by Kate Aeon
“Phoebe got scared last night and spent the night with me.”
“She... WHAT! How?” Toeller sounded furious, but in a calm, cold way.
“I don’t have time to explain. We have an emergency at the hospital, and I have to get in there. I just called to let you know what was going on before I walked her over to her place.”
“Don’t Hang. Up,” Toeller said. In the background Alan could hear Toeller snarling. Because Alan couldn’t hear the responses, he guessed the men who had been assigned to watch over Phoebe were catching hell. Toeller was snarling at them to speak up, to stop mumbling, to explain to him just how the woman they had been assigned to protect had spent the night somewhere else.
Phoebe had on underwear and a shirt and was fighting her way into her jeans when Toeller came back on the phone. “They’ll both have questions for her when she gets there. I expect her to stay put and answer them. They had a slow night, but this sort of thing could have compromised this operation. It can’t happen again.”
“I’ll tell her,” Alan said, and Toeller said, “No. I’ll tell her. Let me talk to her.”
Phoebe got the jeans zipped, and Alan said, “Toeller,” and handed her the phone.
She was quiet for a moment, her face pale and her eyes huge. “I know that an operation of this sort is expensive, sir. I realize that... I’m sorry. It seemed the best thing to do at the time.” She closed her eyes wearily, and Alan hugged her. “It won’t happen again, sir.”
She handed the phone back to Alan without a word and slipped her shoes on, skipping any socks. She yanked her hair back into a quick, loose ponytail without even bothering to brush it first. She looked impossibly sexy, and Alan hated having to leave her even for a minute.
“I’m ready, I guess,” she said. But her brown eyes were enormous, and he could see the fear in them.
And he couldn’t stay. “I promise we’re going to get through this,” he told her. “You and me. We’re going to win this and come out the other side of it stronger and better.“
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
She nodded then. “All right. I’ll hold you to that promise.” She tried a brave smile, but it wasn’t convincing. He hugged her, she grabbed her backpack, and he walked her next door, waited while she let herself in, listened while she locked the door behind her, and then trudged through the dark, clinging to the puddles cast by the streetlights, all the way around the building to the other side. He’d parked in a guest space to give his own space to the FBI. One lucky agent had spent the night concealed in the back of a car just like Alan’s, waiting to grab Schaeffer on the off chance that he decided to use his own parking space.
Phoebe would be fine, Alan told himself. And he would get back to her as soon as he could.
She would be fine.
He got into his car and the cold inside him just got colder.
Phoebe stood with her nose pressed to the peephole of her door, watching Alan until he disappeared from view. Then she sagged against the door, cheek pressed to the cool metal. The end of everything slithered toward her. Alan was gone, and the darkness was coming to claim her. Death was so close she could feel its breath on her cheek.
And then Phoebe stood up straight, realizing slowly that something was wrong. The lights were off downstairs — the place was completely dark inside.
And not quite silent — she could hear radio chatter in little bursts from upstairs. But something about that chatter felt wrong.
And something smelled horrible. Like iron and...
Inside her backpack, a phone started ringing. She jumped from the noise, but also from the impossibility of it
She didn’t have a cell phone.
But it was ringing.
She fumbled with her backpack, lifting the front pocket, reaching for the Browning.
That was where she found the cell phone. Her handgun was gone.
Her belly started cramping, and a wordless dread seized her.
When had the phone appeared? When had the gun gone? She’d last seen it before she went to Alan’s. Before she took the cold-water shower and sneaked out the sliding glass door.
Which meant that while she was in the shower, Michael had found a way to swap them.
Phoebe pulled out the phone. It had a lighted face, and she could see the button highlighted with the word TALK just above it on the screen.
She pushed the button indicated, wanting more than anything to throw the phone away.
But she had to know. She had to know what had happened to her gun. How it had vanished. And what Michael wanted. Because this had to be Michael.
“What?” she said, and was dismayed to hear the shaking in her voice.
Over the phone, she heard a horrifying scream, and then Michael’s voice. “I have Alan,” he said. “And if you want him to live through this, you’re going to do exactly what I say. If you understand, say ‘yes.’ ”
Inside her, something whispered and slithered and rattled. Coming closer. Death. She could feel Death’s gaze, could feel the chill of his breath. He was staring at her, and staring at Alan.
She’d thought Alan would be at the hospital, that he would be safe. “Yes,” she whispered.
“Very good. I can see you. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good. You’re going to turn on the lights in your front room, and you are not going to make a sound, because if you do, Alan is going to have very bad things happen to him very quickly. Understand?”
“I understand,” she said. She reached to her right, felt the switches that turned on the lights.
And in the flash of first light, she saw red and red and more red. Jammed her fist into her mouth to keep from screaming, from saying anything. Froze, so that she did not flee the townhouse, because she did not doubt for a moment that Michael had Alan, or that he would do exactly what he said he would do. More of what he had already done.
On the side wall of her townhouse Michael had nailed two hands, cut off just above the wrists. In blood over the hands, he’d scrawled, “Guess Ben will keep his hands off you now.”
The blood he’d scrawled it with, though, wasn’t Ben’s blood. Because the FBI agents who’d gone upstairs to keep an eye on things were downstairs. Dead in chairs. Bound, gagged. Sheet-white, with big needles jammed into their arms and necks, and tubes running from those needles into Phoebe’s big metal salad bowls. And in the salad bowls, deep pools of darkening red. And paintbrushes.
Michael had spent a lot of time with her white walls.
WHORE and SLUT and BITCH and CUNT repeated endlessly, and in between, YOU’LL DIE, YOU’LL DIE, YOU’LL DIE, YOU’LL DIE.
Blood on the carpet, blood on the stairs, blood on the table, blood on the furniture. He’d taken his time. How had he given himself so much time? How had he caught the FBI agents off guard? Why didn’t Toeller across the green know something was wrong?
Phoebe heard the radio crackle upstairs again. Heard Michael’s voice in two places — in her ear and upstairs. “She’s in. She’s fine. Reed is talking to her now about this stunt. Over.”
The sound of the radio died away. Phoebe stood there, considering what she was hearing. Michael had killed the agents. Somehow. And then he had to have set up some sort of relay so that he could check in with the FBI, pretending to be those agents. Toeller had no suspicion yet that his people were dead. Wouldn’t until shift change, which was still hours away.
He couldn’t actually be upstairs. Because he had Alan, and he couldn’t have Alan and be upstairs. By the time anyone knew to look for Alan — or her — they would be dead.
In her ear, Michael said, “Go into your bedroom now.”
Knees shaking, Phoebe walked in, and in her bedroom found pictures of her nailed to the wall. Above the photos, Michael had painted the words, ONCE UPON A TIME, PHOEBE SCHAEFFER WAS A BAD GIRL. He’d taken pictures of her when she was sleeping. No. Not sleeping, she realized, creeping closer, looking at them.
He’d taken them after he’d drugged her. He had posed her. Obscenely. Over and over and over, while he took pictures of her. She could see Michael’s hands on her, doing things to her. Sometimes he had knives with which he was pantomiming cutting her and maiming her. In most of the pictures, he had worse things than knives. He’d created a photo story — a story of torture and bondage and rape and more torture and eventual murder — and pinned the story on her wall.
Beneath the pictures, he’d painted, AND THEN ALL HER DREAMS CAME TRUE. THE END.
In some of the pictures she could see her eyes half opened, could see that she was trying to make sense of what was happening. In some of the pictures she was in bed, in others she was on the couch. She realized the photos of her on the couch in her bathrobe had been the “nightmare” she’d remembered in enough detail to recount to Alan when he’d heard her screaming and run to her rescue.
Phoebe leaned on the foot of her bed, too sick to stand under her own strength. All the nightmares had been real. Everything had been real.
But they had been just the beginning.
And then all of her dreams came true. The END.
“You like my story?” he asked.
And she dropped the phone and vomited all over her bed.
From the floor, she could hear Michael saying, “Pick up the phone, Phoebe.”
Her stomach heaved, she retched, the smell of blood and urine and shit were everywhere, two dead men and parts of another waited back in the main room, stenches and more stenches filled the air, and Death had pinned her future to the wall in Polaroids. She wanted to fall apart. To die right there, quickly — get it over with before the future that Michael had documented for her with such sadistic patience came true.
But, “Pick up the phone right now,” Michael said again, and then Alan screamed.
Phoebe, still retching, collapsed to the floor and clutched the phone. “Here,” she said.
“You like my story?”
“No.”
“Wrong answer,” he said, and this time Alan screamed for a long time — a hellish, high-pitched wordless scream. “I haven’t started cutting anything off of him yet, but don’t give me any more wrong answers. You understand.”
“Yes.”
“You like my story?”
“Yes,” Phoebe said through clenched jaws, while her stomach heaved, empty.
“Good. You remember I warned you — more than once — that if you ever left me, you would come back to me.”
“Yes.”
“You’re going to come back to me now, Phoebe. All by yourself, and all alone. Because you love me, Phoebe. Don’t you?”
All she could think of was Alan, in Michael’s hands. Michael, who had knives, and tools far worse than knives. Alan, from whom Michael had not cut off anything. Yet.
“Yes,” Phoebe said, with tears starting from her eyes.
”That was a little slow, darling. I’m not going to make him pay for your slowness this time. But you want to answer quickly and enthusiastically next time. And every time thereafter. Don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said instantly.
“Good girl.” Michael took a deep breath. “The FBI doesn’t know their boys in these are dead yet. You are not going to give any signs. Open your closet door.”
Phoebe crawled to her feet, grabbed her backpack, and walked to the closet, dreading having to find whatever Michael had left in there. The rest of Ben Margolies? Or someone else? Or something else?
But the closet was... the closet. She stood looking into it. She didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.
“I’m... I’m looking,” she said.
“Yeah. You’ve all been looking.” Michael laughed.
The image of the Three of Discs flashed through her mind. The hole in their defenses was in there? The thing they had all been overlooking — it was in the closet?
But the closet was on the back wall of the townhouse. It was nowhere near the townhouse Michael had rented. The side wall the closet shared was with Alan’s townhouse. Its back wall was the shared wall with the townhouse that mirrored hers on the opposite side of the building. She couldn’t see any advantage in bugging the closet. She couldn’t imagine what other use he might have made of it or how it could constitute a massive security breach.
Phoebe stood, frozen, trying to find anything that might be that giant hole the Three of Discs had warned her about.
“Come on, Phoebe. Figure it out. Because I don’t have a lot of patience, but I do have your fuck-buddy here, and if you take too long, I have a lot of interesting ways that I can relieve my boredom.”
“You could tell me.”
“But then I couldn’t use your stupidity as an excuse to hurt him,” Michael said in a tone that sounded completely reasonable. Phoebe hated that tone.
She started shoving things around, looking, but not knowing what she was looking for. Something that could be hidden in a closet. But everything in the closet was hers. The few boxes. The clothes hanging up. The clothes folded on the left shelf. There wasn’t anything else in there — just the closet itself, which was a rectangular walk-in box with a bare lightbulb overhead, the two side shelves, the bare wall to the back—
Stop.
No.
Michael wouldn’t have rented two townhouses.
The FBI had only found out about one. They were watching only the one beside hers. If Michael had access to the townhouse behind hers as well, she didn’t think they were set up to monitor anything he did. The back half of her building had its own parking lot. Its own sidewalks and dumpster. Its own cozy green. The FBI was set up to watch her green. Her side of the building.
They were looking in the wrong place.
She moved towards the back wall, trembling.
“Took a lot of work to get that passage right,” Michael said, as she reached out and pushed on the wall. It swung inward at her touch. “Helped a lot that you don’t use the closet much. Most of my first month I spent building the passageway when you were out. You don’t go out nearly often enough, by the way. I spent hours making it sound as solid as the rest of the structure, making sure that its bracing wouldn’t give way when I wasn’t using it. Doing finish work on the edges. Getting the paint right. Cleaning up traces of sawdust and concrete block dust on your floor. But I think most of that was unnecessary effort. Every single one of you looked at my door while you were in there, and not a single one of you thought to push on it. Well, I did have it barred and braced when I wasn’t using it, so that wouldn’t have done anything anyway. But it’s the thought that counts, don’t you think?”
The hole in their defensive wall had been a literal hole in her wall. Michael had given himself a door straight into her bedroom.
He had never needed to deal with her locks. Her bars. Her defenses. She’d been defending everything except the path he’d created for himself, and the only effect of everything she’d done had been to keep help from reaching her.
He hadn’t needed to worry about being observed when he went from parking lot to front door, because no one was watching his front door. They were all watching the false lookout post. The one they had probably only found when he was ready to have them find it.
Meanwhile, Michael had been able to go from her bedroom to her kitchen, unseen, while she read tarot cards a few feet away, her back to him, because she was facing her front door. Guarding that damned front door.
He had been able to drug her. Had been able to just walk in and watch her while she slept. Could have done anything to her at any time — but instead he’d just taken pictures. Because the most important part of this whole fantasy of his, she realized, was that she come back to him on her own. She had to be terrified, because that was what did it for him — her fear. But she had to be the one to go to him, because that was what he’d said she would do.
And Michael always had to be right.
And the hell of it was, she was going to do exactly what he wanted her to do. She was going to w
alk right into his hands, because Michael had Alan, and she could not abandon Alan to him.
Phoebe stared at that open hole and into the darkness beyond, terrified to take the next step. Michael was over there. Alan was over there.
“Come on through, Phoebe... and close the door behind you. We have a lot to accomplish yet.”
She shivered. Stepped through the doorway into his closet, which was empty. Dark.
She did not close the door all the way. She hoped he wouldn’t notice. If he did, he didn’t say anything.
“Keep going,” he told her.
She opened the door, stepped into a place no one had seen yet but her. The bedroom that mirrored hers. Into Death’s antechamber. Michael had turned the room into a gallery of drawings. Charcoal, pencil, marker. Drawings of her that covered every inch of every wall, every inch of the ceiling except for the place where the light fixture poked through. He’d drawn right on the walls in places, favoring red and black marker. And in places he’d pinned big sheets of paper to the walls.
Michael wasn’t much of an artist. And his artwork only had one theme: Phoebe’s pain, humiliation, submission. In the first glance, before she averted her eyes, she saw herself in ropes, in chains, with hooks through her skin, dismembered—
“You’re supposed to look, Phoebe. I did all this for you. Look at the drawings; tell me how much you like them.”
Michael was watching her. She couldn’t see him yet, but he saw her. And he had Alan. So Phoebe looked. Walked along the walls, stared up at the ceiling. Tried to turn her face toward all of the hideous pictures without actually seeing any of them. They were pictures of the inside of Michael’s mind, every single one of them. They terrified her.
So she remembered Alan, focused on Alan. Remembered what she had to say to keep Alan safe and in one piece. “I like them.”
“Good girl. So do I. You’ve looked long enough. Go into the bathroom.”
Phoebe was trying hard to keep her breathing slow enough that she didn’t pass out. She couldn’t pass out — that would leave Alan with no one to help him. Her heart raced, her hands shook so badly she needed two tries to turn the knob.
