Jessie.
The name struck a chord with Martin, and his mind immediately flipped back to when he and Woodward were inside 8181 Coverfeld, to when the gardener’s long fingers had gripped his throat.
Martin swallowed hard.
Coincidence. It was just a coincidence.
The old woman, misjudging his expression, quickly continued.
“And it wasn’t enough for just Benjamin to rape Anne; no, when he was spent, he brought Jessie in to take part in the fun, even as her four-year-old daughter watched on. But Benjamin was so enraged that even this, this desecration of her soul, wasn’t enough. When they had both finished, Benjamin told Jessie to go back to the caravan and grab his seal. Then he dragged Anne’s naked body out onto the porch, and put that seal in the fire. Like everything about Benjamin, the seal was big, blocky, and ostentatious. A giant brass seal with his ugly initials: big, ugly, B and H letters. And when that seal got glowing hot, he flipped Anne over and drove into her soft skin.”
She took a deep breath.
“He branded her, forever leaving his mark on her lower back, just above her hip. Finally satisfied, Benjamin and Jessie left, leaving the young mother bloodied and beaten, but thankfully alive.”
Now it was Martin’s turn breath. He wasn’t sure where this tale going, or if it was even true, but the imagery was hard to shake.
A woman raped and then branded—Jesus.
“Anne never told anyone about the beating—doing so would probably mean certain death—but she couldn’t bear to see Jane again after what her husband had done to her. So when Jane came to her on the first of the month to taste her milk, Anne hid under the bed. On the second month, she did the same. She felt bad for Jane, because no matter how horrible the acts that Benjamin had committed with her, it had only been one night.
Jane, on the other hand, had to live with the monster.
On the third month, something horrible happened: Anne realized that she was pregnant. And when Jane came, she hid again. But on the fourth month, her pregnancy had made her clumsy and she was unable to hide before Jane spotted her. Like her husband, or perhaps because of him, Jane had an angry streak in her, as well. Furious that she had being ignored, by this commoner no less, Jane broke into Anne’s home and took her anger out on the girl, first berating her, then physically hitting her. And the beating only intensified when she saw that Anne was again with child. It made no sense that this peasant could have not one but two children, while she, the all-important Jane Heath, was destined to be infertile. Jane screamed at Anne, calling her a fraud, a charlatan, all the while punching and kicking the pregnant girl. And then things took a turn for the worst. At some point during the assault, Anne’s shirt came up at the back and Jane saw it: her husband’s iconic seal, those two block letters, B and H, on Anne’s lower back.”
The woman paused to hand the folder to Martin, but he didn’t open it right away. Instead, he kept his eyes trained on the woman across from him, waiting for her to finish this horrific tale.
“And then, when Anne was convinced that she would be killed, Jane unexpectedly left. But while Anne was ‘but a peasant’, she wasn’t stupid. She knew that the rage Jane had shown—rage like that—didn’t suddenly disappear. She knew that Jane would come back. So Anne started to pack up, preparing and take her four-year-old daughter and leave. Only she was too slow. Before she could abandon her home, Jane returned. Only this time, she didn’t come alone. You see, Jane, like her husband, had influence, and from the moment she left the swamp, she started to spread rumors about Anne, telling people that she was a whore, that she had tricked each and every one of them, that she had manipulated their husbands to have sex with Anne and that the babies they held were actually hers. Jane convinced them that Anne was a witch, that she had put a spell on her husband to have sex with her. You have to remember, this was the sixteen hundreds… and peasants were easily swayed by people in power. So this time when Jane came to the swamp, she wasn’t alone. This time she had the townsfolk with her.”
The woman paused, leaving Martin to his thoughts in the near darkness. After a few moments, Martin realized that the woman across from him was crying—soft, almost silent tears.
Should I go to her?
But the woman wiped her face and continued before he could make up his mind. Her voice had become deadpan.
“When Jane returned, she ripped the five month old fetus out of Anne with a pair of rusty pliers. Pliers, for Christ’s sake.”
Martin cringed.
“And then, with blood dripping down between her legs, Jane and the townsfolk paraded Anne around the swamp, all the while chanting mater est, matrem omnium—mother of one, mother of all—and filia obcisor, filius obcisor—daughter killer, son killer. They took turns punching her, spitting on her, pulling her hair. And when they were done parading her around the swamp, they tied poor Anne LaForet to an old tree behind her house and burned her alive. Mater est, matrem omnium they chanted as her skin bubbled and peeled and she turned black.”
“Jesus,” the word slipped out of Martin’s mouth.
“That wasn’t the worst part,” the woman whispered, tears streaking her pale, hard cheeks. “The worst part was Anne’s four-year-old daughter.”
She cleared her throat, clearly having difficulty getting the words out.
“They burned her alive, too. They put a stake in the ground beside Anne’s burning corpse, tied the four-year-old to it like a mangy dog, and set her alight.”
Chapter 40
No one chased after Arielle as she’d expected them to. No cop tackled her, forced her into a small, poorly lit room, and made her confess that she had birthed a child in a horrible place and had taken the baby away even before her husband had seen her.
Maybe she half wanted them to do just that, if for nothing else but to get it off her chest, to tell someone.
Maybe.
Instead, she again found herself alone, as she had been for so many years, even while living with Martin. Alone and afraid.
And confused. Arielle’s confusion was like a dark storm cloud that wouldn’t clear even during the sunniest of days.
How did that horrible photograph get in my purse?
She tried to think back to the afternoon of the Woodwards’ party, to when she first returned from 1818 Coverfeld Ave—
Did one of them plant it in there?
Arielle stopped cold, just twenty feet from the park where this horrible afternoon had started.
Feeling dizzy, she took a seat on the nearest bench.
Does it matter? Does it matter that someone had swapped out a picture of her daughter for some disgusting corpse?
It didn’t, of course; none of that mattered. The only thing that mattered was finding Hope.
She pictured the officers—Jenkins and the one that had driven her to the station—at a bar after work, sucking down Budweisers and laughing at her expense. Calling her a crazy lady. A widow, perhaps. A crazy widow who was confused about having or not having a daughter, one that kept morbid pictures in her purse.
And maybe she really was crazy.
But Hope was real. Despite all the fucked-up things that had happened and the probably worse things that she couldn’t remember, Hope was real. And she needs her mother.
The police clearly weren’t going to be of any help. It was up to her—it was up to her and her alone to find Hope.
Her frustration came to a head.
“Fuck!” she screamed. “You can’t have her!”
Her mind started racing, and something occurred to her. Maybe she didn’t have to do this alone, maybe there was one other person she could call.
Arielle reached back into her purse and pulled out her cell phone so quickly that several sheets of paper and other personal items came out with it.
Arielle quickly scrolled through her contacts, taking a deep breath when she found the one name in there that she had wanted to call for all these years, but had promised herself that she wouldn�
�t.
But now was different; now she needed help.
She hesitated.
Coverfeld Ave—she was going back there for the… third time?
It didn’t matter how many times she had been there before. Nothing mattered now except for finding Hope.
Mother, or whoever the fuck you are, you messed with the wrong woman.
A sharp exhale, and she thumbed send. There was a brief pause before the phone started to ring. As she waited for someone to pick up, an image of Dr. Barnes’s bruised face filled her mind.
No one fucks with Arielle Reigns.
Chapter 41
The room was suddenly warm, and Martin felt increasingly uncomfortable. A sheen of sweat had begun to form on his forehead, and the armpits of his t-shirt had gotten heavy with it.
As terrible as the tale that the woman across from him had already recounted, it appeared that she wasn’t quite done yet.
“Even after both Anne LaForet and her daughter’s bodies had been reduced to soot, it still wasn’t enough for Jane Heath. After all the townsfolk had upped and left, Jane walked up to Anne’s remains and spat on them, denouncing her as a witch whore. Unfortunately for Jane, even though she had burned Anne’s body, her spirit was far from dead.”
The woman looked up when she said these words as if to gauge Martin’s reaction. But he offered none—his mind was lost in the woman’s story, trying to wrap itself around the coincidences of the tale that all seemed to center around Arielle.
The blood dripping down between her legs, the photograph, the goddamn house in the swamp. Jessie.
“Anne came back,” the woman continued in a hushed voice, “spitting on her grave was the final straw… Anne came back from whatever hell she had been banished, and she traveled from that pile of burnt bone and flesh and up Jane, inside her, filling her broken womb with a foul, evil spirit—like a demented child that Jane always wanted in life. And Anne, now possessing Jane’s body, sought revenge against the townsfolk that had murder her and her child—both of her children. She sought out all the children she had helped conceive and forced them back to her home where she intended to raise them as her own. A big ‘fuck you’ to the people that had paraded her bruised and beaten body around the swamp, those that had listened to Jane’s fucked up story about her sleeping with their husbands, tricking them into impregnating her. The town, a small, simple place, usually content with just being, suddenly became the focal point of something much greater. And the townsfolk were either too confused or too scared to act, to try and get their children back. Instead, they deferred to the two men who had started this whole mess: they went to Benjamin and Jessie. They knew nothing of what Jane had done, of course, and cared less about the town that she had destroyed. But, oddly, what Benjamin did care about was his punching bag of a wife. And she was missing. So, with Jessie once again in tow, they returned to the swamp. Only when they found her, they wished they hadn’t. Jane cursed them both for what they had done to Anne; she cursed Jessie to stand watch, to burn any other man or woman that came looking for their children. And Benjamin, who had so much fun raping her? She cursed him to have sex with her over and over again, impregnating her each and every time—she cursed him to drink her milk, to fill her with his evil seed.”
And with that, the woman let all the air out of her lungs in a whoosh. She looked as if she had aged a decade in the hour or so that Martin had been sitting on the dusty couch, listening to her story.
Everything had been so vivid, her conviction so absolute, that Martin almost believed her. But part of him, the rational part of his mind, refused to acknowledge the absurdity of her tale; there was no such thing as demons or possession. That was madness.
He cleared his throat and offered the only response that he felt comfortable with.
“How do you know so much? How do you know about this Anne LaForet?”
The woman squinted, her dark pupils receding into the shadows of her face.
“Because I was there. I went to see Mother Anne.”
Martin nearly choked on his spit.
“You what?”
“I went to see Mother Anne; she still draws desperate women who—”
Martin shook his head.
“Wait? You went to see her? Where?”
The woman crossed herself again.
“Open the notepad,” she instructed, ignoring his question.
Martin, incredulous, did as he was told.
Each page of the plain blue notepad had a newspaper article stapled to it. Every page, all fifty or so, had what seemed like a different article, starting from the late nineties.
Martin turned to the first one.
It was short, only maybe fifteen or twenty lines of text, about a woman named Jennifer Matlen, who had been released from the Creston police station after spending more than fifteen hours being assessed by a clinical psychiatrist.
“Jennifer was detained after reporting her four-year-old daughter missing. Police became suspicious when Jennifer was not able to produce any record of her daughter’s birth, or any record of her being admitted to a hospital. The police investigated the house where Jennifer claimed to have given birth, a house in Stumphole swamp on a secluded dirt road named Coverfeld—”
Martin’s eyes bulged.
He reread the street name again. And then a third time.
Coverfeld.
“It can’t be,” he murmured, forgetting that he wasn’t alone in the room. “No fucking way.”
The woman suddenly rocketed to her feet and quickly moved away from him. She wagged an arthritic finger accusingly.
“You’ve been there,” she hissed. “You’ve been to the house!”
Martin looked up at her, the fear on her face giving him pause.
“Yeah,” he began hesitantly, “I went there with a cop friend, but we—ugh—we didn’t find anything. How—how can this be the same place? I mean, what are the odds?”
The woman backed as far away from him as possible, and in doing so she bumped against a small table that lined the back wall, sending the candles on top if it swaying dangerously.
“Did you see her?”
Martin tilted his head.
“Who? See who?”
“Her? Did you see her? Did you see Mother Anne?”
Martin frowned.
“The place was abandoned—there was only a gardener—”
“Jessie,” the woman spat with venom.
Martin was starting to get dizzy. There were just too many coincidences at play. He began to ponder if maybe this woman had followed him, or maybe she had spoken with Arielle… or Woodward… or…
What the fuck is going on?
The woman, who he was now almost certain was the Jennifer Matlen described in the article in his hands, tried to lean back even further, but with her back pressed up against the table, there was nowhere to go. As it was, her black dress dangled dangerously close to a lit candle.
“You need to leave!” she hissed at him, her voice raising an octave. “You need to leave now! She’s seen you, she knows you! She knows who you are.”
Martin stood, laying the blue notepad on the couch beside him.
“She will burn you, like she burned the others. She will make you pay! Mater est, matrem omnium! She will make you burn!”
Then he remembered the photograph from his bedside table, the one that he had once thought depicted Arielle as a child. He reached into his pocket and pulled it out, unfolding it and showing to Jennifer.
The woman’s eyes focused, and then went wide.
“Is—”
—this the place? He intended to ask, but she cut him off.
“It’s her!” Jennifer screamed, “Mater est, matrem omnium!”
Her outstretched finger recoiled, and she began to reach behind her, to feel her way into the next room without taking her eyes off Martin or the photograph.
Martin blinked, amazed at the strength of the voice coming from such a small woman. The candles bobb
led again as her hands jostled the table edge.
“Careful, you’re close to—”
“Get away!”
Martin reached for Jennifer then, his eyes fixed on the candle that was but a mere hair from the back of her dress.
“No! Don’t touch me!” Jennifer screamed, forcing her body further onto table.
Martin wouldn’t have believed that a fire could grow so big so quickly. The woman’s dress only just brushed the tiny, almost infinitesimal flame, but it was enough. The dark fabric ignited like the wick of a Molotov cocktail.
Now it was Martin’s turn to scream.
It only took two, maybe three seconds before he was on her, but during that short period of time, Jennifer’s entire dress ignited and the woman began wailing at the top of her lungs. Still, despite the fire that licked at her flesh, she spun away, not wanting to be touched by him, all the while spreading the flames to the dry floor, the curtains, the old, peeling wallpaper.
Martin threw himself on top of the woman, her bony body collapsing beneath him like a small piece of tinder. He tried to smother the flames with his arms and chest, patting her, spinning with her, but no matter what he did, they continued to grow in size and intensity. He could feel the heat of the fire spilling from between his armpits and legs, but there was too much adrenaline flowing through him to feel his own burning flesh. He sat up and tried to roll the wailing woman with his hands.
It didn’t matter what he did; the flames just wouldn’t extinguish. Martin, still rolling the woman across the floor, looked up, trying to find something, anything, to put out the fire.
She will burn you like she did the others.
The wallpaper had caught and the photographs of Jennifer’s daughter had started to melt, her pretty, girlish face popping and dripping like old wax.
He saw nothing—no blanket, no fire extinguisher, he couldn’t even find the damn sink.
When he turned back to Jennifer, the woman was staring up at her, the skin on her face pink and riddled with blisters. Smoke was coming from somewhere on the back of her head. Seeing this, he was made aware of his own burning hands and he instinctively pulled them back.
Mother Page 17
