by Tim McGregor
He looked at her. “You sure you want to do this?”
“Yes.”
“Give us your phone.”
Billie handed it over and watched him dial. “You’re not calling him, are you?”
“Shh,” he hissed, then he spoke into the phone. “Jameson? Guess who?”
There was a pause, Gantry rolling his eyes at whatever was being said. “Shut it. You still got that ugly Rover of yours, yeah? Get in it and get over here. I’m seven houses down from you.”
Another pause. Billie could hear the man on the other end squawking down the line. Gantry cut him off. “That’s right, the Napier house. Now get the motor and be quick about it.”
She took the phone back and looked at the house. “What now? Do you think we can sneak in the back?”
“The back? What’s wrong with the front door?”
“What are we going to do? Just walk in?”
“Course not.” He looked at her, the smile on his face as reassuring as an eel. “We’re gonna ring the bell.”
~
Aaron Napier laid out the spreadsheets across the length of the long table in the dining hall. Folders were stacked at one end and two laptops glowed before him. His assistant, Leah Khan, poured over another batch of paper at the far end.
“It has to be here,” he said. “In all this mess.”
Leah removed her glasses and massaged her eyes. “We’ve been through everything.”
“Then look again!” He flung the pen at her.
Leah Khan ducked and the pen hit the wall behind her and clattered to the ground where it joined three others of its kind on the parquet floor. She was paid extremely well but still wondered if it was worth it. “Why don’t you take a break, Aaron. Go stretch your legs or something.”
“Useless,” he fumed. “Fucking useless.”
The intercom buzzed.
“What now?” Napier tapped the keyboard of the nearest laptop. The security camera view popped on the screen, showing the front gate.
“I don’t believe this,” he cursed.
Leah came around the table to see what was on the screen. Two people stood at the front gate. A man and a young woman, both looking up at the camera.
“Isn’t that the woman who assaulted you?”
Napier hit the keypad. “Miss Culpepper. I believe you’re breaking probation, aren’t you?”
“Open the gate, Napier,” said the man into the camera. “We need to talk.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“I’m the bill collector, mate. Time to settle the account.”
Napier snarled. “I’m calling the police.”
The woman who had broken his nose tilted up to address the camera. “Napier, you need to let us in. We all know what your father did to those women. We all know you covered it up. It’s time to end it.”
“Your father?” Leah looked at her employer. “What is she talking about?”
“She’s crazy.” He tapped the com button. “The police are on their way. You two stay put. I want to watch this.”
The man next to Culpepper hit the button. “You sure you wanna play it this way? Come clean now and you might avert the wall of shit that’s about to come down on you.”
“Go fuck yourself!”
The man at the gate looked up into the camera and beamed a wide smile, like he couldn’t be more pleased. Then the image scrambled with static.
“What the hell is it now?” Napier stabbed the com button but the camera remained scrambled. He snapped at the woman beside him. “Where the hell is Davies? What am I paying that gorilla for if he can’t watch the front gate?”
That’s when the lights winked out, the power going down throughout the house.
“What now?”
Leah stumbled in the dark. “Shouldn’t the emergency lights come on?”
“Does nothing work in this house!” he fumed. “Find a flashlight.”
The darkness was total, just an inky night with the sounds of two people fumbling through it. A single beam of light popped on as Leah located a flashlight.
“Come on,” he barked. They went through to the front foyer.
“Davies!” Napier bellowed at the darkness.
Leah waved the beam from the torch around the vast room, over the staircase and the side tables and potted ferns and the man on the floor—
She flung the light back. The security guard named Davies was crawling on all fours. Blood seeped from a cut above his eyes.
“Davies?” Napier bent to the man. “What happened?”
“I’m calling the police.” Scrambling to get her phone, the flashlight in her hand swung away to the wall.
“Leah, the light!”
She cursed and swung the light back down but it too winked out and the darkness swallowed everything. She heard Napier scream and she heard the sound of scuffling. She backed away from the noise until she collided into the wall. Then everything went still.
“Aaron?”
The flashlight in her hand came back to life, then the rest of the lights in the house returned as the power came back on.
The security guard lay face down on the floor, moaning through a rattled windpipe. Her employer was gone.
44
“LIFT YOUR END!”
“I am!”
“Then lift bloody harder!”
The man kicked and bucked and Billie lost her grip. Once her end went down, Gantry’s end slipped free and the man thudded to the floor.
“Christ,” Gantry said, huffing. “Bastard’s heavier than he looks.”
Aaron Napier lay writhing on the stone floor, his wrists and ankles bound with duct tape. More of the heavy tape sealed his mouth shut, muffling his cries for help. Gantry had wanted to slap another swath of it across his eyes but Billie waved him off. She had found an oily rag in the back of the vehicle to blindfold him with.
The man driving the Rover had stated that he didn’t want to know what was in the back of his vehicle. He cursed at Gantry like he hated the man, saying he would drive them where they wanted to go but no more. That was the end of it. Once they had arrived at their destination and hauled the bound man out of the back, the driver had sped off without another word.
Billie had taken the man’s legs while Gantry lifted the heavier end and they carried Aaron Napier into the abandoned warehouse. Although blinded, the man seemed to sense where he was and had begun to kick and scream and twist. Neither of them could hang on against the man’s fits.
Billie caught her breath, watching the man twist and wriggle on the floor, then she looked at Gantry. “Okay. We’re almost there. Pick him up.”
“He’s too bloody heavy.”
They had barely made it through the door before dropping him. The door to the cellar still lay across the cavernous space.
“We’re not there yet,” she said. “Pick up your end.”
“Screw that.” Gantry took hold of the man’s ankles and simply dragged him across the floor.
Napier screamed and bucked in protest, twisting out of his captor’s grip. Gantry came about and booted him hard in the ribs. “Be still, you stupid bastard!”
The fight seemed to drain out of the man. Billie took hold and they hauled him the rest of the way to the stairwell. Gantry waved her off and took it the rest of the way, bouncing and thudding the man down each step all the way into the cellar.
Billie propped the man against a pillar beam. Gantry, wheezing, found a crate to sit on and patted down his pockets for his cigarettes.
She watched the Englishman catch his breath. “You okay?”
“I hate exercise.” Fumbling with the pack, the cigarette fell from his hand and landed in a puddle at his feet. “What is with you and me? We always seem to be lugging around grown men in the dark.”
She brushed the dirt from her hands and looked at the bound man. Napier sat with his back against the pillar, slumping to one side as if unconscious.
“So what now, chief?”
Billie looked over the vast cellar. There were rusting hulks of machinery and greasy puddles on the floor and the massive posts holding up the floor above them. Nothing more. “I thought they’d be here. Waiting for us.”
Gantry looked behind him, as if expecting an ambush. “I should leg it before they show.”
“You can’t leave now.”
“Ghosts don’t much like me.” He tugged his tie loose and then nodded at the man on the floor. “Is he dead?”
Billie bent down and peeled the blindfold away. The man’s eyes were partially closed. “He’s passed out. Give me your knife.”
He tossed it to her. “What for?”
Unfolding the blade, she cut away the bonds on the wrists and then the ankles.
“Is that a good idea?”
She folded the knife and tossed it back to Gantry without replying. Lifting a corner of the tape over Napier’s mouth, she got a solid grip and yanked it free quickly.
The man shuddered to life in a fit, howling in pain. His eyes wheeled about mindlessly and blood trickled from a split on his lip. The moaning and the howling carried on and Billie squatted down on her heels and waited.
The cries settled into whimpers and his eyeballs stopped spinning. They came to rest on the woman before him, racking focus until the blurriness faded.
“You bitch,” he uttered, his lips curling back over his teeth like a dog about to snap. “You fucking bitch.”
Gantry watched the man through a haze of smoke. “Be nice to the lady, arsehole.”
Napier’s eyes darted to the man on his left and the woman crouching before him. Venom oozed from his glare and he carried his cursing forward.
“Napier,” Billie said, locking eyes with the man. “Look around. Do you know where you are?”
“Fucking whore,” he spat. His eyes didn’t stray from hers, as if reluctant to look elsewhere.
“Listen to me,” she said in a low voice. “The women are coming. I don’t know what they’re going to do to you but I doubt it’s going to be very nice. If you agree to tell the police everything, about your father’s crimes and how you covered it up, I’ll get you out of here.”
The man shut his mouth and his glare dropped to the floor before him.
Gantry flicked the cigarette into the darkness. “That’s the best offer your gonna get, sunshine. Better take her up on it.”
Aaron Napier remained silent but his chest was heaving, as if unable to breathe.
She glanced back at Gantry. The Englishman shrugged his shoulders.
“Let ‘er rip, kiddo,” he said.
Billie closed her eyes and turned the lock on that secret door deep inside her heart. And then she whispered. “He’s here.”
The humidity in the dank cellar evaporated as the temperature plummeted. When she opened her eyes she saw her breath misting in the air and she knew the dead were coming.
Then Napier lunged.
~
Leah Khan propped open the front door and stood at the threshold waiting for the police to arrive. The security guard named Davies was sitting in a chair holding a cloth to the cut on his head.
“Where the hell are they?” she said.
Davies looked at her and then shook his head.
She folded her arms and tried to quell the troubling thoughts that were buzzing through her head like wasps trapped under glass. Why had the young woman come back? Why risk it when she was already under probation? And then, with the help of some other man, kidnap her boss?
The Culpepper woman had again accused her employer of a nasty crime, of covering up something terrible. No matter how many times she dismissed the very idea, it kept nagging at her. Aaron Napier was no saint and she knew he hid a good number of things from her but she always assumed that these were simply questionable business practises. Clandestine funds in offshore accounts in places like the Cayman Islands and Bermuda. Never something as horrid as this.
Alongside these troublesome notions was the safe in Napier’s office. As his assistant, she had access to every part of the house, of his life, except that one. Only Napier himself had access to it.
She turned away from the door and marched across the marble foyer.
Davies raised his head. “Where are you going?”
“I’ll be right back. Holler when the police arrive.”
Running carefully in heels, she hurried into his office and slid back the mahogany panelling to reveal the safe. Nothing fancy or even hi-tech. A digital lock on a metal strongbox, not much bigger than the kind found in an upper scale hotel room. A four-digit code.
Her employer liked to think of himself as a complex and intelligent man. Which he was, she admitted. He just wasn’t very creative.
Like a telephone keypad, she punched in the name of his beloved dog, an aged Dalmatian named Spot.
The door sprung open with a click. She withdrew a brittle folder thick with documents and brought it to the desk. She leafed through the pages, quickly skimming one after another. Halfway through the pile, she stopped.
Reaching behind, she pulled in the chair and sat down, her eyes never leaving the page.
She startled when the security guard bellowed at her from down the hallway.
The police were here.
45
HER LEGS BUCKLED up and she hit the floor hard on her back. The wind knocked out of her, Billie couldn’t breathe and she panicked, gasping at air that wouldn’t fill her lungs. Napier loomed over her. His eyes were crazed and his teeth chomped as he uttered terrible things to her. A thin strand of drool ran from his gibbering lips onto her face. Then she felt his hands at her throat.
I’m going to die, she thought.
There was a roar and another figure rushed in, tackling Napier. In her frenzied state, Billie thought for a moment that it was Mockler, riding in like the cavalry to save her but it wasn’t.
John Gantry and Aaron Napier rolled over the floor, fighting and clawing and tussling. Napier was like a wild animal, chomping his teeth and growling as he tried to kill the Englishman. They kicked and fought and tumbled away until Billie lost sight of them in the darkness of the cellar.
Stars flickered before her eyes as she tried to get oxygen back into her lungs and then the racket of the two men stopped suddenly and when one emerged limping back from the shadows, it was Napier and Napier alone that appeared.
She shot to her feet but the room was spinning and she dropped hard to her knees. She crawled away but Napier kept coming, his jaw chomping as he kept at his tirade.
“You are nothing,” he hissed. “Less than nothing. Like all the rest.”
He set his foot against her back and kicked down hard, flattening her to the floor. Billie gasped, tears stinging her eyes. Then she heard his voice, hot and close against her ear.
“You all think there’s something special about you, don’t you? That you’re different, unique somehow. That’s the part that kills me. Honestly. You’re all the same. There’s nothing special, nothing that sets you apart from every other useless cunt that ever was.”
Billie clawed at the filthy stone floor but she was pinned. Where were the women? Where were the dead who demanded revenge? She had done her part and brought the man here and now she was going to die like all the others. She felt his hands lock around her throat, his breath steaming into her ear.
“You all die the same too,” he whispered. “Crying and begging. Why? Do you think that will save you from what has already been decided for you? Your fate was written before you ever were.”
Billie opened her eyes. The dead were there. The stood in silence, watching the man throttle her. Billie thought they would simply watch her die but one shrieked at the man and then they all did. Another lashed out, as if to knock his head in but her bony fist sailed through. His hair ruffled, as if tussled by a breeze, but that was all. The others tried, clawing and shoving. Napier shuddered, as if chilled, and looked about but there was nothing for him to see.
The dead women shrieked, the
ir rage impotent.
Do something, she screamed without moving her lips.
They shrieked louder.
The man backed off, his eyes darting about as his hands slipped from her neck.
He senses something in the room with him, Billie thought. Back in her apartment, the dead women had lifted her clean off her feet and hurled her into a wall. Now all they could do was wail.
She scrambled away. Why couldn’t the women do anything? Did it have something to do with her?
The dead stopped their gnashing. They turned to Billie. One took the hand of the other and this woman did the same until a daisy chain of clasped hands connected them all. The last one reached out to Billie.
She didn’t want to do it. She knew what they wanted but Billie did not want to touch the dead hand reaching out to her.
Napier snarled, his rage ramping back up.
Billie gripped the dead woman’s hand.
She thought she was going to die.
The sense of being drained was overwhelming. Everything she had ran out along her arm and down her fingers and left her empty. She wondered if her very soul had been sucked out of her by the hungry dead. Then she collapsed to the floor.
Grit stung her cheeks as a blustery wind blew through the vast basement. There was a scream but this time it was not the women. Shielding her eyes against the dust, she saw Napier. He lay flat on his stomach and his fingers clawed at the stone as the dead dragged him away. The terror in his eyes was absolute and two of his fingernails sheered clean off as he tried to hang on.
A dull clinking sound rang above the blast of the wind. The bricks in the far wall were tumbling down as if dismantled by an unseen mason. A dark gap appeared, revealing the secret chamber where something had been hidden away for so long. Aaron Napier screamed and begged and wept as he was pushed through into the tomb and thrown to the floor.
And then, brick by brick, the dead walled him up inside.
The wind pushed Billie this way and that and the snap of electricity crackled through the air. Something heavy knocked into her, pulling her away. Had the dead women come for her too?
