The splintered shaft was sticking straight through his chest.
Tyler got up and hunkered down by the man carefully, using one of the plates off the table as a shield.
“Dead,” he said incredulously. He looked up at the others. “He’s dead... He fell on the broken table leg there and...oh, God, it’s bad.”
“Out of here! It’s evil!” Davey commanded. “It’s still evil.”
They were all shaking so badly no one seemed able to move. Davey reached for Hannah’s arm and pulled her up. “Out!” he commanded.
And she ran. Suzie followed her, and then Sean, and then Tyler met Sarah’s eyes and took her hand, and they raced out, as well, followed by Davey—who was still carefully wielding his plastic sword.
They heard sirens; police and security and EMTs were spilling onto the grounds.
The medics were struggling, trying to find the injured people among the props and corpses and demons and clowns.
When the group of friends reached a grassy spot, Sarah fell to the ground, shaking. She looked up at Davey, still not beginning to comprehend how he had known...
Or even what it was he had known.
“I told you—that house is evil,” he said. “I told you—my dad. He taught me to watch. He stays with me and tells me to watch.”
* * *
IT HAD BEEN the unthinkable—or easily thinkable, really, in the midst of all that went on at a horror-themed attraction at Halloween.
Archibald Lemming and another inmate had escaped from state prison two weeks earlier. They had gotten out through the infirmary—even though he had been in maximum security. News of the breakout had been harried and spotty, and most people assumed the embarrassment suffered by those who had let them escape had mandated that the information about it be kept secret.
Archibald Lemming had been incarcerated at the Clinton Correction Facility for killing four people—with a carving knife. The man had been incredibly sick. He’d somehow managed to consume some of the blood in their bodies—as if he’d been a damned vampire. He’d escaped with a fellow inmate, another killer who was adept with a knife and liked to play in blood—Perry Knowlton. Apparently, however, Lemming had turned on the man. Knowlton’s body had been found burned to little more than cinders in the crematorium at an abandoned veterinary hospital just outside the massive walls of the prison.
Sarah knew all that, of course, because it was on the news. And because, after the attack at Cemetery Mansion, the cops came to talk to her and Davey several times. One of them was a very old detective named Mark Holiday. He was gentle. His partner, Bob Green, was younger and persistent, but when his questions threatened to upset Davey, Sarah learned she could be very fierce herself. The police photographer, Alex Morrison—a nice guy, with the forensic unit—came with the detectives. He showed them pictures that caused them to relive the event—and remember it bit by bit. The photographer was young, like Bob Green. He tried to make things easier, too, by explaining all that he could.
“Archibald Lemming! They found his stash in prison. Idiot kept ‘history’ books. Right—they were on the Countess Bathory, the Hungarian broad who killed young women to bathe in their blood. The man was beyond depraved,” one of the cops had said that night when he’d met with the kids. He’d been shaking, just as they had been.
People were stunned and angry—furious. If there had been better information on the escape, lives might have been saved. Before the confrontation with Davey and his friends, the man had killed ten people and seriously injured many more. He’d managed to escape at a time when it was perfect to practice his horror upon others—Halloween. He had dressed up and slipped into the park as one of the actors.
But many survived who might have died that night. They had lived because of Davey.
It did something to them all. Maybe they were in shock. Maybe denial. Guilt over being the ones who made it out. And confusion over what it meant, now that the normal lives ahead of them seemed all the more precious.
Sarah was with her cousin and her aunt when Tyler came to say goodbye.
He was leaving the school, going into a military academy and joining the navy as soon as he could.
Sarah was stunned. But in an odd way, she understood. She knew she had closed in on herself. Maybe they all had, and needed to do so in order to process that they were alive—and it was all right for them to go on.
She, Tyler and their friends had survived. And it was too hard to be together. Too hard to be reminded what the haunted house had looked like with all the dead bodies and the blood and things so horrible they almost couldn’t be believed.
So she merely nodded when he told her he was leaving. She barely even kissed him goodbye, although there was a long moment when they looked at each other, and even this—losing one another—was something they both accepted, and shared, and understood.
Sarah gave up cheerleading and transferred to a private school herself, somewhere that hadn’t lost any students in the Cemetery Mansion massacre.
When college rolled around, she decided on Columbia and majored in creative writing, veering away from anything that had to do with mystery or horror. She chose a pseudonym and started out in romance.
However, romance eluded her. She was haunted by the past.
And by memories of Tyler.
She turned to science fiction.
Giant bugs on the moon didn’t scare her.
Except...
Every once in a while, she would pause, stare out the window and remember she was alive because of Davey and his Martian Gamma Sword.
Still, by the time she was twenty-seven, she was doing well. She had her own apartment on Reed Street. For holidays she headed out to LA—her parents had moved there as soon as her dad had retired from his job as an investment banker. Of course, they always tried to get her to join them with a permanent move, but she was a New Yorker and she loved the city. Sometimes she guest-lectured at Columbia or NYU. Upon occasion, she dated. Nothing seemed to work very well. But she was okay. She had college friends, and since she’d worked her way through school waitressing at an Irish pub, she still went in to help out at Finnegan’s on Broadway now and then. The Finnegan family were great friends—especially Kieran, who happened to be a psychologist who frequently worked with criminals. He always seemed to know when Sarah wanted to talk a little about what she’d been through—and when she didn’t.
It wasn’t the happiness she had envisioned for herself before the night at the Halloween attraction.
But it was okay.
She hadn’t seen Tyler—or any of her old friends—for over a decade.
Sarah had been living in the present.
And then she heard about the murder of Hannah Levine.
Like it or not, the past came crashing down on her.
And with it, Tyler Grant reentered her life.
Copyright © 2018 by Heather Graham Pozzessere
ISBN-13: 9781488033124
Loving Baby
Copyright © 2018 by Tyler Anne Snell
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