What Lies Below

by Mark Lukens

  Dr. Stanton had urged her to come back here and face her past, confront the demons hiding in the dark. And now she had. She remembered everything, and now she wished that she couldn’t remember again.

  She wanted to leave, but she needed to go down to the basement first. She needed to see.

  Pam stood at the basement door moments later. She opened the door and stared down into the darkness. She flipped up the light switch and almost expected the light not to come on. But the light bulb in the ceiling at the bottom of the stairs turned on right away.

  For a moment she saw her Barbie dolls and the small toys on the steps, and other toys that didn’t seem to go together—their only purpose to trip someone up.

  Then she saw her mother crumpled up at the bottom of the steps.

  Her father had felt for a pulse, and he knew that she’d still been alive. He knew he had to hurry and get her inside the wall before she woke up.

  Then her mother’s body was gone in the blink of an eye—the basement steps were normal again, no body, no toys on the steps.

  Pam hurried down the steps and entered the cavernous basement, flipping on the overhead fluorescent lights as she went.

  She came to the armoire. She pushed the other pieces of furniture and stacks of boxes out of the way. It took her fifteen minutes to get everything out of the way, and she was beginning to sweat a little.

  After a deep breath, she pushed the armoire out of the way. It was heavy, but once she got it moving, she didn’t stop. She pushed at it like a football player pushing a tackling sled. She kept pushing until the piece of furniture was completely out of the way of the block wall.

  And then she saw it—the evidence she needed to see. A large section of the block wall was newer than the rest of the wall. It might look like a normal basement wall repair to anyone else, but Pam knew what lay behind the blocks.

  Pam sank down to her knees and held on to the wall. She sobbed so deep and hard, she thought she might have pulled a muscle.

  “I’m so sorry, Mom …” she whispered through her sobs, fighting to catch her breath.

  After five more minutes of crying, Pam stood up and wiped her tears away.

  “I’ll make this right,” Pam vowed. “Legend my ass. He’ll be remembered for the monster he really is.”

  But what about you? her mind whispered. You’ll be a monster, too. People will know that you were hypnotized and that you helped him. They won’t believe you. The media might spin it any way they want to: Rich girl helps father kill her own mother.

  The VHS tape. She would get it and destroy it. There would be no record of his experiments, of her being hypnotized. With no proof, it would just be her father’s word against hers. She would just play dumb and say that he confessed on his deathbed that he had killed his wife and buried her body in the basement.

  Why would she need to tell any more than that? Just keep it simple. He killed her. Who knew why? Who cared? He did it—that’s all that mattered.

  And once the news was out, his reputation would be ruined. He wouldn’t be remembered as a groundbreaking psychiatrist—he would be remembered as a killer, as a monster.

  She hoped his last few weeks would be filled with torment. His legacy was always his greatest pride. And now his legacy would be shit.

  Pam left the block wall exposed and rushed back up to the first floor. She needed to get the VHS tape, and then get her daughter. Then she would call the police.

  She didn’t see anyone else along the way to the study. She entered the room and then closed and locked the door. She was about to rush across the room to the bookshelves, but then she froze.

  The books on the fourth shelf had been thrown down to the floor in a pile. The wall safe door was wide open.

  Pam sprinted to the safe. She reached inside. The documents were still there, the wooden boxes.

  But the VHS tape was gone.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Could she have possibly forgotten to close the safe and lock it back up? Could she have forgotten to stack the books back on the shelf?

  She had reason to doubt her memories these days.

  No, that wasn’t possible. She remembered putting the tape back inside the wall safe. She remembered locking it. She remembered putting the books back and putting the small gold key back inside the blue book.

  Who had the tape?

  Suddenly, Pam didn’t care. She had an overwhelming urge to grab her daughter and get out of this madhouse right now.

  She felt a lump of fear in her stomach, like she had missed some very important detail or clue along the way, and now she and her daughter were in grave danger.

  But what was it?

  Pam left the study just the way she’d found it. She ran from the room and searched the rest of the house for her daughter.

  “Sarah! Where are you, honey?!”

  No answer.

  Pam entered the kitchen and found it a mess. There were breakfast preparations on the countertops and dirty dishes in the sink. An overturned bowl sat in the middle of the kitchen floor.

  Rita would never leave the kitchen like this.

  Pam’s heart skipped a beat. Rita was nowhere in the kitchen. And neither was Sarah.

  She unlocked the kitchen French doors that led out to the back patio and pool area. She ran outside, trying to look everywhere at once, trying to find Sarah.

  “Sarah!”

  No answer. No Sarah.

  She ran to the pool. No one there. No one down by the pond or near the woods.

  Something was very wrong. She couldn’t help feeling that something had happened to Rita. And to Sarah.

  She ran back inside and slammed the French doors shut so hard they nearly shattered. She locked the lock on the door handles.

  Then she searched the kitchen again, checking the pantry this time. She found Rita in the pantry crumpled up on the floor. There was a small pool of blood by her head, and her hair was damp with it.

  Oh God, Rita!

  Pam dropped down to her hands and knees and grabbed Rita’s arm, searching for a pulse in her wrist. And she felt one. It was weak, but it was there.

  She jumped up and ran for the phone in the kitchen. She needed to dial 911, get the paramedics and the police here.

  No dial tone—the phone was dead.

  She would have to use her cell phone, but right now she was more concerned about her daughter.

  Sarah … she was in trouble, Pam was sure of it.

  Pam ran through the house calling Sarah’s name, but she got no answer in return. She prayed to God along the way that nothing had happened to Sarah, that she hadn’t done something to her when her father put her under hypnosis earlier to bring her memories to the surface of her mind.

  What else did he tell you to do while you were hypnotized? You’ve been having problems remembering lately; you’ve been having a tough time telling reality from fantasy.

  Pam tried not to listen to the voice. She bounded up the steps to the second floor and ran straight for Sarah’s room.

  Sarah wasn’t in her room.

  She could feel panic setting in as she ran down to the shorter hall, racing to the end of it to the double doors that led into her father’s bedroom. She exploded in through the doors.

  Her father was gone.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Pam walked towards her father’s bed on unsteady legs. It felt like this was a dream, it felt like this couldn’t be real.

  Her father was out of his bed.

  She ran to the other side of his bed to make sure he hadn’t fallen off of his bed and onto the floor. She even looked underneath the bed.

  But he wasn’t there. He was gone. The tubes that had been in his arms were laying on the bedsheets and pillows like they had been ripped out of his arms. There were a few little splatters of blood on the bedsheets.

  Could he have done this to himself?

  Could her father have been faking his sickness the whole time? Could he have been concocting this scheme for y
ears just to hurt her?

  Or Sarah.

  What secret game had her father and Sarah been playing these last few years? A big setup to hurt her? To manipulate everything? To make it look like she had helped kill her own mother when she was eight years old?

  Pam stood very still in her father’s bedroom and looked at the door. She had to think. Where were they? Where was everybody?

  She had already checked the whole house.

  And then she froze when she heard a thumping sound coming from the floor below her. Somebody was pounding on something down there.

  And that’s when Pam realized that she had checked everywhere in the house for Sarah except the basement.

  Pam bolted out of the bedroom and ran downstairs. She ran to the door that opened up to the basement steps, a door that she had been standing in front of less than an hour ago.

  It all led back here.

  It always had.

  She pushed the door open and the light was already on at the bottom of the steps.

  Had she left it on?

  She couldn’t remember. She was pretty sure she had turned it off and closed the door to the basement when she went to the study earlier to look for the VHS tape.

  “Sarah,” Pam called down the steps.

  “Mom?” Sarah called back from somewhere deep in the basement.

  For a second, relief nearly dropped Pam to her knees. Her daughter was alive. Maybe she was down there with Carl, but at least she was still alive.

  Pam rushed down the steps, nearly stumbling, but she caught herself. She got to the bottom and she heard a noise like banging on concrete blocks.

  She hurried through the dark basement, not bothering to turn on the lights along the way. A light shined in the far-off distance of the basement—where the armoire was. She navigated the twists and turns through the stacks of furniture, boxes, crates, bags, and filing cabinets that had accumulated over the decades down here.

  And then she saw her father’s frail body on the floor in front of the now re-opened block wall. He lay among the dust and bits of smashed blocks.

  And then she saw Sarah.

  And then she saw Maria holding a gun to Sarah’s head.

  Maria smiled at Pam, but it was a smile like her father’s smile—twisted, mean, and superior.

  THIRTY-THREE

  “Mom,” Sarah whimpered.

  “It’s okay,” Pam told her daughter, and then she realized how stupid the words sounded. It was an automatic response from a mother. But this wasn’t Sarah taking a spill from her bicycle … someone had a gun pointed at her head.

  Pam shifted her eyes to Maria, and she put her hands out in a placating gesture, already trying to calm Maria down.

  “Maria, what are you doing?”

  Maria stared at Pam with that smug smile still plastered on her face. She pulled the VHS tape out of the waistband of her pants and held it in her hand like a preacher holding up a bible. “Everyone is going to know Carl Westbrook’s secrets. Everyone is going to know what you and he did to your mother. Everyone is going to know about his hypnosis and mind control experiments. And everyone is going to know that he’s my father.”

  Pam shook her head in disbelief. “Your father?”

  “My mother was Rosa.” Maria spat the words out like she was upset that Pam wasn’t catching the connection quickly enough.

  Rosa, Pam thought. The housekeeper who had been here before Rita. The one her dad fired after her mom

  (was murdered)

  left.

  “He got my mother pregnant,” Maria said. “And then he threw her out on her ass.”

  Everything suddenly came together for Pam. That was it! Mom found Dad cheating on her with Rosa, and then he killed her before she could leave him.

  “I never knew this piece of shit was my father,” Maria said and glanced down at the skeletal body of Carl, and for a split second she seemed like she wanted to kick him in the ribs. Then she looked back at Pam. “I never knew until two years ago when my mother told me everything on her deathbed. I spent the last two years studying everything about my father’s life. I became a nurse so I could get this job, so I could be close to him. So I could put the pieces in place to ruin him. And you.”

  “Please, Maria. Just calm down. We can talk. Just put the gun down.”

  Maria didn’t put the gun down—she held the gun in her right hand pointed at the back of Sarah’s head, and the VHS tape in her other hand, now down by her side.

  “Just … just please point the gun away from my daughter’s head.”

  Maria didn’t move the gun away; she kept the gun pointed right at the back of Sarah’s head.

  Sarah stood very still, her big blue eyes focused on Pam the whole time. She looked like she was struggling not to cry.

  My brave girl, Pam thought, and she had to hold back tears of her own.

  “You got to grow up in this big house,” Maria told Pam. “On this big property. You never had to worry about money. You never had to move out of an apartment in the middle of the night because you couldn’t pay the rent. You never had to watch your mom die because she couldn’t afford health insurance.”

  No, I just had to watch my father bury my mother inside a block wall while she was still alive.

  “I understand why you’re upset—” Pam began in a calm voice that sounded eerily like her father’s voice when he began counting backwards from ten.

  “You don’t know anything!” Maria barked, cutting off Pam’s words. She jabbed the gun at Sarah’s head as she yelled. “You had my life! I should’ve had this life, and it was stolen from me. Stolen from me and I never even had the chance to fight for it!”

  Pam just nodded. She didn’t know what to say.

  “Well, now I’m going to fight for it. I’m going to have everything I should’ve had all those years ago.”

  Maria smiled at Pam, and now Pam could see her father’s smile on her face. How could she have not noticed it before?

  “Now I make your father pay. I make you pay. And I make your daughter pay.”

  Pam took a step forward as panic squeezed her. She still had her hands up in a surrendering gesture. “No, please! I’ll give you anything you want. You want this house? It’s yours. I don’t want it. Money? I don’t need any. I’ll give you anything you want, just please don’t hurt my daughter.”

  “Mommy,” Sarah whispered, and now she began to cry.

  “Please,” Pam begged. “I’ll do anything you want.”

  Maria’s eyes were locked on to Pam, and she didn’t see Carl moving on the floor. He had curled up onto his side, but he sprang at Maria like a rattlesnake, striking her and grabbing onto her, pulling her down onto the floor with him. She was so shocked by his attack, the gun and the VHS tape slipped from her hands and fell down onto the floor, both of them sliding away into the shadows.

  “Run!!” Carl screamed at Sarah.

  Sarah didn’t hesitate, she ran to Pam who waited with open arms.

  Pam hugged Sarah and then looked over her daughter’s head at the horror before her.

  Carl cackled with insane laughter as he dragged Maria with him into the hole in the wall. She struggled and screamed and fought, but he was too strong for her, it was like he had been saving up every last ounce of his strength for this moment.

  “You wanna spend some time with your daddy?” Carl growled at Maria as he pulled her into the hole with him. He had her in a choke-hold, and Maria’s eyes were as big as dinner plates as she was swallowed up by the darkness inside the hole.

  Pam let Sarah go and she darted over to the gun and picked it up. Then she grabbed the VHS tape from the floor.

  She hurried back to Sarah and handed her the tape. “Run upstairs to my bedroom and put this tape in my purse. Get my cell phone out of there and call 911. Get the police and an ambulance here. Okay?”

  “But what about you?” Sarah cried.

  “I’ll be okay. Just go!”

  Sarah didn’t argue anymore
, she was off and running with the tape in her hand.

  Pam turned back to the block wall and aimed the gun at the hole. She caught glimpses of her father and Maria struggling with each other like two wrestlers inside the hole. Somehow they had wound up tangled with the dirty white sheet that Carl had buried her mother in. She heard the crunch of brittle bones snapping underneath their bodies as they writhed together in the darkness. Then she heard Carl laughing like a lunatic, and she heard him whispering things to Maria as he held her in a chokehold—things that Pam couldn’t hear, things that Pam didn’t want to hear. Who knew what her father was telling Maria right now; who knew what seeds he was planting in her mind—seeds from which horrible things would grow, horrible visions, horrible lifelong nightmares.

  Pam could still hear Carl whispering, but she couldn’t hear Maria anymore—it was like she had gone catatonic as a defense. But maybe she was waiting for Carl to loosen his grip, or to stop struggling with her. Maybe she was going to bolt out of the hole as soon as she had her chance.

  But Pam wasn’t going to wait around down here to find out. She wasn’t quite sure if she could shoot Maria if she came crawling out of that hole, a woman who might be totally insane now.

  After bolting up the stairs, Pam slammed the door to the basement steps shut.

  Sarah came running up to her with the cell phone up to her ear. “I don’t know the address here, Mommy.”

  Pam took the phone from her daughter and gave the 911 operator the information that she needed.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Pam led Sarah to the front door of the house. They walked outside and closed the front door. They stood huddled together in the front entranceway.

  “I want you to stay out here and wait for the police,” Pam told her daughter.

  Sarah still had the cell phone in her hands, gripping it like a talisman of safety. Her eyes drifted down to the gun still gripped in Pam’s hand, and then her eyes were back up to her mother’s eyes. “What about you?”