by Rachel Caine
The fleeing rabbit is about a quarter of the way across the clearing when suddenly a light flares on, blindingly bright, aimed to illuminate the entire semicircle at the front of the house. Motion light. I drop back into my crouch, and I can see Sam doing the same. I’m mentally kicking myself for missing the fixture, but it was hard to see until it ignited like a ball of white fire; it’s set far back under the peak of the eaves, and when I raise a hand to try to block the glare, I think I can see that it’s contained behind some kind of wire mesh.
Won’t be easy to reach, disable, or fool.
The rabbit loses the race halfway across the yard. The cat pounces, and the rabbit makes a sound that’s eerily like a scream as it’s seized by the back of the neck. The little shriek cuts off when the cat viciously shakes it, biting down. Good, efficient murderers, cats.
Having killed it, the cat drops the limp bag of fur on the ground, bats it with a paw for a while, then strolls off. Leaves it where it lies.
I think of my ex.
The motion light clicks off again in another thirty seconds after the cat is gone, and I look over at Sam. He seems grim, studying the scene, and finally shakes his head. He’s thinking this cabin is a very bad place. It has an aura of—I don’t know how else to say it—darkness. I can imagine bad things being done here. I can almost feel the ghosts crowding around me. What has this faceless man done? Arden sure seemed terrified of him.
I wonder for the first time if our man is alone in this cabin. Does he share my ex-husband’s tastes? Does he have a captive in there? If we walk away, who else might we leave to suffer?
There is no good answer here. We’re in the wrong, legally; the info we have on this man is thin, and there’s no proof he’s done anything wrong. We’re trespassing. Maybe stalking, since we’ve been watching this place for hours. We still haven’t caught so much as a glimpse of the person who owns the place.
Something’s been nagging at me all this time, and now, suddenly, it goes from a whisper to a shout. He should have looked out.
The security light had flashed on. If he was that paranoid about people approaching, he should have looked out.
I tell myself that maybe he’s distracted, in another room, maybe on the toilet, but that still doesn’t make sense. The cabin isn’t that big. He still would have pulled the curtain, or opened the door and reactivated the security light to check the surroundings.
All those lights, coming on and going off since sunset. And it has a pattern. I see it now as I replay it in my memory.
It’s all on timers. Jesus. There’s nobody in there.
I could be wrong, of course, but I don’t care. Watching that rabbit die, seeing that spray of blood fly in the air as the cat shook it, makes me remember the pictures that this man sent to me, him or one of his slimy little friends. Pictures that dishonor the victims of my husband’s crimes, digitally map the faces of my children onto murder and rape victims, show them posed in degrading and horrible ways. This man is a coward. He hides out here in the wild and torments my family, and I am right here, and I’m not going to walk away without letting him know he’s not safe. Not from me. Not anymore.
Regardless of the motion light, I stand up, and I run for the front door.
The light blazes on again before I’m more than two steps out of cover, but I don’t hesitate. I hear Sam moving behind me; he hasn’t shouted my name, and I’m a little surprised he’s followed. I know he’ll be angry. We cross the open space and flatten out against the wall on either side of the front door. After what seems an eternity, the light clicks off again, and I have to blink away the bright afterimages.
“The hell are we doing?” Sam whispers.
“Going in!”
“Gwen, no!”
“Yes!”
There isn’t time for a long debate, and he knows it. He sends me a look full of fury and frustration, but he pivots, balances, and slams his boot into the door just at the lock. The door shudders, but it doesn’t open. He tries again. And again.
Nothing. The door’s meant to withstand worse than us.
But the windows aren’t.
I go around to the side. The window there is locked, but we’re in this now, and I’m not about to hesitate. The glass proves to be breakable, even though it’s thick and double-paned, and once I’ve shattered enough of it, I reach inside, flip the catch, and slide it open to climb inside.
I pull the gun that I’ve kept holstered until that moment. Sam’s already got his own weapon ready as he slithers through behind me and rolls back up to his feet.
There’s no sound. No light. I glimpse a lampshade and frantically feel around for the switch; it blazes on when I find it, and we’re confronted with a couple of plush chairs, a hooked rug, a small table on which the lamp sits, some bookcases with a jumble of contents, a kitchen with a tiny stove and refrigerator that look like they date back to the 1950s.
There’s no one here.
Sam’s still moving. There’s a door to our right, and he opens it and covers the room with his gun while I flip on an overhead light.
There’s a twin bed. Neatly made with a forest-green blanket for a cover. Behind a small divider, there’s a shower and toilet.
And there’s no one here at all.
Sam ducks into the small bathroom, then out again. “The shower’s still got some moisture in it. It’s humid, so that might be left over from earlier today.” He gives me that look. “You got lucky, Gwen. He could have been in here.”
“Come on, he had everything on timers, which meant he wasn’t,” I snapped. “Handling this with kid gloves isn’t going to get us anywhere, Sam. And it won’t protect my kids.”
Sam shakes his head, but he can’t fault my feelings . . . he loves my kids, too, I know that. Our friendship is, by any standards, peculiar; it shouldn’t exist, and sometimes I feel like it’s skating on thin ice over a terribly dark fall. But he wants what I want. That will never change.
Standing in this stranger’s cabin, I can feel that sense of darkness again. This man leads a hidden life. I don’t know what variety of depravity he practices, but I know it will be something awful.
It’s hard to look at this normal place, the calm neatness of it, when he’s dedicated his life to destroying other people’s. I’m angry. Probably too angry. I want to smash everything. And what’s stopping me? Truth is, we’re already committing a crime just by being inside. Breaking and entering. Vandalism seems like a reasonable add-on.
“Look around,” I tell Sam. “There has to be something we can take with us. Something to tell us what he’s into, and maybe, if we’re lucky, he’ll have correspondence with Melvin.”
Sam nods, but he pointedly checks his watch; if there was some kind of alarm system, we’re already in trouble. I doubt there is, though. Someone who makes a practice of living so far away from civilization doesn’t depend on 911. Our security provided by Smith and Wesson. If he was here, or anywhere near, he’d have opened fire on us already. We’re safe. For now.
“Papers,” I tell him. “Electronic records. Anything that looks like it could be of use, okay? Ten minutes.”
“Five,” he says, and then he leaves me to it.
There’s a small desk shoved into the corner of this small room. Like everything else, it’s painfully neat and clean, made of burnished maple in plain country style. I open drawers, then pull them out and dump them to look behind and underneath. We can’t conceal our intrusion here. Might as well do a thorough job of it.
I find nothing I can immediately identify as important. Receipts, mostly. Printed papers that seem not very illuminating. I grab everything and shove it into my backpack.
I’m wearing gloves, so I’ve left no prints behind; I put everything back in the drawers and slot them back in place. I check the closet. There’s a gigantic gun safe, but as I’m staring at it, I see a shoe box up on top. I open it. More receipts. I cram those into my backpack. One drifts down behind the safe, and as I’m groping blindly ba
ck there for it, my fingers brush the sharp edges of something that doesn’t quite belong.
I push it, and it moves.
Magnetic. I detach it from the safe and pull it out. It’s a shallow box with a sliding top, like the old hide-a-key my grandmother used to put in the wheel well of her car.
This one holds a USB.
I never would have found it if I hadn’t dropped a page behind the safe. It was in a space that would have been missed in a search, and the gun safe is too huge and heavy to move without major effort.
I retrieve the fallen page, and I put that and the USB in the backpack.
“Got anything?” Sam calls.
“Receipts, some printouts, and a thumb drive,” I say. “No computer, just a power cord. He must have taken that with him. You?”
He appears in the doorway. I can’t read his expression, but something about it makes me step back from the closet and come toward him. “You’d better see this,” he says. I know I’m not going to like it, but I follow him out into the main room. Everything in its place. Everything clean and orderly. I wonder if this man has a military background, because every surface gleams. If there are fingerprints here, I can’t spot any.
Sam opens up a closet. It looks like a normal pantry, just deep enough to reach into. Eight shelves, top to bottom, packed with canned goods and sundries. Whoever this Absalom asshole is, he likes canned tuna and quick-prep casserole kits.
Sam puts a finger to his lips and pushes on the shelves. They swing back without so much as a squeak, and behind that is a set of stairs. Motion lights click on, revealing a wall with cheap faux-wood paneling, and below, at the bottom of the steps, like a living thing, crouches a steel door with a key lock. I feel the darkness of it breathe up through the chilly air, and for a moment I don’t move. I can’t. I feel like it’s watching me, assessing me for weaknesses.
I’m paralyzed by flashbacks to my ex-husband’s torture chamber, so carefully hidden inside my own house. To the basement of Lancel Graham’s tumbledown cabin up in the hills above Stillhouse Lake, where he lovingly re-created that horror.
This feels like something just as bad.
We go down slowly, careful of our steps; Sam’s probably concerned about noise, but I’m not. I’m worried about hidden traps and tripwires. This place feels like death. Like threats and consequences.
“Stop,” I whisper, when Sam takes the last step down. He’s about four feet from the door. He listens, and pauses, and looks at me. I keep staring at the steel face of the thing, and I slowly shake my head. “This is wrong. Don’t.”
“Gwen—”
“Please, Sam.” I feel sick, and I am shaking now. The urgency hurts. “We’ve got to go. Now. Right now.” I am not psychic, have no trace of any kind of power or gift, but I have instincts. Instincts I ignored for years with Melvin Royal. I should have known what he was doing, what kind of horror show was going on under my roof. I never did, at least not in any conscious way.
Never again. I don’t know what will happen if Sam touches that door, but I can feel it’s wrong. This is a job for the FBI now, not a couple of renegade amateur thieves. This place feels claustrophobic, and I feel like I’m being watched.
Sam accepts my decision, and that’s a gift I can’t measure; most men, I believe, would have ignored me and gone straight on ahead. As a consequence, we are almost to the top of the stairs when, with a whispering sigh, the door at the bottom of the stairs cracks open. There’s a faint, almost inaudible click.
Sam pauses. I don’t know what’s coming out of that door, and I don’t want to know. I grab Sam, lunge forward—past the shelves, out of the closet—and drag him along with me.
Sam has just cleared the doorway when something picks us up and throws us, violently, across the room. I lift and cross my arms in front of my face, draw my legs up in an instinctive attempt to protect my brain and belly, and I hardly feel it when I hit the wall. I definitely don’t feel hitting the floor, because suddenly I’m just there, lying on wood and looking up as a blast of orange light floods the room. I don’t understand what it is. I feel a wave of heat, and then the roof is, strangely, moving away from me, like a giant has picked it up. The lights we’ve turned on blow out like candles, and I’m looking at stars and trees and then everything, everything, is on fire.
5
GWEN
I come conscious again, coughing, with someone pouring water on my face. The water’s cold, and I’m shivering, and I roll over and cough helplessly for a few moments. Awareness starts somewhere in me, reporting pain in my back, in my leg, in my arm. My brain’s good at analyzing these things, and it tells me it’s nothing too serious. I hope it’s not lying to me. My head hurts as well, and that seems of more concern. My mouth tastes like an ashtray, and I grab blindly for the water bottle that’s been splashing my face and rinse out my mouth. I spit it out on the ground, then chug thirstily. That’s probably a mistake. The thick weight of water hits my stomach hard.
I roll up to my knees, sway a little, find my balance, make it to my feet. I’m in the clearing, near the tree line. Sam is kneeling next to me, and he looks worse than I feel—bloody from a cut on his head, shaking, favoring one side as he tries to get up. I help him. He winces and presses a hand to his ribs.
“How did we—” I turn back toward the cabin.
It’s an inferno. I lose my words when I see it, and the reality that we were in there comes down on me. I stare, mesmerized. How did we get out?
“I pulled you out. What the hell, Sam?” says a new voice. It belongs to a man standing a distance away, who’s watching the blaze. He’s more than six feet, wearing a black tufted parka, which I envy right now, and as he shifts, a gold badge on a chain around his neck catches the light. Cop, I think, and I freeze. But the badge is different. I can’t immediately identify it. My eyes won’t focus finely enough. He’s African American, and his voice has a slow southern accent that makes him sound amiable, though I can see him studying me, calculating, weighing my worth. He’s also wearing a bulletproof vest under the parka, I realize, as the wind blows a hot gust from the burning cabin and flaps it back.
FBI. It’s right there on his vest.
“Mike Lustig,” he says. “And you’re both a pair of goddamn idiots. What happened?” He directs that last part past me, and Sam winces as he shifts position.
“Is that a general question, or do you want something specific?”
“You said you were going to look around. What the fuck did you do?”
My brain clears a little. Mike Lustig. Sam’s FBI friend. He has an escalating curse level. I wish he’d lower his volume, because my ears are ringing constantly, and my head pounds like a bass drum.
“There was some kind of booby trap,” I tell him. “Down in the basement. We didn’t open the door, but someone else did. We were lucky to get out of that hallway before it blew.”
“Not luck,” Sam says. “You smelled a trap, and I didn’t.”
Mike looks from one of us to the other. “And you don’t know what was in the hidden room?”
“No.”
“Damn,” he says. “He could have had anything down there. A captive, even.”
I go cold. “Are you saying that . . . that there was someone down there? Someone we could have rescued?”
Mike just looks at us. Sam shifts finally and says, “Jesus, Mike. What did you know about this guy?”
Lustig ignores the question. “I need to get you to town for a checkup. That cut needs stitches. Favoring your side, too. Broken ribs? How about you, Ms. Proctor?”
“Stop changing the subject!” Sam shouts.
Mike looks past us at the burning cabin. The damage, I realize, is already beyond repair; the place is falling in on itself. He sighs. “This is going to attract attention. Engine company’s probably on the way already; they take fire seriously up in these hills. Come on. I’ll brief you in the car.” He turns and walks away, into the trees, and for a long second, I just stand there, t
rying to understand what has happened, what the hell is going on. Nothing’s making sense. Maybe that’s shock; maybe that’s the fact my brain has been severely rattled inside its bone cage.
It takes Sam’s hand on my shoulder silently urging me along to make me follow, and I keep looking back at the raging inferno, the sparks spitting high at heaven.
What was in that room? Who the hell are these people? They’re not just hackers. It’s not just a blackmail ring, either.
I’m not sure if I’m brave enough to want to know the answer.
We sit in the back of the FBI agent’s SUV, which is both a comfort and a worry; I’m fairly certain these doors won’t pop open at the pull of a latch. He provides us with strong, dark coffee from a thermos before he steps out to make some calls. I drink it thirstily, more for the warmth than the taste. Sam doesn’t say much. Neither do I. We watch the fire, still visible through the trees, and the garland of blinking red-and-blue lights snaking up-mountain toward us.
I finally say, “So that’s your friend. Agent Lustig.”
“Yeah, we served together,” Sam says. “He joined the FBI; I re-upped.” He’s staring out at the fire, but his gaze cuts suddenly toward Lustig, who is on the phone outside the vehicle. Lustig is pacing back and forth, possibly just to keep warm, but I can’t help but think he’s also betraying some anxiety. “He knows something he didn’t tell us.”
“I gathered that,” I say, and I wince when I shift to relieve an ache. It wakes something sharper. Still not broken, I think, but I’ve definitely stressed everything. “Has it occurred to you that maybe he’s using you as much as you think you’re using him?”
I think he isn’t going to respond, but he does. He says, without looking away from Lustig, “He’s a good guy.”
“He’s going to get us killed,” I say.
“No,” Sam says, and he looks directly at me now. “You nearly got us killed. We were supposed to stay outside, not go charging in. You wanted to do that.”
He’s right. I’m angry because he’s right, and I know that’s a terrible reaction to have, so I bite my lip and manage to stop myself from escalating the argument. I’m tired, I hurt, and I have the awful feeling that we started something here that’s out of our control. And what did we get for it? Not much. A backpack stuffed with receipts that probably won’t lead anywhere.
