to know. Why can’t you give him up?

  Of course, he knew the answer. They both did.

  There was a final thump, resonant and loud, echoing off the trees—and then nothing. She kept moving, searching for the origin of the sound. She nearly tripped over the doors in the earth, some kind of cellar. Oh, god. Her heart lurched; there were voices within. Doors locked with a thick, heavy padlock. What good could come of a locked cellar in the middle of nowhere?

  She dug through the bag and found a large hammer, a small sledge actually, heavy and hard. Using all her strength and both hands, she brought it down over and over again on the lock. The lock itself never broke, but the latch holding the doors together fell apart with her last blow, wood splintering. She sat, breathless a moment, then swung the doors open. She was nearly knocked over with the stench, swallowing back a roil of nausea.

  Oh, god. What was down here?

  She took out the flashlight and shone it down into the dark hole.

  What she saw—it revealed itself in flashes. Three children, thin and filthy, two curled and cowering in the corners of makeshift cells. One looking up into the light, his face white, cheekbones pushing against flesh, bony shoulders.

  And Hank.

  It took her back to the woods with Tess, to the hollow of that tree, where she sat frozen inside. Though it was the dead of summer, she’d turned to ice. She wanted to go back there, to that empty place where the world just stopped and turned to frost.

  The Winter girl safely encased in ice, a princess under glass like Kreskey’s Snow White.

  But no. She wasn’t that girl anymore. She needed to help her friend and the other children down there. For Tess, for the kids that she and Hank were once, for the daughter she had waiting for her at home.

  “Lara.” Hank’s voice was soft with surprise. “It’s you.”

  There was a moment when she remembered everything about who he was—how he giggled like a girl, picked the pepperoni off his pizza—even though he insisted they order it on. How Batman was his favorite superhero, because he was a real, flawed man who built himself into something better. How he tried to kiss her when they were ten and she laughed at him, and he laughed, too. How he gave her a red crystal heart for her birthday, but that she’d lost it. Or thought she had. How she always believed that he and Tess would wind up together. And she would leave them and the place they grew up together to travel the world, coming home for holidays to visit their kids. And how somewhere, somehow, she wished there was a universe where it was true.

  Hank said something she couldn’t hear. She was so stunned by what she saw before, the rush of memory playing before her eyes.

  But then his expression hardened, turned cold, and he thundered up the stairs. She didn’t have time to do anything but cower.

  “Hank,” she said, as he was almost on top of her. “Please.”

  But then he was racing past her, tackling a man who stood behind her with shovel raised. She heard their bodies connect with an ugly thud, hard release of breath, and then they were tumbling on the ground, roaring.

  Rain grabbed the hammer.

  FORTY-TWO

  Bright moonlight, towering shadows of trees all around them, the sky a void above.

  Rain stood, breath ragged, hammer poised.

  The struggle between the two men on the ground was a tangle of limbs, a dervish. Hank delivered a blow to the middle of the other man. Then the stranger drove his elbow into Hank’s ribs, eliciting a cry of pain.

  She was hypnotized, thinking that violence between people was never as you imagined it. The sound of flesh on flesh, it was soft. Blows were awkward, the sounds guttural and strange. Something kept her from diving in, from helping Hank. Where? How? What if she hit him by accident? She stood, feeling like the helpless woman in the movies, the one she always wanted to scream at: Don’t just stand there! Do something!

  Then someone tackled her from behind and the ground rose up in an unforgiving wave, knocking the hammer from her hand. Shock. The terrible grappling of the mind. What just happened?

  She tasted dirt, an impossibly heavy weight pinning her to the ground. All her breath left her. A blow, another one, the pain rocketing up her spine, into her arms. Another to her ribs. She was paralyzed. She saw stars, the world spinning and tilting. She tried to turn, to face her assailant, but she couldn’t move.

  She felt herself freeze, go cold inside. It was too much, all of it. The things she’d seen and experienced. Kreskey in the woods. Hank and all his craziness. The night they went back. Markham. The Boston Boogeyman. There were too many monsters. And she was not strong enough to stop them all, and she was no closer to understanding why the world was what it was.

  And then she thought about Lily, her daughter, sleeping peacefully waiting for her mama. Her child. The one thing she was sure she’d done right. How much Lily needed Rain, how much Rain needed Lily. Motherhood, it was a touchstone, or could be. The place you went to give meaning to all the madness outside your door.

  A red-hot burst of adrenaline rocketed through her, and Rain spun powerfully to fend off a woman she had never seen, someone wild-eyed, mousy, with a tangle of unruly blond hair.

  Her elbow connected with the stranger’s jaw. Hard. The other woman was surprisingly tiny, with sticks for arms—how could she be so heavy?

  As the woman surged forward, Rain used her legs to knock her back, delivering a powerful shove to her middle. The other woman—who the hell was she?—stumbled, her body a comical arc, arms reaching. Then, backing over a fallen log, she fell. The other woman’s head hit the ground with a terrible thud, and then she was still.

  Rain tumbled away, scrambling after the hammer, adrenaline pulsing, breath frantic.

  When she felt the weight of it in her hand, she was back there again in that house with Kreskey, the knife clutched in her grasp. She ran that day, all her rage and sadness, an engine. She had no regrets. No remorse, even now. She could do it again. Detective Harper’s words bounced around her brain. Some people are better off dead. With effort, she pulled herself to her feet.

  She lifted the hammer and the strange woman cowered, skinny arm up to hold her off.

  “Please,” she whimpered. She couldn’t have been older than Rain, her clothing ragged and ill-fitting, “Please.”

  Another voice, this time Sandy’s: We fight violence with more violence and only more violence follows. We dig our grave deeper and deeper—there’s no end.

  How, she thought, how did I get here?

  She
let the hammer lower, rage, sadness flooding through her system. The moment was ugly, twisted. Those children down there—three, each in a cage, curled into corners. She could hear voices now, calling out. It was a horror show. Why was the world so full of darkness?

  Lara, Tess and Hank, all destroyed in different ways by Kreskey, who was destroyed by his own parents. And who knew what his own parents had suffered?

  She wanted, truly wanted, to kill this woman on the ground in front of her—though she wasn’t even sure who she was, what she had to do with the children. The woman moved to get up, and Rain lifted the hammer again, moved in quickly.

  “Don’t move,” she warned.

  She didn’t even recognize the sound of her own voice.

  How many evil people were there in the world? How could they ever find them all?

  “Lara.” No one had called her that in years. “Don’t.”

  She felt him before she saw him standing behind her. The heat of his body; she knew it. She turned to find that Hank had come to his feet. The other man lay bleeding on the ground, groaning. Hank, too, was bleeding from the mouth, holding his shoulder.

  His eyes—they were haunted, exhausted.

  The woman on the ground crawled away, still weeping. Rain watched her go—revulsion, anger, fear doing battle in her center. The hammer was still clutched in her hand. Who were these people? How had they all wound up here?

  “It’s done,” Hank said, reaching out a hand.

  He took the weapon from her and pulled her close. She sank into him, her old friend, and held on tight.

  FORTY-THREE

  “It’s over.” His voice was just a rasp. They could have been back there on the floor of Kreskey’s house, his corpse bleeding out beside them.

  It’s over. She wasn’t sure what he meant.

  Would it ever be over? For them? For those children? But then the trees came alive, figures moving out from the black space between the thick trunks.

  The field came alive with light and sound, with voices shouting. Hank pulled her to her knees, put his hands behind his own head and Rain did the same. There was an unreality to the scene as Agent Brower came to stand before them, gun drawn.

  Hank looked up at her, over at Rain.

  “We’re not going anywhere,” he said. “Just go take care of the kids. There are kids—who need help.”

  The young agent regarded them both, her gaze stern, bemused. But she holstered her weapon, snapping the clasp closed, then marched past them with a shake of her head.

  “What’s going to happen here?” Rain asked, dropping her hands, sinking down onto her heels. How was she going to explain this to her husband?

  “Honestly, I have no idea.”

  The night was long, endless. It seemed to stretch and pull.

  Three children—a boy and two girls—were retrieved from that cellar.

  She watched them carried out of the hole on stretchers. Alive. All of them alive—weak with malnourishment and dehydration, in various states of injury, with long, twisting roads ahead of them. But alive.

  Just like her and Hank so many years ago—but not Tess. They were all too late for her.

  The spotlights all around them, the towering trees, the stars. It could be a dream, one of those nightmares that take pieces from your life and make them strange, recognizable but only distantly. If she woke up in her bed, next to her husband, she wouldn’t be surprised. Rain closed her eyes and wished she would, that this would be like so many of her terrible dreams that faded in the light of the life she’d built.

  But no. This was real.

  Cool metal beneath her, some strange beeping, the crackle and hiss of a police scanner. Rain and Hank sat on the back of an ambulance, shoulder to shoulder. They’d been treated for their various cuts and bruises by a team of young and efficient EMT workers.

  “What are you doing here?” Hank asked when they were alone.

  It was the way it always was with old friends. Years had passed, but the energy between them was the same. They knew each other, were familiar in the way of family—they’d seen all the layers of each other, even those they’d managed to hide from others. Time and circumstance had never turned them into strangers. Enemies at one point. Antagonists. But not strangers.

  “I followed you,” she said simply.

  He shook his head, mystified. “Why?”

  “I have no idea,” she answered honestly. “I was on my way to your house. I had questions, things I needed to talk about. But when I got there you were leaving. I followed.”

  “Where’s your family?”

  “Home,” she said. “Sleeping, I hope.”

  “Well,” he said awkwardly. He released a breath and looked off into the sky. “Thanks for coming. It’s—good to see you.”

  She almost laughed at the banality of the statement, as if she’d dropped by to say hello and they’d had some tea. But then, he’d always been so stiff, awkward, no idea what to say. In the gaze he had on her, she saw her oldest friend. And yet he was so different. Older. Softer around the eyes, the first gray in his hair, the first wrinkles around his mouth.

  She took the crystal heart from her pocket and opened her hand. They both looked at it, every facet of their history glittering in its deep red.

  “Does this make us even?” she asked. “Finally.”

  He smiled lightly but didn’t look at her. “I suppose it does.”

  “How did you know I’d go there and find this?” she asked.

  “I know you, Lara,” he said quietly. “I’ve always known you.”

  Agent Brower marched toward them, ponytail swinging. She was looking a little worse for wear—hair a bit wild, strands pulled from their tie, wisping around her pale face, shirt wilted, a corner of it untucked, flack vest crooked.

  “How did you know these children were here?” she asked Hank.

  “A patient I have, a girl named Angel,” he said. “She claimed that there was a boy here, held captive. But she’s troubled, so no one believed her.”

  The agent’s expression was unreadable.

  “But you did?” she asked. “You believed her?”

  “I did.”

  “Did you think—I don’t know—about calling the police? Instead of coming out here unsupported in the dead of night. You could have been killed. Both of you.”

  He ran it down for her, patiently—how Angel’s claims had been investigated and dismissed, how he’d called a child advocate he knew, the detective working the case of a missing boy matching Billy Martin’s description, how the detective couldn’t come back here again without a warrant that he couldn’t get without more evidence.

  She watched him, pale, mouth open slightly. When he was done, she just stared a moment, brow furrowed, eyes stern and angry. Rain was about to tell him to stop talking, that he needed a lawyer, that they probably both did.

  “You saved those kids,” Agent Brower said finally. Her voice was soft. “They’re alive because of you.”

  “That’s what I do,” he said, rubbing at his eyes with thumb and forefinger, weary. “I try to save kids. Not usually like this, though.”

  Agent Brower nodded slowly, folded her arms around her middle.

  “And bring justice when you can’t?”

  The agent looked back and forth between Hank and Rain, something doing battle on her face. How much did she know? Or was instinct, suspicion all she had? Rain suspected the latter. She averted her eyes, up to the sky.

  “Do I need a lawyer?” Hank asked easily.

  Agent Brower stared off at some point behind Rain and Hank, declined to answer.

  “And you, Ms. Winter? How did you find yourself here? The last time we spoke you told me that you hadn’t seen Dr. Reams in years.”

  Rain mustered her journalist self.

  “I was planning on i
nterviewing him for my story, the one we discussed,” she said. “He was leaving his place when I arrived. And I followed.”

  Agent Brower cocked her head, frowning. It sounded every bit as crazy as it was.

  “Why would you do that?” asked the agent.

  Rain dipped her head, avoiding the other woman’s intense stare. “I’m—not sure.”

  “We have a history,” Hank interjected. “A connection. It’s hard to explain.”

  Agent Brower’s gaze continued back and forth between them, scowling, as if they were a puzzle that she couldn’t solve.

  “Were you tailing me, Agent Brower?” asked Hank. By the slight smile on his face, Rain thought he already knew the answer.

  Brower’s scowl dissolved into a similarly cryptic smile. “I’m the one asking the questions, Doctor.”

  Rain realized she was holding her breath, her shoulders hiked high. How was this going to go? Was she going to watch Hank get arrested? Was she going to jail? She made so many promises to her husband, just hours ago. She had broken them all. Would he forgive her this time? Would she lose him?

  “Well,” Agent Brower said with a sigh. “Tonight, you’re heroes. Without you, I don’t know what would have happened here.”

  Heroes. Villains. The lines were so much grayer than anyone knew, the truth so layered.

  Rain saw him then, her husband, half running toward her. She got up and ran to him, fell into his arms and started to cry for the first time. He held her tight.

  “Where’s Lily?” she asked through her tears.

  “I called your father,” he said. “He came right over. What happened here? Rain, what’s going on?”

  She tried to tell him, but the words wouldn’t come. He just held her. She felt Hank’s eyes on her, a heat on the back of her neck.

  “What’s he doing here?” Greg asked, voice growing cold.

  “It’s—so complicated,” she whispered.

  He pulled away and held her by the shoulders, locked her with that intense stare. He was everything, the foundation of the life she’d built, in spite of Kreskey, in spite of Hank. He was the right choice, the healthy choice, proof that she’d survived the things she’d suffered. But how could he forgive her again?