by David Beers
"He killed her didn't he?"
Allison nodded. "She was trying to kill him. She might have succeeded, no one knows. No one has heard from him since."
They both sat in silence, looking at the computer screen and Rally's memorial.
"Thanks, Dr. Riley. If we don't see each other again, it's been a pleasure."
He extended his hand and she shook it.
Chapter Thirty Seven
Matthew watched the young girl step off the bus and walk up the driveway. Her brown hair had been brushed since she ran around the playground. Her hands held the straps of her book-bag and her eyes looked at the ground in front of her. She was a pretty little girl, and even though she looked at her feet, her shoulders didn't slump forward and her steps were light across the concrete. Matthew smiled and moved away from the window. He sat down in the living room, choosing a chair that gave him a view of the front door.
The little girl, Marley, opened the door and closed it behind her. She didn't call out to anyone because she knew Dad and her grandparents weren't home yet. She was alone, and Matthew understood what that meant to her. For just a few minutes she would have freedom. All day long she was around people in school, told to go here and there and listened because that was the type of girl Marley was. At home, her parents loved her probably, but she wasn't in control there either. Here, for just a little while—an hour or so—no one would be able to tell her what to do, where to go, or how to act. She could do anything she wanted and that was liberating no matter the age.
Matthew sat in the chair and listened as she made her way to the kitchen. He heard her open the refrigerator and pull something out of it. He leaned his head on the high back of the chair and closed his eyes, listening to her footsteps. Hilman had done this at one time. He had come in alone while his mother and Matthew were busy doing whatever it was that kept the lights on, and Hilman had been alone to make sandwiches or play his video games. Matthew would never have those days again, but he would have different ones, and this little girl was going to be a big part of that. Marley would help because her mother had decided that's what she wanted from Marley when she brought Rally into this. Now Rally and Hilman were dead and Marley was walking around in her kitchen with no clue what life could be like.
Just no clue.
He sighed, trying to keep his anger from overwhelming him. He didn't need to grab the girl yet. He didn't want to grab the girl yet. Time was on his side here, and he would use it.
Matthew stood from the chair and walked silently to the foyer and then up the stairs, his footfalls not causing a single creak.
* * *
Marley lay in bed with her eyes closed. She wanted to sleep but it was going to take a long time. She always loved her grandparents' house, always enjoyed when her parents allowed her to stay the night or visit. Her grandparents were like her parents, but always nice. They never scolded, never told her she couldn't do something. Their house was fun.
Except now.
Now her Dad slept on the couch and she slept in the guest bedroom and Mom didn't sleep here. Now their family was separated and they had moved to her grandparents’ house to create that separation.
Separation.
The word wouldn't leave her mind. No one had said divorce yet, but she knew what both words meant. Divorce meant the end. Separation meant near the end. That's where they were now, near the end.
"Mom has to decide, honey, whether she wants to be with us or whether she wants to be with her job," her father told her.
"Why can't she have both?"
"What does it feel like she's chosen to you?"
Marley looked down at that question because she didn't want to say the answer out loud. It would make her cry and she was sick of crying.
Separation. Her dad said Mom had to choose. What would it mean if Mom chose something other than them? Would it mean that Mom didn't love her? Would it mean something was wrong with Marley? She didn't want to ask her Dad these questions because it would only hurt him, maybe even make him angrier at Mom. He would tell her no, that none of this had anything to do with her, only her mother. Maybe that was partly right, but it had to be partly wrong too, because Marley was involved with this. Her Mom had to choose between Marley and her job, and that meant it was about her.
The thoughts went round and round in her head, unceasing. They caused her to stop on the playground at school and to daydream during class as well. She couldn't ever fully get away from them, from that word separation. Because her Dad and Mom were near the end, and she couldn't see past that. She couldn't see a life without all of them under the same roof.
Marley's eyes flashed open and the thoughts she believed would never leave her flew from her mind like grains of sand in a hurricane.
The screams coming from outside of her new room took up all the space in her head.
* * *
Marley jumped from her bed and fled her room, following the screams.
They led her to her grandparents' bedroom, where the door stood open and the light shone down from the ceiling.
Her grandmother stood next to the bed, her hands on her cheeks and her mouth twisted open with shrieks pouring from it. Her grandfather was still in the bed, seemingly not hearing his wife's terror.
His eyes were open though, so he wasn't asleep.
His chest was bleeding too, so he had to have been awake.
Grandpa, wake up, your chest is bleeding. The thought came to her as naturally as a leaf falling during autumn. No rush, no fear, simply a changing of the seasons.
Something shoved Marley to the side, nearly slamming her into the dresser. Marley looked away from her Grandpa to see her Dad at the door now, his mouth unhinged and all the force he rushed in with having halted. She would have stared at him as he stared at the bed for all of eternity, unable to pull herself away from the shock on his face. Her father, always the one with answers, always the one she went to with her problems, was completely frozen.
She would have stared forever, except for the ghost that stepped from the corner.
So white, so fast, but why was he wearing clothes? Ghosts didn't need to wear clothes because they weren't human any longer.
It moved to her father—who still stared at his own Dad, holes leaking blood all over the white sheets—and began punching. The ghost grabbed her father's neck with one hand, and with the other, pummeled his face. Five hits in, her father dropped to his knees, but the ghost didn't let go. Instead, he bent down and kept his fist slamming down like a piston in a tractor-trailer. Up and down, up and down, Dad's face turning to a bloody mush. She couldn't see his nose anymore, not even with the white light above showing everything with a horrible clarity. The ghost kept going, holding her father up by the hair now, and slamming his right fist into his face, which no longer whipped back into place, but hung limply.
Finally, when Marley could make out little to nothing on her dad’s face, the ghost stopped, letting him drop to the floor. It didn't look over at her, but back to the woman still screaming at the bed. Her face almost as pale as the thing that had just dropped Marley's father to the ground. The creature walked over with the same lightness of step and in a movement that Marley could barely keep up with, brought a knife to her Grandma's throat.
It didn't pull the knife out, and didn't start punching her, but stood there watching as Grandma's hands moved from her cheeks to her neck. The old woman stopped screaming, and her eyes no longer held knowing terror, but a lost bewilderment, like she had suddenly been splashed with ice cold water. She stood for a few seconds, a single line of blood dripping down from the knife wound, and then fell forward. She landed on the bed, her feet hanging off and her head on her husband's stomach.
The ghost turned to Marley, its eyes the only thing with any color on its whole body, a pale blue.
"Marley, are you ready to go?" The ghost asked.
* * *
Allison smelled the salt first, somehow making its way deep inside the dark pool she lay in
, a searchlight coming way, way down to drag her up. Her eyes fluttered and she took in the world using brief sips of light before finally opening them fully and taking one large gulp. A hand was under her nose, holding something in a paper sack which contained the weird, salt smell that woke her. She followed the hand, her eyes moving up the arm until she saw what was at the end. The unsmiling face. The face that had been on the cover of Time Magazine twice, once for his work and again for his crimes—looking so much different then. So much more human than the thing standing before her.
Allison tried to move her arms. They trembled in weakness and didn't budge any which way. She looked away from the man's face to see why. Tape, rolls and rolls of tape apparently, wrapped her to the wooden chair that normally sat on the porch. All of her. Her torso, her legs, her arms, her hands, everything was silver.
Closing her eyes, she breathed slowly. She would go under if she didn't. She would begin to hyperventilate and then the blackness would flood across her again.
"Allison..." Brand said. "Look at me. I need you to focus. There are people here to see you. You've already paid for this so I want to make sure you get it."
She heard his voice, not for the first time, but it was right next to her now. The voice of The Devil. The voice of the only enemy that mattered.
"What do you want?" She asked, eyes still closed.
"If you would look around, you would see."
Allison opened her eyes, looking straight ahead at her husband and daughter. Both were taped like her, except tape covered their mouths as well, wrapped around the back of their head. Also, they weren't taped to wooden chairs like her, they were strapped to wheelchairs. Allison searched Marley's face and every part of her body she could see; Marley looked unharmed. Her hair was disheveled and her eyes bright red and puffy, but that was it. Next she went to Jerry, whose face resembled almost nothing of the man that she kissed the past fifteen years. His nose was twisted to the side, both of his eyes only large purple welts that he couldn't see from. His lips were huge, split pieces of meat, and thank God she couldn't see inside to look at the holes where his teeth should be. His head slumped down against his chest, unmoving.
"I had to tune up your husband some. Couldn't let him have any opportunity to hurt me, ya know? His parents are dead, your in-laws, but I suppose you purchased that too. I didn't need to touch Marley, if that matters."
Allison tried to swallow, her dry mouth unable to gather enough saliva to make it work.
"You know why I'm here?" Brand asked.
She didn't look up at him. Didn't take her eyes from her family.
"I need you to answer me, dear. Do you know?"
"Because you're a fucking psycho," Allison said.
"No. Well, maybe, but that would be an underlying issue, not the exact reason I'm here. I had never thought of touching you or your family, not even in the peripheral until about a week or so ago. Do you remember what happened a week ago, Allison?"
She saw, from the corner of her eye, him walk away from her before entering her full field of vision as he moved behind Marley's wheelchair. He put his hands on the handles and leaned over her, so that his face was right next to her daughter's.
"Get away from her," Allison said.
"What happened a week ago?"
"You killed your ex-wife."
"Why did I do that?"
"Because she stabbed you in the stomach, Matthew." She met his eyes, and they were bluer than any picture could ever capture. Blue like untouched oceans. Blue like skies that angels floated in.
Don't fall into those.
"Yup, she sure did stab me. Want to see?" He stood up and lifted his shirt, revealing red skin that was stitched together. "She almost killed me too," he said, dropping his black t-shirt back down into place. "Why would she do that, Allison? Why would she hurt me after all these years?"
"Because you're a fucking psycho."
Matthew moved from behind Marley's chair to Jerry's. He pulled her husband by his hair, lifting his head up. Jerry gave no sign he was alive beside the slow up and down movement of his chest.
Marley tried to scream through her tape, but it was a muffled, futile attempt. Brand didn't even look over.
"Let him be," Allison said, trying to keep her voice from rising.
"Rally knew I was a fucking psycho for a long time, Allison. That was why she left me. She didn't kill me when she left me though, did she? She just left and found someone who wasn't so much of a fucking psycho. However, this time she stuck me with a knife, and I doubt you know this part, she shoved it deeper when I gasped for help. Why did she do that, Allison?"
"You're supposed to be smart. We don't tell people we're protecting to kill the people we want to catch."
"You're not supposed to, but law enforcement also isn't supposed to shoot down children in the street, and we both know that's happened before." He let go of Jerry's head and it flopped back to his chest.
"I wired her up and I planned on having her lead us to you. That's what we did, and that's what she agreed to. That knife? Those stitches across your stomach? That was all her work."
Matthew tilted his head to the side and stared, his blue eyes searching through her in a way that she couldn't understand. They both looked through her, and at the same time, weren't there at all, gone somewhere into his own head.
"She thought you were crazy. She thought you were too fucking crazy to continue living. Don't you see that?" She was pushing and she knew it. She should have been begging, asking him to let her and her family go, but for what purpose? No one Matthew Brand came across got away. No one he touched lived again.
"She didn't want you to live anymore, Matthew. Not me. I wouldn't have killed you. I would have brought you in and set you before a judge. Your wife was the one that wanted you dead."
His head was still cocked as if he wasn't fully listening to her. In her mind, Allison saw the room he had built for Rally, saw the jewelry and the streaming videos of their love, and she imagined it crumbling. Falling apart inside his head as he looked at Allison with that tilted glance, unable to do anything to stop the room from crashing down. Was the granite statue being hit by pieces of the moon as it fell from the roof? Is that what he was witnessing?
"Tell me this occurred to you before just now, that maybe she hated you? That maybe she wanted everything you'd done to end, even if it meant you died? You couldn't have thought I told her to stab you, right? You can't be that dumb."
The pale man straightened his head up and switched spots again, going back to her daughter. He grabbed Marley by the hair, pulling up so that her neck stretched.
"NO!" Allison shouted, hearing the muffled screams of her daughter and looking at her elongated neck. Brand brought his other hand around to the front, his long fingers looking vampiric as he gripped Marley's neck. "Don't you fucking touch her. Don't you fucking touch her!" Allison said, trying to keep calm but her rage still spewing from her mouth like lava from a volcano, the surrounding earth no longer strong enough to hold it back.
"Why am I here, Allison?" Brand's voice so low that Marley's cries almost drowned it out.
"To take her. To kill him. To kill me. I don't know, just please don't touch her."
"No, Allison. That's not why I'm here. Even if what you said is true, even if Rally hated me at the end, who put her in that position?"
For the first time since she'd been woken Allison remained quiet. This was as personal to him as his son's death. He'd traveled the country with a wound to be here, to have this conversation—to make her say that she understood why he was taking her child and murdering her husband. What had Rally wanted from him? What had made her try to kill him? He wouldn't stop, not until someone put a knife in his gut and twisted it around until there was no chance his organs could heal. That's why she had done it, and how long had she tried to change his mind? How many times had she asked him over the phone, while Allison listened, to stop what he was doing?
"I did, Matthew. I put her th
ere, but I didn't make her grab a knife and hang out while you burnt the place down. She knew what you were doing, what you're doing now, was wrong. Have you ever thought you might not be able to bring your son back? That it might all just be theoretical? Even the government hasn't been able to replicate what you were doing. What if all this is for nothing?"
He smiled, his hand still on Marley's neck, and her head still stretch upwards by her hair.
"Allison, I killed the only woman I've ever loved last week. Do you really think your reasoning here is going to stop me from what I came to do? I'm here because you put my wife in a position where I was forced to kill her, indirectly or directly, it doesn't matter. She's dead. Everything I've had has been taken from me. So this is your turn. Your turn to have everything taken. We'll be leaving, me, your daughter and your husband, and you'll never see them again. It's important that you understand that, Allison. You can search the entire world, turning over every rock, but you'll never find them. These faces right here, this will be the last time you're ever in contact, so make whatever you have to say matter. I'll give you what no one ever gave me. Go ahead, talk to them."
The tears that she had tried to keep still sprang on her face. Hot liquid that dropped to her cheeks.
"Baby, I love you," she said, looking directly into her daughter's wide, terrified, brown eyes. "I love you and this is going to be okay."
"Don't lie to her, Allison. Nothing is going to be okay for anyone in this room. Say what you want, but don't lie to her."
Allison tried to kick her foot, out of anger as much as trying to get loose, but it barely moved against the tape.
"Marley, look at me. Mommy loves you and I need you to be strong right now. Okay? I need you to trust me. I love you, honey, and don't worry, nothing's going to happen."
Brand released the girl's hair, looked down at the floor and shook his head. "Things are going to happen, Marley. Your mother is lying to you. The only comfort I might be able to give is that your father will be right next to you the entire time." He looked up. "Allison, take care now. We'll be going."
