by P. T. Phronk
Eden0306
It was the name of the street our little new house was on, Eden Place, and the dates of Todd’s and Wes’s birthdays.
I had to change my passwords over the years, of course, but the four-digit code came back as the failsafe code to verify my entry into debugging mode on all of APT’s security systems.
I entered the key combo to enter debug mode on the panel outside the safe room, then the failsafe code: 0 3 0 6. I wouldn’t need Gary’s strings-attached help. I wouldn’t even need electricity. All I needed was my family, dead but not gone.
Ghosts, but not really.
Trista was in a similar state. The door to her final resting place unlocked with a clink, and the handle, roughened thanks to Caleb chiseling away at it, felt cold in my hand.
I thought of Trista’s diary. She’d mentioned the man—HE—watching her, smelling of cherries. And another person, SHE, was equally terrifying to her. Two prime suspects in her death. She’d had one final word to write, and it was scrawled in her own blood beside her, inside that room. It must be the name of her killer. That had to be it; what else would a lifelong diary writer do in her final moments? The answer was just behind the door. So why was I hesitating?
I pushed through. My family’s ghostly shadow had gotten me here. Trista’s would get me through the next step. The door swung open. The fresh, cool, filtered air blew loose strands of hair back from my forehead.
When I saw what was inside, my heart felt like it was pumping sludge. My knee gave out. I had to lean against the door frame to stay upright.
Trista didn’t have answers about who killed her.
The room didn’t have answers either. The room was a liar. It had promised me a solution. Now it only gave me the impossible.
This place didn’t make sense. This universe didn’t make sense. Someone had built this house, this shelter, in the middle of a forest, where trees and wild animals were forged through the chaotic laws of nature, following programming in their DNA designed to harvest energy, then protect it.
I’d built this shelter within the shelter. Programmed for the same purpose—preserving energy, preserving life. It failed, like everything would. Something bigger always wants that energy. Life splays out. Meat never stays on the carcass. The universe always tends toward entropy.
I wanted to scream, but why? Why waste the energy? Laughing would be more appropriate, but equally futile.
I took a step back, away from the horror inside the safe room. My back hit something that wasn’t there before.
A hand clamped around my mouth. Tobacco and sweat filled my nose. Flaking nylon scratched against my elbows as I thrashed, but The Snake was strong, and like an actual python, squeezed harder the more I struggled. The back of my head smashed against the double-mouthpiece of his gas mask, in the tender spot I’d already hit against the stone floor last time I was in the basement, placing me back in that state of grogginess. My useless knee made it easy for him to drag me from the safe room, where more hands grabbed me from every angle.
Then I felt something I didn’t expect to feel, getting away from that horrible safe room, probably for the last time: relief.
Chapter 11
The ball room’s carpet smelled like a dog. Probably the same dog Craig had played with here when he was younger, and I imagined as shaggy and black, like the one Mae had taken out to play. The Foster family dog was long dead, but I could smell it, and unlike the spectral dog that had stalked me since I arrived, the smell was real. I could feel it in my nose, in a way I couldn’t feel the home’s dreamlike apparitions.
I had time to contemplate this as one man held me against the carpet so hard that the fibres tickled my nostrils, while another one rifled through a bag for a zip tie. One of them—The Snake, I think—finally looped the plastic tie around my wrists behind me. My arms shook with effort as he clicked it tight.
They hauled me onto a dining chair draped in white linen, then tied my ankles together too. Outside, the storm picked up again, the strange red glow of the lightning-infused sky casting shadows of trees against the ball room’s many tall windows.
Craig sat beside me, then Jasmine, Caleb, Ash, and Marcus—all tied up and lined up in the order we were captured. Marcus’s chest rose and fell—he was alive, but his face was ashen. A blossom of blood soaked the chair covering, turning the fabric red almost all the way to the floor. The Bear yanked Marcus’s head back and looked into his eyes, which were open, but didn’t seem to register anything.
The Bear mumbled something to The Snake, then the three men stomped to the other side of the room to talk in whispers.
“I’m sorry,” Craig said.
Caleb whimpered words that didn’t sound English, but his father’s apology silenced him. “Sorry for what, Dad?”
“When you didn’t come back upstairs, I had to come down to find you. I was supposed to save you. I’m supposed to be the dad here.” His last few words tumbled out along with a cough.
“It’s not your fault, Dad. None of this is your fault.”
Jasmine sniffed back tears. “Yeah, fuck off with that apology, Craig.”
Marcus looked up, suddenly lucid for a moment. “She’s right, Craig, buzz off with the blame. You’re making us dads look bad. Besides, I’m the one that went and got myself shot,” he growled.
Then, somehow, we all laughed. Everyone except Ash.
But whose fault was it really? Because I knew now that someone here was to blame. Someone here had killed Trista with HIS or HER own hands. And surely it wasn’t coincidence that these men had shown up tonight, of all nights, so someone was to blame for that too.
“Someone did it,” I mumbled while the others continued to chuckle through their tears. “Someone here is responsible.”
They fell silent. Finally, Ash spoke. “Bet it was the cough that gave you away, got you captured, wasn’t it, Craig?”
Craig’s sigh sounded like it had sand in it. “What’s your point, Ash?”
“Same point I’ve had all along. We all knew that cough would kill you, just not this soon. Caleb knew it better than anyone. He knew that he wouldn’t get the inheritance when the day came—not with Trista ahead of him in the line.”
“You take that back!” Caleb squealed.
One of the men behind us told us to shut up.
Caleb lowered his voice. “You know I wouldn’t. You all know I wouldn’t. Right? Right? Even Amy believes me.”
“I know you didn’t,” Craig said. “I was with you in the family room just before. I headed upstairs to bed, and it was only a minute later when Jasmine saw … her … my baby … on the camera. There was no time. There’s no way.”
“Yeah, but can we ever trust what comes from your mouth, Craig?” Ash’s face was red, his usual sarcastic detachment gone. “I couldn’t even trust you to pay me on time.”
“This again? Now?” Craig said.
“Listen. You couldn’t pay me on time, even though you could damn well afford it. Just like you could damn well afford Trista’s tuition.” Ash paused to let Craig say something, but he didn’t. “Look at his face, everyone. That guilt! My god, it’s like a puppy caught destroying the baby’s favourite stuffy. Yeah, so, I heard your little conversation with Trista. More of a fight than a conversation, really. That was just before she left for a week, touring the universities she was hell-bent on running away to, and you refused to pay for. ‘I wish I could just lock you in the safe room forever’—a direct quote.”
Craig’s face twisted with confusion, and, yes, some guilt. “It … it was a joke. Of course it was. How did you kn—”
“I hear things. I always hear things. I’m always here. I haunt this place like it’s my job, because it’s where I’m, sometimes, paid to be. No, I wouldn’t leave you, poor fragile lonely Craig, not like Trista. And Jasmine, weren’t you—” Ash said.
“Ash, now it’s your turn to fuck off,” Marcus said.
“Says the man who can’t accept his own daughter.
Can’t accept who she is. What she is.”
“Just what do you think you know about what I am, Ash?” Jasmine screamed through a veil of tears.
“Shut up! Shut up!” shouted The Bear.
We shut up. In the ensuing silence, I heard fragments of what the intruders said to each other. “If it’s not here tonight, it’s coming any day now,” one of them said.
“Are we even sure the room’s really safe?” another said, later.
More frantic whispering.
Another raised his voice. “Cost? Cost?”
A moment later: “He’s right, I’d rather be alive and feeling guilty than dead and feeling nothing.”
They were talking about killing us. They were talking about the mental toll of killing us. We didn’t have any time left.
Out of necessity, a plan that had been percolating through my mind finally reached my lips and trickled out. “Listen. I heard Craig coughing just before Jasmine’s scream, when Trista was killed. That was when he headed upstairs, just like he said. It couldn’t have been him. He was with Caleb moments earlier, so it wasn’t Caleb. Caleb said that Marcus was cleaning up in the kitchen, and I heard the pipes rattling, so it wasn’t Marcus. Mae didn’t get here until later. Jasmine was in the control room at the time, and Jasmine, didn’t you say you stepped out to talk to Ash just as it happened?”
Jasmine simmered with rage when she looked at Ash, but she nodded her head.
“So it wasn’t Jasmine, it wasn’t Ash.”
“That’s everyone,” Caleb said. “I told you!”
“You were right.” I was convincing Caleb, which was exactly what I needed. It was what we all needed, even though everything I said was irrelevant at best, fiction at worst. But wasn’t Mae fiction? Weren’t the legends of Jack just stories?
I brought the fiction home—tacked on the powerful ending, the emotional gut punch. “We've eliminated everyone who lives here. That only leaves them.”
“But the security syst—” Craig said.
“It’s not foolproof, okay?” Here was the part where the storyteller’s faults helped drive the message home. “There are vulnerabilities. We don’t tell customers that, of course, but nothing is impenetrable. With the right information, the right codes, anything can be hacked. And these men, they must have hacked it. While we were sitting and eating in the family room, or maybe even well before that, these men disabled the security system, slipped in through the back door, into the basement, and murdered Trista. The safe room wasn’t safe. The home wasn’t safe. It never was.”
Ash regarded me with a mix of bafflement and out-of-place amusement. Caleb began to tremble. That was good. I leaned forward in my chair so he could see my face.
“Maybe the plan was to put all of you in the safe room, not just Trista. While they robbed the house. But Trista came home from her university tour earlier than planned and caught them here, so they locked her up. These men saw the risk of Trista giving away that they were out there in the woods, waiting. There are pens and paper in the safe room; a note pointed toward the camera would ruin their plans the moment Ash checked the security system.” I glanced at the men. They were too caught up in their own argument to notice me talking, but I tried to keep my voice down nonetheless. “So they killed her,” I whispered. “They walked into that room and they bludgeoned her with a hammer. It looks like the first few blows didn’t do it, so they had to keep going at her while she crawled toward the yellow door and begged for her life.”
None of this was true.
Jasmine weeped. Caleb had his far-off look again, like he was looking past me, out into the woods, where the trees thrashed about like madmen in an asylum.
“How do you know? How did you get into the room?” Craig asked.
“Same way they did,” I said, trying to direct the conversation to address Caleb, but Craig was getting agitated and red-faced between us. “You thought you were safe, and that was a mistake. It was stupid. These men took advantage of that. They’re like all the other scared men out there—they’ll do anything to feel safe, even if it means giving in to chaos. To death.”
“Are you saying this is my f-f-” Craig began, but was interrupted by his coughing. Flecks of red appeared on his khaki pants as he hacked.
“Shut up!” one of the men shouted.
My heart was breaking. “No, no, it’s not your fault. You just wanted to protect your family. They took advantage of that.”
Caleb’s head slowly turned as he took his attention away from the forest outside and onto the men. His expression became blank, his focus soft, as if he were daydreaming about a memory from the distant past.
Craig coughed as tears streamed down his face. I reached my aching, restrained arms toward him and managed to wrap my right pinkie finger around his left. “I’m so sorry,” I said.
His stare met mine as he nodded. His pinkie squeezed mine. Red dots appeared on the front of his shirt as he failed to contain the ragged cough.
“I said shut up!” The Bear stomped over to stand in front of Craig. The Snake followed behind, little flecks falling from his peeling hazard suit and leaving a sparkling trail in his wake. I could feel The Pig’s eyes on me as he hovered behind us.
The Bear glanced at The Snake, then pointed at Craig. “Kill him.”
Jasmine screamed.
The Snake raised his gun, but his hand shook violently. “We can find another way.”
“That’s not the plan. It’s our turn. That’s the plan. The weak have lived comfortable lives, but the world has now provided a gift for the strong.”
The Snake took a step forward, the gun an inch from Craig’s forehead. This wasn’t part of the plan, but there was nothing I could do. Any movement and I’d be dead first. I could feel The Pig’s ragged breath tickling the back of my neck.
“We can let them run. Look at that storm,” The Snake said, gesturing with the gun to the trees outside the window, whipping back and forth in the storm’s second wind. “Time’s up. They won’t come back. They can’t identify us.”
The Bear ripped his gas mask off. He couldn’t have been older than thirty, and had light hair, grey eyes, a face I would have described as soft, kind. He could’ve been anybody. He could’ve been Wes. “They can identify us now, Alex. You are Alex James, and your five-year-old son Aiden is waiting at your former home on Castor Crescent. Do it for Aiden, Alex. Do it for his future.”
The Snake—Alex—pulled the trigger.
Craig fell silent. His finger slipped away from mine. His head slumped forward. The trickle of blood from his face matched the trickle of the reddened rain running past the windows.
Jasmine screamed. The Bear pointed at her, then at The Pig. “Charlie. Your turn.”
“Guys, come on,” Ash said, breaking his unusual streak of silence.
Marcus had sagged to one side, unconscious. Maybe dead.
“They did this,” I whispered to Caleb, my voice so wracked with emotion that it did not sound anything like me. “Your sister. Marcus. Now your father.”
Caleb’s eyes rolled back in his head. His lips moved, reciting fragments of sentences that made no sense together, various names of animals and people spilling from his mouth in rapid succession.
“Charlie!” bellowed The Bear. His face was no longer kind. The Pig—Charlie—put the tip of his handgun against the back of Jasmine’s head. His arm dipped for a moment, and I thought he may have been losing consciousness from all the holes I’d put in him, but then he raised the gun again and put it against my head instead.
“Her first,” he said.
A rumble filled the house, stopped, then started again. It sounded like a large truck was rolling toward the house, or—no, more like something massive was stepping towards the house.
“Jasmine! Ash! Close your eyes!” I shouted. The tip of The Pig’s gun pulled out some of my hair as he suddenly swiveled toward the window and squealed.
The Bear and The Snake began to turn. I squeezed my eyes shut.
“What is that?” The Snake asked.
Behind me, The Pig crashed against a cart holding dishes and silverware as he launched himself away from the window. He laughed nervously. “No,” he said. “No no no, I’m the wolf. I’m the wolf.”
The ground rumbled again. Or did it only feel like it was rumbling because of my shaking legs? Was I doing this to myself, like in those old TV shows where the actors threw themselves around to simulate a crumbling starship?
“What’s going on?” Jasmine cried.
“Are your eyes shut?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Keep them shut. All of you, keep your eyes shut!”
But Ash made a very strange sound, exhaling with his nose repeatedly like an agitated horse. His eyes weren’t closed.
A thump to my left let me know that The Snake had fallen over. His flaky hazard suit scratched against the carpet as he writhed on the ground.
“Fee fi, fee fi, fee fi,” Caleb mumbled.
All at once, thunder crashed, and one of the windows shattered. The room filled with humid wind laced with that sickly-sweet smell of the environmental catastrophe.
“It’s them!” screamed The Bear. He fired his gun at the front of the house. “We can’t hide from that. Hah! We were so stupid, we could never hide. It’s their turn. Run!”
He fired again. Something moaned, so deep and powerful that my chair buzzed, the silverware and wall hangings rattled. It was like a mountain exhaling.
Whose story was this? Caleb was the creator. His anger and his own stories were manifesting here at Foster Manor, as I knew they would, as they always had. But the men had their own experience of the story, their own interpretation.
I could hear crackling around me. I was convinced the walls were on fire. I felt radiating warmth on my face.
The Snake got free from whatever he’d been struggling with. “Aiden! Is that you? How did you get out there? Get away from the window! Charlie, where are the keys? We need to get him out of here.”
But The Pig had bolted; he ran past me, leaving a gust of air in his wake. A moment later, another gust, lower to the ground, tickled my ankles.
