by Mark Lukens
“No,” Jackson answered, chewing on his gum. “This is where it starts getting a little weird.”
3.
In the backyard, on the pool deck, Perry and Jackson stood over Kevin’s body which was sprawled face-down in front of the sliding glass door in a pool of blood. There were splashes of blood all over the patio stones. There were smears of blood on the sliding glass doors. Kevin’s hands were coated in blood.
“ID in his wallet says Kevin Getz,” Jackson said. “I’m guessing he was Jennifer McGrath’s boyfriend. He’s got a deep slash across his throat. Cut through his arteries, windpipe, vocal chords. Everything. Looks like he was beating on the sliding glass door.” Jackson nodded at the smears of blood all over the glass. “Maybe he was trying to get inside.”
Perry shook his head in disbelief. “So this nutcase drains the blood out of the girl and keeps it, but he slashes this guy’s throat and lets him bleed out all over the place.”
“There’s some other stuff around the side of the house.”
Perry followed Jackson past the pool. They walked through an open wooden gate and then they continued along a path between the house and some shrubs. Beyond the shrubs was a stand of woods between this house and the next one a quarter mile away.
They stopped where a set of construction lights had already been set up by police officers. The lights shined down on the ground where a collection of small kitchen utensils and butter knives, house and car keys, phones, and other items from the house were piled up by the door that led into the kitchen. The kitchen door was ajar, just like it had been found by the police officers.
“What the hell?” Perry said and looked at Jackson.
“It’s like the killer was in the house earlier and set things up. He dismantled the phones and removed any house and car keys.”
“And the knives,” Perry nodded down at a group of butter knives, forks, and even a potato peeler. “Like he was removing anything that could be used as a weapon.”
“Some of the knives are missing,” Jackson said. “All of the big kitchen knives from a wood block are gone. They’re not out here with the other kitchen stuff and we haven’t found them anywhere inside the house.”
“He might have used one of them on the boy.”
“Yeah,” Jackson agreed. “But why would he take all of the big knives with him and leave all of this other stuff behind?”
Perry shrugged. “You get any prints off this stuff?”
Jackson shook his head. “They’re still working on it, but nothing so far. He probably wore gloves.”
“Who called this in?”
“Anonymous tip from a throwaway cell phone.”
Perry glanced at the woods for a second, and for that moment he felt like he could feel the killer watching them from the darkness. He thought about sending some cops into the woods.
A police officer rushed around the front corner of the house and ran up to Perry and Jackson. “The girl’s parents just pulled up.”
Perry and Jackson rushed out to the front yard. Perry saw Mr. and Mrs. McGrath bolt from their car, running towards their house. Police officers blocked their way, trying to hold them back. Mr. and Mrs. McGrath had left their car running, the headlights on, the car doors wide open.
“Get the hell out of my way!” the father yelled. “Where’s my daughter? I want to see Jen!”
“Oh God, please tell me she’s okay,” the mother begged. “Please tell me she’s still alive.”
Perry joined the two officers in holding Mr. McGrath back and Jackson approached the mother. Jackson was a very large man, and usually an imposing one, but he could also show deep emotions with just a look. Mrs. McGrath stared into his dark eyes and more tears spilled from hers, her chin quivered as she tried to speak, but there were no words. She could only shake her head no. Jackson laid a hand on her shoulder and whispered into her ear. She collapsed against Jackson and sank to her knees as she retched out silent sobs.
Jen’s father rushed over to his wife and his body folded in on itself as he collapsed beside his wife, both of them held each other and cried.
4.
Across the street, deep in the palmetto brush and pine trees, the Shadow Man watched the collection of police cars and emergency vehicles. He smiled at their confusion, at the way they scurried around like ants on pointless little missions. They could keep on scurrying but they would never find him. They would never catch him. He was too slick for them. He would always be one step ahead of them.
One step ahead of everybody.
He lifted up his duffel bag and threw it over his shoulder. It was a little heavier now that it had a container of the girl’s blood inside. He turned and walked away, deeper into the brush and darkness.
It was time to collect the next item for the ritual.
CHAPTER THREE
1.
Tara managed to get a few more hours of sleep, but it was a restless sleep filled with twisted dreams. She didn’t have any more nightmares of Jen’s murder, but she could feel an evil weight trying to smother her in the dreams.
It was him – the Shadow Man. He’s found me again. He’s come to kill me.
She finally gave up on sleep and got up at five-thirty in the morning. She untied the rope from around her ankle and went to her bathroom to take a quick shower.
Inside the bathroom, she locked the door and undressed. She had a clear shower curtain over the bathtub – she hated being behind the solid shower curtain, jumping at every noise, peeking out every few seconds, so she bought a clear one. She kept a baseball bat beside her toilet, leaning against the vanity, and there was a knife in one of the drawers.
She took a quick shower and then got dressed in her workout clothes: a pair of sweat pants, an oversized Tampa Bay Rays baseball shirt, and a pair of sneakers. She grabbed her gym bag with a change of clothes inside and tossed a few bottles of water in there.
2.
The gym Tara went to was more of a traditional boxing/martial arts gym, but there was an area for free weights and exercise machines. She worked out with the weights and exercise machines sometimes, but mainly she worked out on the punching bags. She warmed up a little and did a few stretches. Then she strapped on her gloves and the pads for the tops of her feet. She had taken three years of karate and reached blackbelt very quickly. And then she quit. But she still incorporated the kicks and punches she’d learned into her workout routine. Like the knives and baseball bats stashed throughout her apartment, self-defense lessons and the constant workouts made her feel like she would be ready if the Shadow Man ever found her again, if he finally came to finish the job and kill her.
She hit the punching bag and it helped a little in a therapeutic kind of way, but no matter how hard she worked out she couldn’t keep her mind from drifting back to her nightmare about Jen.
Tara had always had psychic feelings as far back as she could remember. She grew up in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. It was a nice neighborhood with Victorian homes lining the streets. Her father, Ben, had been in the insurance industry and he’d done pretty well with investments in his spare time. Tara’s mother, Cynthia (but her dad called her Cindy), volunteered at the animal shelter and took part-time work from time to time to keep herself busy.
Tara had lived with her parents until she was sixteen years old, until her parents were murdered.
Tara had been an only child. Her parents always told her she was a gift from God; they had tried to have children for years and finally Tara had come along. She was always treated special by them, as only children sometimes are, but they never spoiled her.
She’d had nightmares ever since she could remember. She would wake up screaming and her mother and father would rush into her bedroom. They would try to calm her down, but eventually they would have to leave the light on for her so she could sleep. Or sometimes her mother would curl up in bed with her and hold her until she fell back asleep.
The nightmares were usually the same. There would be someone lurkin
g in the darkness, and that shadowy person wanted to kill her; she was sure of that. And then she would run and she could hear the person chasing her, breathing hard, his footfalls pounding the ground. He would catch up to her, getting closer and closer. Sometimes she saw the person. She could tell he was male and muscular, but that was about all. He was always hidden in shadows; she could never remember any facial features, almost like he was a silhouette. And eventually she began to refer to him in her mind as the Shadow Man. Sometimes the Shadow Man had a knife in his hand, sometimes he had an ax. He never said anything to her; he never screamed at her or threatened her. He just chased her and chased her. And she knew that if he caught her he was going to kill her. He was going to hold her down and carve her up very slowly.
She would wake up hyperventilating and sweaty. She was afraid that if he killed her in her dream, she would die in her sleep.
When Tara was twelve years old she began to sleepwalk. That’s when her parents decided that maybe she needed some professional help. They took her to see a therapist, Dr. Kuehner, who diagnosed her with night terrors. The doctor was a nice woman, but she couldn’t help Tara. They tried talking about things, they tried hypnosis, even sleeping aids, but nothing took the nightmares away.
“Why do you think this Shadow Man is after you?” Dr. Kuehner asked Tara many times. Tara had told Dr. Kuehner everything she knew about the man that chased her in her dreams, the man who was trying to catch her and kill her, but she had no idea why he was after her; she just knew that he was real, and that he was out there somewhere looking for her. Dr. Kuehner explained that this person in her dreams was just a figment of her imagination, something her mind had made up to mask other feelings. But Tara told her she wasn’t trying to mask anything – other than the nightmares there was nothing wrong in her life.
When Tara turned thirteen her nightmares didn’t get any better, they got worse. And at the same time her “feelings” about people grew stronger. She’d always had these feelings where she just “knew” stuff about people. It wasn’t like she could read minds, more like she just knew things. Tara tried to explain these feelings to Dr. Kuehner. Tara told the doctor that she’d looked things up on the internet and that she’d seen psychics in movies and on TV. Her parents never allowed her to watch scary movies because of her night terrors, but when she spent the night at her friend Debbie’s house they would watch them, and from these movies and TV shows she realized what she was – she was telepathic, or a psychic, or she had second sight; whatever you wanted to call it. Dr. Kuehner tried to explain to Tara that she was just projecting feelings that she had created subconsciously onto her conscious mind about people she knew – or something like that. Tara didn’t understand the scientific lingo, she just knew that her psychic abilities were real, whether anyone wanted to believe her or not.
Eventually she learned not to tell anyone about it.
Life went on as normal as it could be for Tara over the next few years. But when she was almost sixteen years old everything changed. She woke up at night, three blocks away from her house in Mr. and Mrs. Taylor’s shrubs beside their garage. She was dressed only in the underwear that she’d worn to bed and she was screaming. It just happened that Suzy, the Taylor’s daughter, was one of the biggest loudmouths in the school and in record time everyone knew about her little “incident”. She could not only hear them snickering and making fun of her behind her back, she could feel them.
School became unbearable. Rumors began to spread about the scar she had on the side of her neck, rumors that she was crazy and had tried to kill herself. The scar, a thick jagged gash across the left side of her neck about four inches long, was something she’d always been embarrassed about. She tried to hide it with her long hair, but other people invariably saw it and asked about it. Her parents had told her that she’d slipped and fallen when she was a year old and had cut her neck open. They had rushed her to the hospital and had it stitched up, but because she was so young the scar had gotten bigger and jagged over the years as she grew. She never talked about her accident too much with her parents because they always seemed to feel so guilty about it.
As she walked down the school halls with students laughing behind her back about her latest sleepwalking episode, she felt like she could slink down to the floor and die right there.
She wished she could get away from this school and these asshole kids. She wished she could move far away.
And within a few months she got her wish.
The nightmares got worse and worse. Even while she was awake, she felt the constant dread that the Shadow Man was coming for her, like this killer was homing in on her psychic signal, like he was picking it up right out of the air and following it like a bloodhound trailing a scent. He was getting closer and closer. He was a psychic like she was; she knew that – they were the same in that respect.
One night she had a night terror and she ran from her house. She didn’t remember it, but she ran and ran. She woke up in a stranger’s yard with a whole family huddling around her. There was a cop there with a flashlight in her face, questioning her. She remembered that she was hysterical, screaming at the cop that the Shadow Man was coming to murder her and that she needed help.
And then a vision hit her – it almost seemed like it had been forced into her mind purposely. She knew her parents had been murdered. She’d seen flashes of the gruesome scene in her mind even though she didn’t want to. And the worst part was that there was nothing she could do to help them now, she couldn’t tell the cops to hurry because it didn’t matter now – her parents were already gone. She felt a crushing pressure on her chest, like she couldn’t breathe anymore, and she shut down.
A few minutes later the cops checked Tara’s house as she waited in the front seat of the squad car, numb with grief. They found her parents slaughtered. Whoever had killed them had entered the house and killed them quickly, hacked them up within minutes. The killer had searched through every room in the house; his bloody footprints had revealed that. He searched the rooms, but he hadn’t taken anything. It was like he was looking for something.
Or someone.
They never caught her parents’ killer. The police considered it a home invasion gone bad. But Tara knew better, she knew that the Shadow Man had picked their house specifically, and worse, she knew that he had been looking for her. It was a guilt that always stayed with her. Her rational mind told her that if she’d been at home, the Shadow Man would’ve killed her parents anyway. But it didn’t matter; she still couldn’t help feeling guilty about running away in the middle of the night.
Tara’s Aunt Katie, her mother’s sister, took Tara in. Tara moved to Philadelphia with her aunt. But they didn’t stay in Philadelphia very long; they moved around a lot. Even if they lived in the same town for a little while, they would move from house to house, never staying anywhere longer than six months.
Tara finished high school early, doing some of her studies online, and then she applied to an art school in Tampa, Florida. She was accepted. She had always been a good artist, but her teachers in school always commented on how “dark” some of her works were – they would rather she stick to ponies and rainbows.
Her parents had a life insurance policy in place, but it was held in a trust (along with the little bit of money that the sale of their “murder house” had made) until she was eighteen years old. Tara wasn’t a millionaire, but she was set for a while. But even though she had the money, she still wanted to get a college degree and do what she’d always wanted with her life – to be an artist.
When she moved to Tampa, she got a nice apartment. The night terrors had subsided some, but they never completely went away. She would have the occasional nightmare about the Shadow Man, but more often than that she would dream of a murder somewhere, she would see the person while they were dying – just like she’d seen Jen last night, like she was looking through the killer’s eyes. She had tried to help the police a few times, but she couldn’t give enough deta
ils about the killer, and she couldn’t see the future, she couldn’t see these things before they were going to happen.
At least not yet.
Tara was never able to live with anyone for very long. She had tried. But eventually a roommate would wake Tara up in the bathtub, or in a hall closet, or even out in the driveway, and she would have to explain to them about her night terrors.
And boyfriends found it a big turnoff when they woke up in the middle of the night to find Tara on top of them, punching them, clawing at them. And it didn’t help that her training in the martial arts allowed her to punch and kick with lethal force.
She had been with one guy, Rick, for almost a year. She had told him about her night terrors and he promised that he could learn to live with her condition. He told her that he would be there to protect her from the shadowy man that she feared in her nightmares. But when she broke his nose in the middle of the night, it was too much for him, the last straw. He was sorry, he told her, but he couldn’t go on like this. What if she grabbed a kitchen knife while in the middle of one of her night terrors? Tara agreed and she watched him pack his bags and leave. She cried for a few days after he was gone, but she could not blame him for leaving.
Tara was destined to be alone – she realized that.
She kept weapons around her house in case the Shadow Man finally found her again: knives in the kitchen, baseball bats in the closets, but never guns – she couldn’t trust herself with a gun. And she never had pets; she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she hurt a pet in her sleep.
Tara finished up her workout with a flurry of punches and kicks on the bag. She grabbed her towel and headed to the locker room.
3.
After Tara showered and changed her clothes, she walked outside to her dull brown Jeep Cherokee. She wore a pair of faded jeans, an oversized shirt, and white sneakers. She had to admit that she felt better after working out. Exercise always helped to clear her mind.
