by Scott Hale
Linnéa scooted her chair back. She glanced over her shoulder, half expecting to find Richard Cross in the corner, a hammer in his hand.
“I’m sorry,” Ellen said. “It’s… it’s been so long.” She wiped her eyes. “God’s not answering my prayers.”
“Stephen found something strange in our garden. A root. Trent had one, too, and so did Bethany.” Linnéa didn’t like where this was going, and her voice reflected that. “Heard you had one in your yard, too.”
Ellen’s guilt etched itself into her face. “Oh, those?” she said, nonchalantly. “Darlene used to rip them up. She said they made her feel funny.”
“Do you know what they are?”
Ellen glanced away, said, “No.”
Linnéa saw the basement door in her mind’s eye, and then she slid the wine bottle closer to Ellen.
Ellen took the bait and filled her glass to the rim. Some spilled over, and she quickly drank it up before it hit the checkered table cloth.
Linnéa knew a drunk when she saw one. Again, Agnes would be proud.
“Tell me about Filipa,” Ellen said, her words slurring.
Deflecting, Linnéa whispered, “Tell me about Darlene.”
Now, Ellen was leaning back in her chair, holding her wine to her chest. The rosary around her neck slipped into the cup; the crucifix turned blood red.
“My Darlene? Oh, my Darlene. My beautiful, wicked girl. She’s… she’s a quiet thing. Even when she was little, she always kept to herself. I think she’s going to be smarter than her old mom here—” Ellen cleared her throat, “—but I don’t know. You have to watch out for the quiet ones, you know? Your Filipa’s a sweet girl. She’s quiet, too, isn’t she? You ever wonder what she’s thinking? Girls like them don’t always say what’s on their minds like you and I. We found ourselves through others…”
She downed her glass and poured herself another. “You know what I mean, right? I remember your mom. She was a lot like my mom. The two would’ve made good drinking buddies at the nursing home if they would’ve made it that… Sorry. My mother never prepared me for the world. She just… called it shit and then called it a day.”
Ellen took another drink and held the wine in her mouth for a moment, savoring it. “I can’t remember if I ever prepared Darlene for something like this. I spent so long turning my life around, I think I might’ve forgotten about her sometimes. She knew not to talk to strangers, but did she know she could talk to me if she knew something was wrong? She was so quiet. Sometimes, I’d forget she was even here. We prayed more than we talked. I guess that was my doing.
“I’m sorry. What am I trying to say? I don’t know what I’m trying to say. Darlene is… Isn’t that sad? That we could live across from one another all these years and not know each other’s girls? Or Charles or Jimmy? Did you know them? I didn’t. But it’s like… whoever took… them all… knew us… knew them… better than anyone else. They came at the perfect time… right under our noses.”
She took another drink, made a fist with her free hand until her knuckles popped. “I want to say it was the angels. I want to say it was god who took them. Wouldn’t that be nice?” She settled into her seat, like she was going to fall asleep. “But it was a demon. Maybe a demon we made. Or I made. I’ll take the blame. Something from way back, a long time ago.”
Linnéa mumbled, “We all did something wrong, didn’t we?”
“Did we? Did you? Figured you would find out. You and Stephen are trying. I don’t know what I’m doing these days, except just doing what Bethany says. You know about the neglect? I was neglectful. I won’t hide it. I was a bad mom. Richard was a bad dad. It’s our shadow, following us everywhere we go. Just a shadow to you and everyone else, but we know.
“Darlene was four. I was relapsing. Richard was out of town with some… whore.” Ellen ground her teeth. “It was a Saturday. A young man came to the door. The door was open, and he saw Darlene on the floor, playing with a kitchen knife. And then he saw me, a hypodermic needle still in my arm. He reported me to children’s services.”
“I didn’t know that,” Linnéa said.
“Yeah. Yeah… yeah, I know.” She grabbed the wine bottle and emptied it into her cup. “We got a second chance. That young man? He was from my church. He saw me at my lowest, and then lifted me up. I got my shit together… again… and then I got right with the lord.”
Linnéa leaned forward. “Your church is non-denominational, right?”
Ellen hiccupped a ‘yes.’
“What’s it called again?”
“The Disciples…”
Linnéa squeezed her wine glass so hard it cracked.
“…of God.”
“Oh.” She thought back to Black Occult Macabre, its article on the vermillion veins, and their place in occult rites. “Oh, that’s right. Hey, you called Darlene wicked. I know you’re a spiritual woman.”
“Not when I drink,” Ellen said. “Isn’t that strange? When I’m sober, I recite verses non-stop. When I drink, I don’t feel the need.”
“Calms your nerves, I guess.”
“Takes me back.”
“I’m sorry,” Linnéa said. “I shouldn’t have brought the wine.”
Ellen held up her hand. “No, no. A little sin goes a long way. I’m okay. You were going to say something about Darlene?”
“Oh, yeah.” Linnéa pretended she had forgotten. “You called her wicked. You’re a spiritual woman. I take it that means a little more than she’s a brat.”
“Oh, my Darlene’s a brat.” Ellen laughed. She looked at the ex-wineguinated bottle, and then looked under the sink, as if more alcohol was hidden there. “Darlene never took to the church. She’s quiet, but she broods. She thinks I’m a hypocrite. She knows what I was like years ago. She won’t let god in. Sometimes, she would spend some time with the other kids from the church. There was a boy… I think she liked him. But he was one of those rich types from west Bedlam. He wouldn’t give her the time of day.”
Linnéa nodded, while she remembered the white van that had been outside her house the day the kids went missing, and how the teenagers inside had been discovered to have been from west Bedlam. Were they from the church, too?
“You said in therapy yesterday you heard Darlene speak to you sometimes.”
“I guess I do. From her room.”
“I thought you didn’t go in there.”
Ellen’s eyes were glazed over. For a moment, it looked as if she were going to pass out. She swayed where she sat, lost in either a drunken bliss, or a holy reverie. Linnéa watched her intently. As soon as she was gone, she planned on jumping out of her chair and booking it down to the basement, to see Darlene’s room for herself. Ellen was hiding something and—
Footsteps on floorboards; dry creaks echoing in the stuffy dark.
Ellen snapped out of it. Sobering up at the speed of light, she said, “I doze sometimes. It’s nothing.”
More footsteps, stickier than before, and a handrail rattling against a wall.
Linnéa cocked her head. “Ellen?”
“Hmm?”
“Who else…”
A metallic screech from a twisting doorknob.
“Who else is here?”
Ellen looked at Linnéa as if she were crazy.
A door slammed open inside the house, bashing against a wall.
Linnéa jumped out of her seat, just as she thought she would, and stammered, “E-Ellen?”
Richard Cross stepped into the kitchen, his button-down shirt draped loosely over his girth. He had a hammer in his hand.
Linnéa went around the table, peered down the hall he’d come from. The door to the basement was open. He’d been down there the whole time.
SUNDAYMONDAYTUESDAYWEDNESDAYTHURSDAYFRIDAYSATURDAY
Stephen woke Linnéa up in the middle of the night to show her an email. It was from Connor Prendergast and it read: If you really wanted to talk that badly, you could have just knocked.
It was three in
the morning, Connor was apparently still awake, and Linnéa and Stephen were still dressed, shoes and all, in their clothes from the other day.
They were in the car and coasting out of Six Pillars before they even had a chance to second-guess themselves. At this time of night, the neighborhood was row after row of disembodied facades all set aglow by street lamp’s coppery light. Bodies were few and far between; and voices rode like banshees through the hollow dark. Sometimes, there were cars; they were all strange, out of place. Visitors from abroad, bearing gifts of second-hand smoke and rattling speakers.
On their way out, they noticed a police cruiser parked catty-cornered to the neighborhood pool. He flashed his warning lights and then, drowning their car with his floods, turned them off and waved them on. Linnéa and Stephen were distraught parents caught in a perpetual fog of loss. As long as they didn’t break anything along the way, who was anyone else to say they couldn’t wander? They got a free press. They were celebrities. Someone would want their autographs soon enough.
Orange detour signs and blinking construction lights grew out of the hill as they drove up to the entrance to Six Pillars. Near the large, graffitied sign that marked the neighborhood, the blue truck with Price Homes’ emblem sat on the shoulder. It was the same truck Linnéa had seen yesterday when they left to tail Connor. It was in a different place today, but it was still here.
She slowed to a stop and pointed to the truck. “Remember that?”
Stephen unstuck his sweating back from the seat and said, “Yeah. What do you think that’s all about?”
“I don’t know.” She took out her phone, took a picture of the truck and the license plate, like she had with the white van she’d seen earlier, too. “Don’t see why it would be here.”
“Me neither.” Stephen rubber-necked it as Linnéa started up the car again and turned out of Six Pillars. “Let’s look into it.” He took out his phone and phoned in another “suspicious person.”
The operator on the other line greeted them cheerily, like a close friend, and said they’d get right on it.
By 3:26 AM, they pulled into Connor’s driveway and walked up to the front door as if they owned the place. Stephen, making a fist, bashed the door three times, as if he were the police. Linnéa jumped, laughed—the late hours always did make her skittish.
Thump, thump, thump—heavy footsteps thundered behind the front door. As they drew closer, Linnéa and Stephen drew back.
The movement stopped. To their left, a window looked out into the yard. The curtains swayed behind the glass. There was a sigh, a muffled “You fucking kidding me?” Then, one after the other after the other, the three locks were undone and the front door pulled open.
Connor stood in the dark, in his ghoul-print pajamas, staring at Linnéa and Stephen as if they’d just run over his dog.
“Seriously?” he said, barely able to keep his eyes open. “I’m way too stoned for this.”
“We need to talk to you,” Stephen said, making his voice intentionally deeper.
“Oh, is that it? And here I thought you were going to ask me if I knew your buddy, J. Christ. Please, come on in!”
Connor groaned. He turned and walked away, letting the darkness inside the house swallow him whole.
Stephen started forward. Linnéa grabbed his shirt and shook her head. It was three-thirty in the morning, and they were standing outside the house of someone who could very well be responsible for their daughter’s kidnapping. She wasn’t about to step foot in there without enough light to blind a blind man. She wanted to see everything, and everything that might be coming. She wasn’t ready before. She was now.
“Oh,” Connor said, somewhere inside the house. “Sorry, I forgot. As you can imagine—” two clicking twists, and a lamp turned on in the living room, “—I am a little tired.”
“Well, Mr. Prendergast, we don’t mean to be such a burden to you.” Linnéa stepped inside. “But we got questions that need answering.”
“Yeah,” Connor said. “Well, you guys want some coffee?”
Annoyed, Stephen, coming in behind Linnéa, said, “It’s three in the morning.”
“I don’t think any of us are going back to bed after this.”
Connor slipped into the kitchen, which ran directly into the living room. Linnéa nodded at Stephen to keep an eye on him. As he hung out in the kitchen’s doorway, ready to put his supple, ass-kissing lips to work, Linnéa gave the strange, but admittedly predictable living room a once-over.
It was small, and packed from wall to wall with horror paraphernalia. Posters from horror movies were framed alongside posters from horror novels. Sagging shelf after sagging shelf were filled with the horror movies and novels themselves—thousands of them, undoubtedly—and they ran around the perimeter of the room in a multi-colored band of spines shouting “blood” and “kill” and “dark” and “terror” among other clichéd titles. There was a decent couch, two chairs, a coffee table, and a very nice television, but even they weren’t given enough room to breathe and be what they had to be; beside them, on top or in front of them, were horror figures and other collectibles that ranged from machete-wielding slashers, to grotesque, resin abominations that probably cost more than her and Stephen’s car payments.
Any other day, Linnéa would’ve loved the stuff, but today, it didn’t do much for her. When everyone is a suspect, shit like this was too easy to read into; rather, too easy to warp into something you could read into.
“Did you know we were following you?” Stephen asked.
Connor dug in his cabinets for his coffee cups.
Linnéa kept a close eye on the kitchen knives not far from where he stood.
“Yep,” Connor said, taking three cups and going back to the coffee maker. Doling out the steaming, human fuel, he said, “I take it you read the website and now think I have something to do with your daughter’s disappearance?”
Stephen rubbed his arms, shook his legs. It was far past his bedtime. Finally, he said, “Yeah.”
Connor came into the living room, handing a cup to Stephen and then a cup to Linnéa before finally dropping onto the couch. A bit of coffee splashed up and splattered the armrest, but judging by the other coffee stains there, it wasn’t an issue.
Linnéa sipped the coffee and sat in one of the chairs near couch, and Stephen, wearily, descended onto the chair on the opposite end of the couch. Between them was Connor, and his coffee table covered in sketches of material for Black Occult Macabre.
Stephen laid into him first, and that was how Linnéa wanted it to go. Her husband had been docile. He hadn’t gotten to bug the shit out of anyone in a long while. It was good for his health.
“So, why didn’t you say anything?” Stephen leaned forward, elbows on his knees, cup between his hands and covering his face like a settler round a campfire. “Why did you wait? Were you just leading us on? You got my email before then, didn’t you?”
Connor licked his lips. He had the look of someone who’d been grilled a fair share in his life, scorch marks and all. “I don’t. I don’t know. No. Yes.” He laughed and then: “Okay, guys. You know what I do. You know what I believe in. You obviously don’t buy it.”
“You think?” Linnéa snapped.
“Yeah, yeah, but we are here,” Stephen said, ever the mediator. “You know our case.”
“Yep.” Connor chugged his coffee. “Kind of hard not to. I know I’m being an ass, but I am very sorry.”
The apology washed over Linnéa and Stephen with about as much oomph as air.
“I did follow it for a while. It’s awful. And really fucking strange, right?”
They didn’t need to be told how strange four kids disappearing in broad daylight on a Sunday morning all at once, in their own homes, was.
“You found vermillion veins? Do you have them with you?” Connor cringed. “Did… did you bring them here?”
Linnéa shook her head, but Stephen nodded and reached into his pocket and pulled out a clump of
veins. They were the ones from Bethany Simmons’ yard. Linnéa didn’t know how she knew that, but she knew it.
Connor twitched. “Yep, that’s them. That’s… not good.”
“Hey, Connor—” Linnéa leaned out of her seat, “—don’t give us the vague fortune teller routine.”
Stephen took over. “Why isn’t it good? What’s going on? You’re the only one who seems to be writing about these things. I consider myself a botanist and—”
“It means someone or something has been and is still watching you and the other families. I did read your email. If they weren’t growing there, then they were put there. You know, for the freaks that buy into them, that… shit—” he pointed his finger to the veins, “—is like gold. They’re not going to just dump and run. I’m not trying to be vague. I’m trying to put it in… Whoever did this… they’re either living in your neighborhood, or visiting it enough that they might as well be.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Stephen said. “They took Filipa. They got what they wanted.”
“Did they?” Connor glanced between the both of them. “Is it about the kids? Or the parents? Filipa could be a means to an end.”
Linnéa’s stomach turned. “Is there a cult?”
“In Bedlam? I’ve looked, but…”
“What about the Disciples of God?” she pressed.
“They’re just your standard, pay-to-win, non-denominational, please-donate-in-denominations-smaller-than-fifty, rich people religion. Bunch of shmucks with a headquarters in west Bedlam roping in a bunch of shmucks over here in east Bedlam.”
“Darlene and Richard Cross follow them,” Linnéa said.
“And you wrote that there is a cult out there called The Disciples that have something to do with the veins,” Stephen added.
“I think it’s just a really annoying coincidence,” Connor said. “I’ve never come up with any connections between the two. But… there is something.”
“What?” Linnéa and Stephen said together at once.
“You don’t notice it until someone else does, but there’s been new people in Bedlam. Not from Brooksville or Bitter Springs, either. People from afar. Different states. Different countries. Not a lot of them. But they’re all gathering here. I don’t know what that’s about.”
