by Jeff Gunhus
The Torment of Rachel Ames
A Novella
Jeff Gunhus
Seven Guns Press
Contents
Copyright
Also By Jeff Gunhus
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Afterword
About The Author
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2015 by Jeff Gunhus.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Seven Guns Press. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Printed in the United States of America
Cover design by Extended Imagery
Edited by Mandy Schoen
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gunhus, Jeff
The Torment of Rachel Ames / Jeff Gunhus
Created with Vellum
Also By Jeff Gunhus
ADULT FICTION
Night Chill
Night Terror
Killer Within
Killer Pursuit (Jan 2016)
The Torment of Rachel Ames: a novella
MG/YA FICTION
Jack Templar Monster Hunter
Jack Templar and the Monster Hunter Academy
Jack Templar and the Lord of the Vampires
Jack Templar and the Lord of the Werewolves
Jack Templar and the Lord of the Demons
For Nicole
I love you
Chapter One
Rachel Ames knows she’s making a terrible mistake, but that’s never stopped her before. Even as she speeds down the empty highway, she’s certain nothing good will come of this trip. She can’t say why she has this belief, only that it’s deeply rooted, part of a visceral animal instinct clawing away at her insides. Call it intuition. Or call it common sense, doesn’t matter. Can’t change the fact that it’s the truth.
She refuses to change her destination, even if the rising sense of dread causes her heart to beat right out of her chest. She’s committed, this much is a fact, so she pushes aside all thought of turning around and focuses on the road ahead.
She checks the map on her phone, taking comfort in the little blue dot on the screen that symbolizes the exact spot in the world occupied by her aging Honda Accord with faded red paint, bad muffler and squeaking brakes. The dot sails along a straight white line surrounded by an ocean of green. She appreciates the simplicity of the image, the perfection of it. An object moving at a steady rate along a direct path toward a specific destination. No hurdles. No obstacles to navigate. Not even an intersection or a fork in the road. There are only two decisions to make. To continue forward or stop the car and go back.
And there’s no chance in hell she’s going back.
Her two gentlemen passengers are the perfect companions. Silent, good-looking and only there to cater to her whims and needs. They sit together in the seat next to her, sharing the seatbelt. That might have been overdoing it, but strapping them in together makes her laugh, so she forgives herself the indulgence. This is her journey, her time, so acting odd is her prerogative.
Besides, the two of them are the perfect complements. Daniels and Underwood. Booze and typewriter. Soul mates bound by common history and mutual reliance.
The Underwood typewriter was a great find her sophomore year in college, given to her by Professor McNeely’s widow soon after his very public death from a massive aneurism. It’d happened right in the middle of her creative writing class, just as the old bastard was finally saying something nice about her novel-in-progress. Mid-sentence, he’d slapped a hand to his head, made a small grunt and rolled his eyes back in their sockets. At first, she’d thought he was mocking her work, but then his back arched and he collapsed to the floor. After that came the convulsions, followed by the shit and urine filling his pants as her classmates screamed. Then, as the good book says, the lights went out and Elvis left the building.
But unlike Elvis, the man wasn’t much loved. A taskmaster who hated any writer besides himself, he used critiques as an assault rifle to mow down any young soul with the temerity to attempt the art that, in his mind, belonged only to him and a handful of his peers. Sure there were the appropriate candlelight vigils and the church service to honor the brave soul who died fighting the good fight in his ivory tower, but right under the surface, the humor rolled dark and furious.
I heard that the last pages he read really blew his mind.
You know that saying, would it kill you to say something nice?
Rachel guessed it had. The jokes and her connection with the man’s grisly death gave her some level of notoriety in the English department, something that had its pros and cons. The con being that the rumor mill grouped her in with all the other young coeds McNeely had been schtupping, an insinuation she detested. She hadn’t been like all the others. She was certain that she’d been his favorite.
There were two pros to the rumors. The first being that others on the faculty, and even a few agents looking for newbie writers, wanted to read the student novel that the great Stan McNeely actually liked. This attention got Rachel her first agent, Hank Wells, and eventually her first sale. The second pro was that McNeely’s widow had given Rachel her husband’s prized Underwood typewriter.
This last little windfall was so unexpected that it would have been met with an editor’s red pen if she’d ever tried it in her fiction. On hearing that her dearly departed philandering husband had liked Rachel’s writing, she’d sought Rachel out at the viewing. It was an awkward meeting, but the widow McNeely made it clear that life without her husband—but with her husband’s royalty income—was a welcome turn of events. When she offered Rachel her choice of McNeely’s personal items it took only seconds to decide on the typewriter. The Underwood was the same one that had given the world McNeely’s Booker Prize winning novel Of God Alone and, in her own not incapable hands, had since kicked out two well-reviewed novels with her name on the cover. One of them, her second, had even been called mind-blowing by a reviewer for The New York Times, who may or may not have meant it as a sly reference to the typewriter’s pedigree. No, the Underwood had served her well. Until the last book. That was a different story.
The reception of her last book had led to the other man in the front seat. A fifth of Jack Daniel’s, making a pleasant clink-clink-clink sound as it knocks against the painted metal of the antique typewriter.
Daniels and Underwood. Together forever.
She glances back at her phone but the map is gone. The pleasant view of her abstract-self making steady progress through the world is now a grid of light blue lines on a white background and a single word in the top left corner of the screen.
Searching. Searching. Searching.
She laughs, hearing more bitterness and fear in the sound than she expects. She tosses the phone aside, now useless, and grips the wheel, noticing the sweat on her palms for th
e first time. A quick check in the rearview mirror shows an exact replica of the road in front of her, only with black, churning shadows filling the distant sky. Seeing it, her breath catches in her chest. She twists the mirror to the side so she won’t be tempted to look back there again.
She faces forward, trying to calm down. Her stomach rolls over on itself and she lowers her window to get some fresh air. It helps, the air cool and sweet, filled with the smell of pine. She feels herself relax again, pushing aside all thoughts of the dark sky behind her.
The Honda eats up mile after mile, straight as could be. Tall pines on either side of the road create a corridor that feels somehow both majestic and claustrophobic. A couple of checks of the phone shows the fancy map is out for good, but she’s made her peace with that. She has the simple directions in her head.
But that’s what scares her. Wasn’t life simple? Just a few simple rules to follow. Treat others as you want to be treated. Tell the truth. Do the right thing. Only kill what you intend to eat. Keep those you love safe. Don’t wear white after Labor Day. Don’t pee in the pool.
Simple enough instructions, as clear-cut as the road down which she now travels. But the one thing she’s proven over and over in her life is that she’s capable of violating the simplest of rules. Even unintentionally. So, even on a straight road with no turns and no decisions to make, she knows she’s still right on the edge of being lost. She feels as if she’s teetering, balanced on so fine an edge that she’s at the mercy of the direction of the next breeze.
If she were to get lost, the certainty that she would never find her way back again coils around her heart and lungs and squeezes tighter with each thump of her tires along the highway.
You’re not going farther, you’re going deeper, says a voice in her head.
Not farther, deeper.
It’s a ridiculous notion. She’s in a car, on a road, with a place to go and directions to get there. Everything else is noise.
Her phone has it all wrong. She isn’t searching, searching, searching as it insists. Its little electrodes and transistors might be panicked from losing touch with the outside world, but it’s exactly what Rachel wants.
Consequences be damned.
Chapter Two
The tires crunch the gravel driveway in a satisfying way as she pulls up to the cabin. The sound draws out a memory of summers in New England. Only the gravel was seashells then, millions of them, smashed up and laid down as filler for their family vacation home. Rachel shakes her head, erasing the thought. No memories. Not now.
She parks the Honda and looks over her new home. It isn’t much, just a simple cabin, four walls of weathered clapboard on a raised foundation. The wood is grey and bare except for a few small patches of stubborn flaking paint, likely white at one time, but aged with grime that makes it the same color as decayed teeth. There are long smears of rust from dozens of nail heads that look like draining bullet wounds. Bushes and trees push in on the structure from all sides. Vines cover the south wall, tentacles stretching from ground to roof, fingers dug into the seams between the boards, prying into them and buckling them outward. It looks as if the forest has been caught in the act of choking the cabin to death right before she showed up and ruined all the fun.
“Lovely,” she says, opening her car door. She points to Underwood and Daniels. “You boys stay here. I’ll check things out.”
She closes the door and presses her key fob, chirping the locks. It’s a ridiculous notion as she doubts there is anyone around for miles. But some things are hard-wired into her. A decade of living in New York doesn’t leave a person unscathed.
She walks up to the gate on the picket fence that stretches across the front of the house. She marvels how it hangs slanted on its hinges and creaks back and forth in the breeze in a perfect horror movie way. It makes her smile. As does the bleached white bull’s skull sitting on a rock next to it, thick horns arching up over its cracked bones and vacant, staring eye sockets. Her kind of place.
She nudges the gate open and walks through.
There’s a door halfway down the length of the wall. Because of the raised foundation, there are old, crooked stairs that lead up to a small landing. The wood creaks in protest as she puts her weight on the first step and tests whether it will hold her. She’s not so sure. From where she stands she can see that the top section of the door was a screen at one time, but it’s so shredded and baked by the sun that it looks more like a nest of spiderwebs hanging there. Through the hole she sees the heavier interior door with four window panes. This door’s cracked open, which surprises her.
“Hello?” she calls out. She looks at her watch. She’s early but the person she’s meeting must have arrived before her. But there hadn’t been a car. None that she’d seen anyway. “Anyone there?”
Only the wind answers, rustling through the trees that sway in a slow dance overhead. The frayed strands of the screen lift into the air briefly, then resettle. The interior door doesn’t move.
It would make sense to walk up the three stairs and knock on the door, but something about the whole situation bothers her. She walks past the door and heads around back.
The cabin is right on the water’s edge of the lake and, as far as main attractions go, this one doesn’t disappoint. A small grass yard, surprisingly cut down so it looks like a plot of green suburbia right there in the wild, stretches the thirty feet from the deck attached to the back of the cabin down to the water. It is a gentle slope, which explains the need for the cabin’s raised foundation. A floating dock extends like a single finger into the water and ends with a rectangular platform on which sits a single Adirondack chair. She spies a canoe off to the side, stored upside-down, weeds growing up around it.
But the view beyond the pier is the star of the show. The lake is deserted, the wooded shoreline unbroken by another cottage as far as she can see. Gone are the evergreen pines from the drive down, replaced by the riotous colors of the birch and elm in the peak of their fall transformations. The sun has dropped low on the horizon and sets the forest on fire, sparking a thousand diamonds on the lake surface rippled from the breeze.
“Can I help you?” a man’s voice says to her left.
She’s so taken in by the view that she doesn’t even turn.
“I don’t think you can,” she whispers.
“Will you let me try?” he asks.
She turns as the man walks up from the water, a form silhouetted by the sun. She squints to get a look at him, feeling a tingle of anticipation, hoping.
“I don’t tend to accept help from strangers,” she says.
“And I tend not to rent my cabin to them. First time for everything, as they say.”
“Who says?”
“What’s that?”
“Who says first time for everything?”
The man shrugs and steps forward. “Just people.”
He wears blue jeans and a flannel with rolled sleeves. A few days of beard growth covers his face, but it makes him look rustic, unlike those pretentious fakes in men’s magazines. Although she figures his strong jaw and blue eyes alone could have gotten him work in one of those publications if he wanted it.
He holds out his hand. “Name’s John.”
She takes his hand and shakes it, noticing it’s softer than she imagined which puts his whole outdoorsy look into question.
“Rachel,” she says.
He smiles like her name is a snippet of attractive music.
“What do you think of the place?” he asks. “Will it work?”
She looks back out over the water. It’s exactly what she needs, the place she would paint as her perfect spot if she had any skill with a brush at all. “It’s fine,” she says.
He grins as if he can see right through her and knows she’s dying to sit in the chair on the dock, feel the wind on her skin, the sun on her face. Just her, a notebook and Mother Nature in all of her soothing grace.
“Okay, it’s more than fine. It’s perfect,
” she says.
He likes the comment, his eyes smiling as he looks around as if just seeing the view for the first time. “It’s a good place,” he says. Then he turns to the cabin. “It could use a little fixing up, but it’ll keep the rain out. Well, in most places that is.”
“The more rustic the better.”
“That’s what you said on the phone.” He points to the side of the cabin. “There’s a generator if you really need it, but it’s loud and kind of messes with the whole peace and quiet thing. There’s propane for cooking. A couple of lanterns and a ton of candles you’re welcome to use.”
“Sounds great.”
“Can I help you get your luggage?”
She shakes her head. “I only have a small bag and a typewriter.” She doesn’t mention her bottle of Jack.
“Are you a writer or something?”
“Or something,” she replies, immediately feeling rude. “Yeah, I do some writing.”
“This is a good place for it,” he says. “This place can work, if you give it a fair try.”
She blinks hard. She smells something burning. There’s noise. The crackle and spit of a fire. She turns hard to look over her shoulder, actually hoping a fire has started behind her. But she knows better. The noise is always there in the background. Only now it’s asserting itself. Rising decibel by decibel until it’s a roar. There are voices in the sound. Shouts. Screaming.
“Are you okay?” John asks.
The sound turns off like a switch has been flipped. She stands there, breathing hard, her legs trembling.
“I said are you okay?”
She looks up at him, the blue eyes of this stranger that are so full of concern that it nearly makes her cry. She says the only thing she can under their scrutiny.
