My heart drops into my aching stomach. Big tears fall.
“There must be an adjoining tunnel,” I say, my voice a hoarse whisper.
“Are we going to die now?” Mike says. “Are we going to see Dad?
The Skinner lets loose with a growl like a wild animal, as he lunges for us.
Miller doesn’t bother to knock. He puts his hand on the front doorknob, turns it, and finds that the door is not only unlocked but that it hasn’t been shut all the way. The house is dark, so he feels along the wall for a light switch. When he finds it, he flicks it on, illuminating the center hall in a warm, orange glow. He’s trained to identify things that are out of place, and in this case, there’s no shortage of evidence to gaze upon.
There’s blood on the floor. Streaks of it that appear, at first glance anyway, to extend from the kitchen all the way out into the center hall and down the basement staircase. The kitchen floor is littered with shards from shattered dinner plates and drinking glasses. The cabinet doors have been flung open. The entire space is ransacked.
Miller swallows something bitter.
“Looks like a small war has taken place here,” he whispers under his breath.
Something catches his eye, hanging over the edge of the sink. He makes his way across the floor, the broken glass and ceramic crunching under the thick soles on his shoes. When he comes to the sink, he takes hold of the wire with his free hand and the mini camera and microphone that are attached to it.
“Place was bugged,” he says, staring down at the device. “But by who? The Skinner?”
His stomach muscles tighten as though to confirm his suspicion. He shoves the device into his jacket pocket.
He makes out a noise. Something scattering across the floor and down the basement steps. Raising the pistol barrel, he aims it for the opening between the kitchen and hallway and slowly begins making his way back across the kitchen floor. Coming to the open basement door, he sees that the light is on. It tells him someone is either down there or has been down there recently.
“Hello!” he shouts. “Anyone down there? I’m Detective Nick Miller with the Albany Police Department. I have a gun, and I’m coming down.”
Breathing in and out, Miller improves his grip on the 9mm semi-automatic and proceeds to descend the stairs.
Arriving at the landing, he quickly gazes over his left shoulder into the dark, dank, moldy atmosphere.
“Hello,” he repeats. “Anyone down here?”
More noise coming from the far side of the basement. In the area that isn’t lit up by the dull, flickering, ceiling-beam-mounted light bulb. Carefully placing one foot in front of the other, he walks under the light. The spider webs stick to his face, but it’s a minor inconvenience compared to what he’s liable to find on the other side of the cellar.
“Hello,” he repeats yet again. But he knows if someone or something is waiting for him, they are simply not about to respond.
More noise, like the tearing of cloth.
Miller pulls a mini Maglite from out of his left-hand jacket pocket, thumbs it on, and grips the 9mm with both hands so that the bright light runs parallel with the barrel. He crouches, combat position, aims the gun in the direction of the noise. Two big brown eyes reflect in the Maglite. The eyes belong to the furry face on a small dog that’s shivering and crying, its fur covered in webs and filth, as though having crawled into the basement through a small opening in the earth.
Miller takes another step forward.
“It’s okay, buddy,” he says, bending at the knees, holding out his hand for the dog to sniff. “What’s your name?”
The dog barks, but doesn’t lash out at the detective. Aiming the light source beyond the dog, Miller makes out the form of a grown man seated in a chair. The man’s head is chin against chest, and there are thick strings of blood and mucous extending from his face all the way down his chest.
But the closer Miller comes to the man, he can see that there’s something wrong with the face. Something more than meets the eye. It takes only a couple more steps before he can see that the man in the chair no longer has a face or a scalp or neck skin. It’s all been completely removed or flayed.
The detective tries to swallow, but his throat has closed up on itself. His head is spinning, his stomach so tight he feels it might split in two. He’s been witness to some graphic violence in his life. Some seriously sick shit. Stabbings, gunshot wounds, even a beheading. But he’s never seen anything like this, and it’s enough to send an electric wave of shock throughout his nervous system.
Once more, he runs the Maglite over the head and sees that the back of Sam’s cranial cap is blown away.
“Somebody shot you,” he whispers. “Put you out of your misery.”
The dog brushes against his leg. It’s crying, but it’s also poking at something lying on the floor. He shifts the light beam downwards. At first, he thinks it must be a rubber mask like something you might purchase at a party store. But then he quickly understands that it’s not a mask at all, but the face of a man. The entire face, scalp, and neck that belongs to Sam Goodman.
“Sam,” he says. “My God in heaven. Who the hell did this?”
He knows full well who did it.
The Skinner.
Reaching out with his index and middle finger, Miller brings them to Sam’s blue carotid artery and confirms what he already knows. Sam is dead.
“Thank Christ,” he says.
The dog moves further into the darkness. Let’s loose with a few barks. Miller shifts the flashlight towards the dog. The animal is facing the stone wall.
“What the hell are you looking at?” Miller says.
The dog scratches at the wall.
The detective goes to the wall, presses his hand against it. Then, making a fist around the mini Maglite, he punches the wall.
“Hollow,” he whispers. “Not stone. But hollow metal.”
He pushes against the wall, but it doesn’t budge.
“Well, so much for open fucking sesame,” the detective says.
Pulling his radio from off his belt, he depresses the mic.
“This is Miller,” he barks. “I’m requesting immediate backup assistance.”
It’s only when The Skinner is standing a foot or less from me, his face and tight body illuminated by the yellow string of lights hanging from the tunnel wall, that I see how the blade is still buried inside his right cheek.
“Don’t look at him, kids,” I say, voice stern and as unafraid as I can possibly manage. “Close your eyes.”
The kids are crying, trembling, their tears pouring out of their red eyes.
The Skinner stares me down. He tries to talk, but no words will come with his thick tongue impaled on the blade. But that doesn’t prevent him from trying to speak.
The noise coming from his mouth is a mumble, but it sounds like he’s saying, “Rebecca, my little kitten. I love you . . . I . . . love . . . you.”
To my left, a light bulb twisted into the socket. There’s no cage covering it, and there’s definitely enough slack in the line. I don’t even think about. I just grab it, yellow line and all, shatter the bulb against the wall, and jam it into his right cheek.
The Skinner screams, his high-pitched voice reverberating throughout the tunnel. The lights on the long line flicker, the entire tubular space going from dark to light to dark again, like someone is flicking a switch on and off. For a brief moment, I get the feeling the entire line is going to drop into the water. If it does, we’re all dead. But the line holds to the wall, and we live. We live, for now.
I let go of Mike and Molly. The last thing I want to do is separate myself from them. But Skinner is too strong, too quick. If I sacrifice myself, use my body as a distraction, I’ll be able to get them free and clear of this place. But if we stay together, chances are Skinner will kill us all.
“Run!” I insist. “Run now! Don’t stop until you are out of this tunnel. Go! Go! Go! Run until you come to the end of the tu
nnel.”
“What will happen to you, Mom?” Mike says through his tears.
“I’ll be okay,” I say. “I’ll be right behind you. Now go. Do what I say . . . what your dad says. Go now.”
But they hesitate. They grab hold of my hands like they firmly believe they will never see me again. But I won’t allow that to happen.
“Go!” I scream.
As if scolded, they let go of my hands. They turn and run through the water, toward the faint lights at the very end of this concrete tunnel.
Directly before me, The Skinner is pressing both his hands against the facial wound. Fresh blood is pouring out from between his fingers. His dark eyes shed clear tears. The tears mix with his blood and his saliva.
He shifts his right hand so that it grips the knife handle. He pulls back on the knife so that blade begins to slowly exit his purple and black tongue . . . exits the tongue and the cheek slowly, agonizingly, until the blood-streaked blade is now free and gripped in his hand.
Christ almighty, I should be running, right on the heels of the kids. All the voices in my head are screaming for me to run. But I know that if I follow the children, The Skinner will only come after us. If I stay back, however, the children will make it to safety.
Soon, they are out of sight.
“They’ve made it, Michael,” I say in my head. “They’re free.”
Good, he says. Now save your own ass.
The Skinner is staring me down, his face a bloodied mess. Making a fist, I ball it into his mouth. I then about-face and run like hell.
I head back toward the cellar.
Here’s what I’m thinking: If I can manage to somehow get back to the tunnel that leads to the basement of my house, I can make a clean getaway. Then I can call in the police. Call in Miller.
I’m running as fast as my feet will take me in the six inches of water that fills the bottom of this pipe. But I don’t get far before noticing that The Skinner is not following me. Why isn’t he trying to catch me? Trying to hold me down? Trying to rape me? Skin me? Wear my face like a mask?
I stop and feel a frigid chill that starts at my water-covered feet and runs throughout my veins and capillaries. I turn and face him, where he’s standing maybe fifty feet away from me. That’s when I hear a rumble from directly overhead and a metal cage that comes crashing down all around me.
Having called in Albany SWAT to locate and infiltrate the tunnels from their westernmost access points, Detective Miller has also ordered dispatch to alert the Rensselaer County Sheriff and the State Troopers. It’s just a matter of time before the property is surrounded. Or so he hopes.
But that still leaves precious minutes in which the children and their respective mothers are at the mercy of the Skinner. Back down in the basement, he tries desperately to find a way to access the false door embedded into the old stone wall. But he just can’t seem to find a grip that will allow him enough leverage to pull it open. Clearly, the hidden door has been engineered and constructed to open and close from the inside only. End of story.
He thinks fast.
The kids had been reported as having witnessed the Skinner — the Boogeyman — inside the cornfield. Which can only mean there’s a separate entrance out there. In fact, there must be access to the one basement the contractor built and abandoned back in the 1960s. That single basement must be serving as The Skinner’s lair.
But he doesn’t have time to perform a proper grid search for it. He needs to find the location now. Immediately, if not sooner. Looking down, he sees the dog sitting on the floor, staring up at him. The idea comes to him in a flash.
Bending over, he picks the dog up.
“You ever wanted to be a police dog, Pooch?” he says. “Well, now’s your chance.”
Miller carries the dog up the cellar stairs to the corridor and then up the main stairs to the second floor. He searches for a room that looks like a little boy’s or a little girl’s room. He finds one on his left that matches the latter. The room has not been tidied up since she slept last.
What was the little girl’s name again?
Molly. Named after Rebecca’s late twin sister.
The pink comforter on her bed lies in a heap at the end of the mattress. There’s a coloring book on the floor along with scattered crayons. The drapes are still shut. But there’s also a pair of red hearts on white pajamas discarded on the floor. Miller bends down, picks them up, brings them to the nose of the dog. The dog barks and squirms in his arms like he knows precisely what the plan is.
“Good dog,” Miller says, dropping the pajamas not onto the floor but onto the bed.
He repeats the process inside all of the remaining three bedrooms, allowing the dog to obtain the scent of each and every individual living inside this farmhouse. Individuals who now are being held against their will in a basement under the cornfield.
Heading back down the stairs, Miller carries the dog out the back kitchen door. He once more pulls out his mini Maglite and thumbs it on. Shining the bright round beam against the barn and then the corn stalks beyond it, he puts the dog down.
“Go find Molly,” he says. “Find Rebecca and Molly and Mike Jr. and Robyn. Find them all.”
Miller knows that his plan to use the dog to find the missing persons could be construed as out there at best or farfetched at worse. But he needs to find the entry to the basement now, which means he needs to think outside the box on this one.
The dog barks, growls, and points with his left leg and paw. He then scoots into the corn. Once more drawing his 9mm, Miller follows.
“So far so good,” he mumbles to himself.
Scream.
It’s the only thing left for me to do. There’s a metal cage surrounding me. A cage a big game hunter might use to trap an animal. A big animal like a wild pig. I reach out, grip the bars, shake the hell out of them, like I’m strong enough to snap the steel in half. But I’m tired. Exhausted and defeated and in pain. Nausea once again assaults my gut. Bile is coming back up on me. The metallic taste of blood and acid invades my mouth. It’s all I can do to keep it down. Turning, I can see the cage is equipped with a door. The door is padlocked. I try pulling on it anyway. But it doesn’t budge.
Then, he appears as if from out of nowhere.
The Skinner stands outside the cage in his tight clothing, his feet submerged in the water, his hairless body flexed and tense, his face looking like raw, bloody hamburger, his dark eyes glossy but bright and wide. He’s got something in his hand. Another syringe. He’s laughing through his pain, and pointing the syringe at me.
My instinct is to rear back against the cage. But he’s too quick. He crouches and thrusts his arm through the space between the bars, jams the needle into my side. It takes only moments before my vision becomes blurry, distorted. I don’t sit down so much as I drop down into the water, and the world around me goes from vivid and focused to fuzzy and distorted.
Am I dreaming?
Or am I just so fucking out of it I can’t tell the difference between reality and the unconscious? I feel myself being carried out of the cage, The Skinner once again supporting my torso with his arms shoved under mine at the shoulders. He’s dragging me back into the cellar, past Robyn’s lifeless body duct-taped to the wood chair, my heels trailing along a floor that’s covered with her dark red blood. He takes me deeper into the basement, to an area that I have not yet seen, nor want to see.
When he drops me onto my back, my skull bounces off the floor. Pain shoots through my body, and for a second or two, I believe it’s possible that the collision of skull against solid concrete knocked me unconscious. For how long, I have no way of knowing. A minute, maybe, or an hour. I’m not sure, at this point, that it matters. All I want now is for the children to be safe and for this fucker to be done with me already. I want him to get it over with. If he wants to skin me, flay me, dance “Ring around the Rosie” around me, just fucking do it already and then let me die.
But then I hear him behind m
e, and I feel his arms under my arms and him lifting me off the floor once more. He’s dragging me again, but this time when he stops, he doesn’t set me down onto my back. He turns me over and pushes me into a device constructed of metal bars. Unlike the cage out in the tunnel, this device allows me only enough room to support myself on my hands and knees like a four-legged animal.
At the far end of the device is an opening large enough for me to shove my head through. The bars are long and vertical, perpendicular to the floor. When my head is entirely outside the opening, he pulls a lever and the bars close on my neck, so tight that I can’t possibly move it even if I weren’t drugged, but not so tight that I can’t breathe. All the bars come together so that my entire body is trapped inside the device like an animal about to be slaughtered.
I have no explanation for it, but I start laughing. The laugh is mostly on the inside because I’m too feeble to make much sound. But it’s a laugh all right. The Skinner has trapped me inside a barred slaughter cage like a farmer might use on a pig farm.
It only makes sense. I grew up on a farm. Being a state trooper, my dad didn’t maintain a whole lot of livestock, but on occasion, he’d have a pig or a cow slaughtered for meat. It was something that my sister and me were forbidden to witness so, naturally, we’d do our best to sneak a peek at what was happening out behind the barn. Dad would always hire someone to do the slaughtering. It was always the same man. An old man, or so we thought at the time, but a man who my dad said was old beyond his years because of the bottle. He would bring along a metal barred contraption that he’d invented. A portable slaughter cage that allowed him to perform the butchering while the live animal was wide awake. Because performing the slaughter with the animal wide awake meant the blood flow was at its optimum, and optimum blood flow meant the meat would be more tender, more flavorful.
I feel a wave of cold wash over me. It’s the wave of realization.
I recall the pickup truck that would pull up to the farm. The truck that struck horror in Molly and me. So much so that we’d run upstairs to our rooms until our curiosity got the best of us and we’d make our way back downstairs and out to the opposite side of the barn to sneak a look at the animal being skinned and slaughtered. That truck . . . that old, dirty, rusted truck . . . it had lettering on the side door panels.
The Ashes (The Rebecca Underhill Trilogy Book 2) Page 19
