The Ashes (The Rebecca Underhill Trilogy Book 2)

by Vincent Zandri

  Both men are stunned and still very much alive while the black blood sprays from their severed carotid arteries. Eyes wide, they try to speak, scream, but they can’t. Sliding out of the chains, Skinner goes to the van doors, closes them, presses the lock manually. He faces the two men who are down on their knees, their faces growing sickly pale from the rapid blood loss.

  “Now,” Skinner says, holding up the razor blade-like shiv, “who wants to be the first to make me a mask?”

  Sliding forward, he presses the shiv into the soft, fleshy space between Lawrence’s eyes, runs the blade slowly down the center of his face, opening up the nose like a raw blood sausage.

  “Ring around the Rosie,” Skinner sings, “A pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down . . .”

  Now, a year and a half later, the police are no closer to finding him than they were when he simply walked away from that van and into the woods behind the highway rest stop, his face skillfully covered with another man’s face. He’s collected a few masks since that day. Good masks, the skin still tender and soft. But they are nothing like the masks he will harvest come the morning. Nothing compared to the flesh he will consume. He listens to Robyn’s gentle snores, and he closes his eyes. Sleep will not come to him, but that doesn’t mean he won’t enjoy some very pleasant dreams.

  When the morning arrives, I feel more exhausted than when I hit the sheets eight hours before. Of course, all that alcohol didn’t help any. What the hell was I thinking?

  I don’t really know how much sleep I managed to get.

  All I recall is tossing and turning and listening to the house creak and crack while I hid under the comforter, certain The Skinner was standing beside my bed. Or worse, maybe under it.

  Sam helps get the kids ready for school. He overdoes it, making them eggs, pancakes, and sausage. But that’s only after he’s fed them bowls of Captain Crunch and milk.

  “What is this place?” I ask as I position myself in the opening between the hall and the kitchen, my hair wet from the shower. “Denny’s?”

  Over my shoulder, I can see the basement light has been left on since it’s possible to see the white light through the less than perfect seal between the old wood door and frame. I open the door, flick the switch, close the door back up. The cold, organic scent of mold and rot wafts up from the basement depths, and it gives me a case of the chills.

  “Anybody been in the basement?” I ask a bit bewildered since there’s no reason to ever go down into a dank, dark dungeon occupied only by ghosts, snakes, and spiders. Correction . . . Robyn goes down there, looking for bits of old junk for her sculpture projects and naturally she made a check on the place after Molly started complaining of a Boogeyman who could be down there. But otherwise, we all try to avoid it.

  Both kids respond in unison. “No way!!!”

  “That place scares us,” Mike says.

  “The Boogeyman goes down there,” little Molly says.

  Not wanting to have a repeat performance of yesterday, I decide not to push the issue. Besides, like I already said, Robyn probably went down there earlier looking for something for one of her weird sculpture projects.

  “I like it when Sam sleeps over,” Molly says, her pretty, rosy-cheeked face stuffed with pancakes. “He makes lots and lots of food.”

  I can tell little Mike wants to back her up, but his cheeks are so stuffed with breakfast, I swear he’s going to burst.

  “Where’s Robyn?” Sam says. He looks adorable in his usual uniform of jeans, boots, and work-shirt covered in a way-too-small apron meant for a woman half his manly size.

  “I knocked on her door,” I say. “But she didn’t answer. It’s Monday, which she hates. If she didn’t get up for early morning yoga, it means she didn’t sleep well, and now she’s in a bad mood and wants to sleep in. Her first art class isn’t until eleven, so the best decision we can make is to let her get her beauty sleep.”

  But then, if she slept in, who went down in the basement and left the light on? It had to be Robyn. Must be she got up, decided to work on one of her projects-in-progress, but then felt so sleepy and/or crappy, she decided to go back to bed. Wouldn’t be the first time she’s done that.

  “Can’t argue with sleeping in on Mondays,” Sam says, dishing out more sausage links to both kids. “What about you, Bec? You hungry?”

  I pull my damp hair back into a ponytail and pull a black cotton turtleneck over my shoulders. My jeans are a little stiff from having just pulled them off the drying rack in the upstairs bathroom, but they fit like a glove. Just like my ten-year-old cowboy boots, which afford me a little height against Sam’s towering frame. If I wore cowboy boots back when I was married to Michael, I would tower over him.

  “Breakfast?” I say. Without even thinking about it, I place my open hand on my stomach. “Maybe a little coffee and toast.”

  Sam assumes a serious express. “I’m a little worried about you. Always complaining about stomach aches.”

  I gaze at him with wide, unblinking eyes. Laser beams that say, some things are better left unsaid.

  “Mom, are you okay?” little Mike says.

  “Sure, Boo,” I assure him, planting a smile on my face. “Mommy just doesn’t go for a big breakfast in the morning. You know that.”

  “I love breakfast,” says Molly, lifting a fork full of syrup-dripping pancakes to her mouth. “I could eat this stuff all day. Breakfast for lunch. Breakfast for dinner.”

  Sam is standing in the corner by the coffee maker, a coffee mug in his hands.

  “How do you like it, Bec?” he asks.

  “Black,” I say, along with a wink. “Like my . . . ummm . . . you know what.”

  He laughs.

  “Black like what?” the ever-observant Mike says. “I don’t get it.”

  “Me neither,” says Molly with a full mouth. “Grown-ups are weird. Always worried about boring stuff.”

  Kids, they might enjoy make believe, but you can’t get anything happening in the real-time past them.

  Sam hands me my coffee, and I take a welcoming sip.

  “Okay you two,” I say, voice stern but not too stern. “Get a move on. Bus will be out front in four point five minutes. Let’s hope all the teeth are brushed.”

  “Been there, done that,” Sam says.

  “God Sam,” I say, “however did I get along without you?”

  “Wondering that myself,” he says, tossing me a backatcha wink.

  The kids get up from the table. Using a simple hand gesture that includes my extended index finger, I direct them to the sink to wash several varieties of food groups from their faces and hands. Then it’s time to gather up jackets, lunch boxes, and book bags. Together, Sam and I wait for them out front at the top of the driveway until the bus comes. When it arrives, I kiss them both and once more go through that inevitable emptiness that always accompanies seeing my son and Robyn’s little girl off to school.

  Admittedly, however, I sometimes enjoy seeing them get on the bus on those days when all I want to do is grab another cup of coffee and enjoy it out on the porch while the morning sun warms my face. But this morning is different. As Sam and I watch the bus disappear along the winding, hilly country road, we turn around to face the house and the cornfield and woods behind it.

  “Today, I will find out who you really are, Mr. Skinner,” I say to myself.

  Sam and I are quick about picking up the kitchen. We work together as a team, cleaning the dishes, drying them, setting them in the rack by the sink. With everything in order, he grabs the keys to his white Ford F150 4X4 extended cab, says, “I’ll wait for you out front, Bec.”

  For a brief beat, I think about sticking my head into Robyn’s bedroom, let her know where I’ll be for the day, but it’ll be just as easy to leave her a note. Ripping off a piece of paper from the Stuff-We-Need-At-The-Store pad that hangs off the door via magnet, I write, “Rob, road trip downstate today with Sam. Hope you don’t mind taking care of my students. I’ll owe
you one. I’ll be back for dinner. Don’t forget, your turn to get the kids off the bus. Text me when you get up. Peace out.”

  I leave the note on the table along with a plate of the leftover sausage and pancakes which she can heat up in the microwave. One last item. I lift the lid on my laptop, once more face the digital newspaper article about the escaped Skinner. I send it to the wireless printer we store in the broom closet on the top shelf. Less than a minute later, I’m folding the article, and stuffing it into the pocket of my jeans. I grab my black leather coat and my smartphone and meet Sam out in the driveway.

  Hopping up into the truck’s passenger seat, I pull the article back out, and say, “Set the GPS for the Mid-Hudson Psychiatric Center at 2834 NY-17M, New Hampton, New York 10958.”

  He does.

  The artificial intelligence computer voice tells us to take a right at the end of the driveway. I set my hand on Sam’s leg.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “For what?” he says, pulling out of the driveway and onto the country road.

  “For being there for me. For us.”

  He smiles. “Wouldn’t have it any other way, babe.”

  I hope he’s still feeling that way after meeting with the doctor at a facility for the criminally insane.

  She never knew what lie beneath her bed as she slept.

  Truth is, her worst nightmare had become real. A man . . . a devil-like creature that bore the mark of the beast . . . lying in wait for her underneath the mattress. But not just any man. A man who hungered for skin, for the raw flesh underneath it. For the taste of human meat.

  He recalls all those days and nights lying on his back on a hard bunk inside a prison cell, staring at the faces of two little girls. Molly and Rebecca Underhill. They were his lover’s adopted daughters and how he so wanted to become a part of them. He wanted to dance with them, sing with them.

  Ring around the Rosie, a pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall downnnnnnnnnnnnnn . . .

  He wanted to touch them, feel them, get inside their skin, press his little body beside their beating hearts, swim inside their veins in the warm blood. As time went by, he wanted to taste them, wear their skin over his own. He wanted to become them.

  Only Rebecca has survived.

  But she now has a new sister in the form of Robyn. And new children to care for — Molly and Mike Jr.

  Lying prone on his back all night, under the bed of the sleeping woman, Skinner felt happiness and excitement. An excitement he experienced inside his hardness as he did inside his brain, which buzzed with electricity and adrenaline.

  He smelled Robyn. Smelled her sex. He possessed that gift. He felt her flesh without touching it. Tasted her body without putting his lips and tongue on her.

  Here’s how he stole her from right out of her bed: As the nighttime darkness became deep and impenetrable, he shifted his body out from under the wood bedframe-supported mattress. Then, silently situatedhimself onto his left side, he reached out with his right hand, his claw-like fingers slowly coming around the bed until positioned directly over her mouth. And then, just like that, he brought the hand down hard on her mouth.

  He didn’t have to see her face to know that her eyes had opened wide in panic and fear. To know she was caught in a state of paralysis that existed the moment you are awoken abruptly, or when you wake from a vivid nightmare and the line between reality and dream is entirely blurred.

  He slipped his thin, lithe body from out of under the bed, and used his extraordinary strength and ability to throw himself upon her, straddling her, pressing his hand over her mouth the entire time. He ran his free hand up and down the side of her body, tearing off her panties.

  She tried to bite him, but she wasn’t strong enough. The pain would not have any effect on Skinner even if she managed it. In a very real way, he is already dead, and there is no killing the dead.

  Pressing his hand harder over her mouth, he then clasped the index finger and thumb onto her nasal passages, cutting off the oxygen supply entirely. When she passed out from asphyxiation, he slipped off the bed and pulled her up and over his shoulder.

  Carrying her out the bedroom door, he silently but speedily transported her down the staircase, to the center hall where he opened the basement door. Flipping the switch for the single overhead light bulb, he closed the door behind him and carted her down the wood steps, across the gravel-packed floor, through the cobwebs that stuck to his face, and the black snakes that slithered over his feet, and the centipedes that buried themselves in Robyn’s thick hair. He carried her to a piece of stone wall that appeared precisely like every bit of stone wall that surrounded it, but that, in reality, was entirely different.

  Depressing a special electronic device he pulled from his pocket, he was able to trip the lock on a door-sized panel that pivoted on a vertical hinge. With the deadweight of Robyn slung over his shoulder, he walked through the door and into the dark, rank-smelling tunnel.

  The secret door automatically closing behind him, Skinner made the slow trek through the tunnel he’d dug with his own two hands to an old concrete sewer tunnel which connected to his home in the ground.

  Now, with his little kitten duct-taped to a chair in the center of the concrete room, he lay himself out on a cot built for one, and he sleeps the sleep of a baby, down in the depths of his basement home beneath the cornfield.

  “So, do we have an appointment?” Sam asks, taking occasional sips of his large Dunkin Donuts coffee. Like he hasn’t drowned himself in a pot of coffee already. He takes pride in being a man’s man in a politically correct, male castrated world. Or so he says. In another time and place, Sam would have been one of those rugged individualist construction workers who believes a coffee break isn’t complete without toasted hard rolls, black coffee, and Marlboro cigarettes.

  “I’m not so sure Skinner’s doctor . . . what’s his name . . .” I glance once more at the article until I find it. “. . . Dr. Martin Friedlander. Not sure he’ll agree to see me right away unless I make a pest of myself front and center.”

  “I like your strategy,” he says. “But you realize, you might not like what he has to say.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning this Friedlander is liable to tell you Skinner’s presence in Mexico has been confirmed by more than one witness or something like that.”

  “So that would be a good thing,” I say. “That would be a relief.”

  “Maybe,” he says. “But what if the kids keep claiming to see a man named Skinner in the cornfield. We’re still left with the original problem.”

  I see where Sam is going with this. He feels that by not going to the police right away, we’re more or less putting off the inevitable.

  “So what you’re saying is Dr. Friedlander can tell us Skinner has been spotted on Mars and that doesn’t change the fact that he’ll be dead wrong.”

  “My guess is that Skinner, if he was in love with Whalen as much as it appeared when they were cellmates together at Green Haven, has made a pilgrimage not only to Whalen’s home but also to the source of the crazy bastard’s life-long obsession.”

  My stomach sinks. It’s the organ’s way of telling me not to forget about it . . . that it’s still here to plague me hour in and hour out.

  “Me and Molly,” I say.

  “It’s a theory,” he says. “But based on what we know and what the kids have been witnessing . . . Based on the thing I took a shot at out in the cornfield . . . The Skinner is living somewhere behind your house. This little mission we’re embarking on is your way of putting off the inevitable.”

  My sinking stomach now replaced with a kind of anger. Who is Sam to judge my motives? But on the other hand, he makes perfect sense. Maybe we should be going straight to the police. Or maybe not.

  “There’s a method to my madness, Sam,” I say. “If Dr. Friedlander tells us things that support your theory, which is essentially that Skinner is taking over where Whalen left off, then we’ll have the f
uel we need to go straight to the cops. What I’m banking on is that he told Friedlander where he would go if he got out. Or maybe he revealed something to another inmate or patient or whatever they call them inside the place. That’s the kind of concrete proof I can go to the cops with other than just, ‘Oh, hi there, officer, my kids are seeing ghosts in the corn.’”

  “The cops will think you’re just an overly concerned mother. Not a nut case. Maybe you should give them a little credit.”

  Sam’s right. But then, he doesn’t know everything about me. Maybe it’s time I peeled away a little bit more of the onion, let him in on a little more of the truth.

  I exhale a long, drawn out breath.

  “Listen, Sam,” I say, “that first year after my abduction was a difficult time for me. Not only because Michael died, but also because I was afraid of my own shadow. Or, not afraid for me, necessarily, but for the kids. I somehow became convinced that Whalen wasn’t dead. That he would come back for me and this time he’d finish the job he started twice and failed at twice.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “What I’m saying is, I must have called the police or even showed up at the Albany headquarters a dozen times over seeing a shadow here or hearing a bump in the night there. Stuff that turned out to be . . . well, my paranoia.”

  “I get it,” he says. “You spout off about a man living in the corn, the cops will blow you off. But you can prove that maybe this time you have some proof of the danger and—”

  “—They might actually take me seriously, and do something about it before someone gets hurt.”

  He nods, steals another sip of coffee.

  “Let’s go see Dr. Friedlander, and then go to the police, and put a lid on this thing today.”