BoneMan's Daughters

by Ted Dekker

  There were other details now, the smell of bleach, a crooked picture of a rooster on the wall, an old cookbook with a red-and-white checkerboard cover.

  But there was the door, open to the basement, and Ryan was already halfway across the kitchen.

  The floor moved under him and he knew that if Alvin was directly below him, he’d already heard the weak foundation moving. Like the creaking hinge and the banging door, the protest from the floor only seemed to push him.

  He was known now. There was no chance of outwitting BoneMan any longer. There was only Ryan’s rage against the man who had broken his daughter’s fingers and corrupted her mind.

  Ryan was about to enter the stairwell when an image seen through the opened door next to the refrigerator stopped him. Through the doorway he could see a bedroom with a bed. But it was the pictures on the wall beyond the bed that sent a chill down his neck. There was no mistaking the black-and-white photograph of Bethany, standing in her window at the house in Austin. The freak had stalked her and taken this picture with a zoom lens?

  A newspaper clipping hung next to his trophy. BoneMan Takes Another Victim.

  A second picture had been pinned to the wall on the other side of the larger image. An old, yellowing photograph with a crease running diagonally across the upper left corner. And even from this distance Ryan knew the small child grinning with chubby cheeks.

  This too was Bethany. When she was only a baby.

  Ryan blinked. Walked into the room and stared at the wall, mesmerized. He knew that he should be rushing down the stairs. He knew that at any moment BoneMan could rush up behind him and put his hammer through his head. He knew he had come to kill or be killed.

  But he also knew something else that now rendered him immobile. The picture of the baby was his baby, his Bethany, his angel, but it was a photograph taken before he’d adopted her.

  He’d never seen this picture before. This wasn’t something that BoneMan had taken from their house. So then where had he found it? And why was it on his wall? The larger one showing Bethany within the last year he understood. But the small, worn photograph reached into Ryan’s chest and tightened a fist around his heart.

  Ryan moved around the bed, like a man walking dead and unseen, fixated on the picture. He stood before the image and lifted his hand to the wall. Ran his fingers over the image of Bethany as an innocent angel, smiling dumbly. It was paper clipped to an envelope addressed to a post office box.

  The postmark was just over one month earlier. BoneMan had received this picture just thirty days ago?

  A knot was already locked in his throat, but now something else joined it. Nausea.

  The rest of the room was very plain, but the bed was made with white sheets, and four half-burnt candles the thickness of his arm sat on an old dresser. BoneMan slept here. He lay here and he dreamed of being Bethany’s father.

  Ryan plucked the picture off the wall. The envelope floated to the ground.

  Surely there was no real significance behind finding a baby picture of Bethany in this monster’s room. No, that… that wasn’t right. No, no, no, that just couldn’t…

  He flipped the small picture over and stared at a note scrawled in fresh blue ink.

  Here’s you daughter, you ingrate.

  I put her up a month after this picture

  was taken caus she wouldn’t shut up.

  Rot in hell. Betsy.

  A red line was drawn through the name.

  Ryan couldn’t stop the tremble in his hand, but he had to read the note again because he was sure he’d misread the words. There was a mistake. He had to read this again!

  He grabbed the picture with both hands and scanned the lines again. This could not be, not his angel, not born to that . . .

  Revulsion smothered him all at once. He realized that he’d stopped breathing, and now he sucked at the air in loud, halting gasps. The nausea he’d felt a minute earlier rose through his throat and he couldn’t stop himself from heaving. His stomach was empty so they were dry heaves, but they watered his eyes and contorted his body.

  Bethany was Alvin Finch’s daughter by birth. He’d discovered it only recently and gone after her. And he would as soon break her bones as love her because in BoneMan’s twisted mind there was no difference.

  Ryan lost his reason then. He almost screamed his rage. Under any other circumstances the mere thought that Bethany was born to the man in the basement would have inspired him to smash the windows and bloody his hands, breaking the walls as an expression of his fury over the injustice of it all.

  But at this very moment BoneMan’s daughter, who was now Ryan’s daughter, cowered in the basement, giving her soul to him!

  Still gripping the picture between white fingers, he leapt over the bed and tore from the room, only barely caring that he might be giving himself away now.

  He grabbed the wall at the stairwell, spun through the doorway, and plunged down a flight of concrete stairs built as part of the foundation. Down into darkness. With each step he felt the end rushing up at him. This was BoneMan’s world, where BoneMan killed. But the realization didn’t slow him.

  This was where Bethany was, captive to the father of lies.

  The room he’d been held captive in sat at the end of the hall, door opened to empty darkness. Bethany’s room was the other way, at the other end.

  He reached the bottom of the steps, spun around the bottom rail, and stopped. An empty hall ran up to the same door BoneMan has shoved him through. The doorway to Bethany’s room was open and glowed with orange light.

  They were waiting for him. Ryan’s heart crashed in his chest. BoneMan was waiting to fulfill his promise.

  Or they were already gone, on another road out the back way.

  He released the railing, shoved the picture in his belt, and limped down the hall, mind clouded with rage and fear and Bethany.

  He was halfway down the hall when he heard the voice. BoneMan’s voice. A low and kind voice that sounded like the weeping of children in Ryan’s mind.

  “It looks very pretty on you.”

  Ryan covered the last ten yards without being able to think. And then he was in the open doorway staring at the room with the cross on the wall.

  He saw the entire scene as if it were a single snapshot that his mind had studied for long seconds, not the mere moment it took for him to comprehend what he was looking at.

  Alvin Finch stood shirtless with his pale, veiny back to Ryan, blocking his view of Bethany. The man was so completely absorbed by the object of his jealousy that he didn’t turn.

  The rest of the room was as Ryan remembered—the lamp hung from a nail on the overhead timber. The bed ran along the wall across the room, empty now, and beside it the piss pot. The sledgehammer leaned against the cross, thick steel head resting on the concrete.

  “My mother was short,” Alvin Finch said. “You’ll grow into it in a year or two.”

  He took a step forward, and when he moved, Bethany came into view. She stood in a white wedding dress, hemmed in lace and yellowed by time.

  “Do you want to touch my chest?” Alvin asked.

  The fury coursing through Ryan’s body now felt like the intense, dry heat of a sauna blown in his face. The sight of the white monster who called himself Satan standing over his daughter made him instantly ill and he felt as though he was going to throw up. He could not breathe, he could not think, he could not move.

  He could only shake.

  “I’ve just applied lotion,” Alvin said.

  Bethany saw Ryan then, and her eyes shifted ever so slightly.

  And Ryan started to turn.

  Ryan wasn’t sure why or how or even that he was moving, but he was. Grunting and panting he leaped across the room to the cross.

  With both hands, Ryan grabbed the sledgehammer by the long handle and began his swing from the floor as he turned.

  He bolted for them, roaring like a bull, and swung the hammer, adjusting the trajectory of the head as
best he could, given the energy he’d already thrown into the swing.

  BoneMan still had his back to him and was turning with a stunned stare. The head of the sledgehammer landed on the side of the man’s head with a sickening crack.

  A sharp jar ran up Ryan’s arms. He felt the hammer slip from his grasp and drop on the concrete next to Bethany. His nemesis stared from bulging eyes that peered from a skull bleeding on one side.

  And then Alvin Finch, aka BoneMan, aka Satan, toppled to his left. He bounced off the post in the middle of the room, struck the concrete next to the hammer’s head with a loud slap, and lay still.

  For three long seconds Ryan stared at the form, still uncertain that he’d caught him flat-footed. The man’s own sickness had killed him. If he hadn’t been so consumed with possessing what he could not have, he might have heard Ryan coming.

  Instead, he lay on the floor, either dead or close to it, and Ryan felt nothing even remotely similar to remorse.

  Bethany was looking at him. He glanced at the hammer by her feet, then back at her lost eyes. Finish it…

  A wave of rage washed over him. The hammer was there, by Bethany’s feet, and the beast who’d abused her was there, on the floor. Ryan wanted to scream out for his daughter to pick up the hammer and slug this bull in the head again and again, until there could be no doubt that he’d been appropriately punished for his indiscretion.

  “Kill him,” he muttered.

  But Bethany just looked at him. She stood still like a limp doll swimming in the mother’s wedding dress.

  It occurred to him then that even now, BoneMan’s hooks were still in her mind. She really had given her captor a part of herself and would have to wrestle it back. The rage would come later.

  “You came back for me,” she said. Without shifting her eyes from him, she reached up and pulled the dress off her shoulders. It fell to the floor around her feet, but she just stood there in her pajamas staring at him and he wasn’t sure if she was angry or glad. Her face slowly twisted into a knot, and tears sprang to her eyes. Her shoulders began to shake.

  A knot crowded his throat so he couldn’t tell her how much he loved her, although that was all he wanted to do.

  Bethany looked at the fallen form to her right, then up at Ryan again and now began to wail. Panic washed into his mind. She was crying over his death? Over BoneMan’s death?

  No! No, Bethany dear, it’s not like that! I saved you. Don’t cry, please don’t…

  Bethany lifted both arms and stumbled forward and only when she reached him did he realize she was coming with an embrace.

  Blurting a sob, he stepped forward and threw his arms around her. She wrapped her thin arms around his body and rested against his chest.

  “Thank you,” she managed to whisper. Then again, a strained whisper, “Thank you.” She held him with more strength than he imagined possible after her extended captivity. And then she wept unreservedly.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “No!” she cried. “No!”

  “I want to be your father. I—”

  Bethany put her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek. “You came back for me. You are my father and I’ll never leave you.”

  It was almost more than he could bear. He couldn’t speak so he held her close and wept into her hair.

  But another sound joined their cries of remorse. Behind them BoneMan groaned.

  Bethany jumped at the sound.

  He wasn’t dead?

  Ryan turned slowly and stared at BoneMan’s face. The man’s eyes shifted about, darting from Ryan to Bethany and back. Despite his broken skull he was clearly conscious. And in his blue eyes Ryan could see that he clung stubbornly to a desire.

  For a long moment he stood still, allowing the blood in his veins to grow hot, gripping his hands slowly into fists so tight he might have cut his palm with his fingernails.

  BoneMan was alive still. And with every lustful breath the monster took, Ryan felt robbed of life. The man’s display of raw evil was even worse now for expressing itself in those hideous eyes despite his utter failure to win the daughter.

  Ryan roared and threw himself blindly at BoneMan.

  Gripping the man by his trousers and shirt, he hefted him up like a weight lifter snatching up dumbbells. He twisted, roaring still, and slammed the body against the wall.

  Onto the blocks of wood.

  Bethany was shrieking now, diving in, grabbing at the ropes still fastened through the blocks that had held Ryan’s arms and legs.

  “Tie him!” Ryan cried. “Tie him!”

  She sobbed and she bound him in quick short movements, spinning from limb to limb. It only took a few seconds and in those seconds Ryan and Bethany were one, undivided in their purpose.

  It was enough to make him want to cry.

  Bethany leapt back, eyes wide on Alvin Finch, who was strapped to the wooden blocks. Ryan let him go and stepped back. The man’s body sagged, then hung still, unmoving except for the slow rise and fall of his chest.

  Bethany grabbed the lantern from the beam and held out her hand. “Come on.”

  Together they staggered from the room, leaving BoneMan incapacitated on the wall, watching them with desire. When Ryan looked back at the door he had to fight back a strong urge to pick up the sledge and close those eyes once and for all.

  “Come on,” Bethany said, tugging him.

  They limped down the hall and up the stairs without a word.

  She let the door slam shut behind them and squinted in the light. Ryan took her hand again and hurried her away from the house, toward the driveway, toward the large oak that spread its long limbs over the road. He stopped and turned back, still unsure if they really had escaped the monster.

  Crickets screeched. A gentle breeze rustled the leaves overhead. The old, dilapidated house stood in the setting sun, quiet and serene, belying the horror that it had harbored for so many years. Cracked windows, crooked door, flaking paint—just another house set far back from the well-traveled roads that wound unsuspecting through Texas.

  Beside him, Bethany sniffed, then shook with a sob. Ryan’s mind snapped back to the child, back to his daughter, and for the moment the house ceased to exist. All that mattered now was Bethany.

  He grabbed the lantern from her free hand and set it down on the ground. Then swung around to face her. He was only halfway around when her arms wrapped around his neck and pulled him tight. She buried her face in his neck like a leech, drawing life in a desperate silence.

  Ryan stood immobilized. Slowly he put his arms around her waist and held her close. Father and daughter.

  They clung to life as one, and Ryan couldn’t remember ever feeling so grateful, so full of love, so blessed as he did now holding his daughter, Bethany.

  The afternoon heat smothered them, a welcome furnace of love kindled by deep, deep longing and relief. If Ryan died then of a heart attack, he would have lived a full life, if only in these last few moments. No heaven that awaited could possibly be any more satisfying than the gratitude that now swept through his mind and body.

  “I love you, Daddy,” Bethany whispered into his neck through trembling lips. “I love you so much.”

  He wanted to push her away so that he could look into her eyes and tell her that she didn’t need to feel any guilt. This was all his fault now. He would never let her go again.

  But he realized that she wasn’t clinging to him in order to deflect guilt. She was holding tight to him, her savior, her father, the one who’d moved heaven and earth to rescue her.

  And then it struck him: they were in heaven. Not literally, but just as real. He was the father who’d come to rescue his lost child from this Lucifer’s hell. He was the father embracing his prodigal child.

  “I will never leave you, Bethany. Never!”

  Ryan wasn’t sure how much time passed as they embraced under the oak’s majestic branches; it had either sped by or slowed to a crawl, he didn’t know which. But gradually the sound
of crickets and rustling leaves became realities again.

  Bethany pulled back, kissed his cheek tenderly. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  His throat was still in a knot; he didn’t know what to say anyway.

  She turned and faced the house, holding tightly to his arm. An image of BoneMan strapped to the beams below filled Ryan’s mind. The thought that they’d left the man—the beast, this Lucifer who came from the pit of hell—alive. How could they do that?

  What if he was still alive? What if he’d managed to escape? What if the wall had some kind of safe passage built in? What if this father of lies lived to hunt down his daughter once again?

  He swallowed hard, aware of a growing ringing in his ears.

  “Will they come for us?”

  “There’s a road nearby. We can walk out.”

  But she made no move to flee. Her breathing had thickened and her hands were steady.

  “I hate this place,” Bethany said.

  “I hate it too.”

  They stared at the house.

  “This house is hell to me. It will haunt me.”

  Yes, he thought. And, No, he would not let anything like this haunt his daughter.

  “Then burn it,” he said.

  “HE’S IN THE basement.”

  Ryan bent over, lifted the flaming lantern, and walked toward the house, outraged by the realization that they hadn’t yet finished. “I’ll burn it.” He stumbled forward, mind fixed.

  “No!” Bethany cried. She raced up to him and grabbed the handle. She was going to stop him? Finally confronted by BoneMan’s demise, she was unwilling to see him die? His hooks were so deep in her mind that she—

  “I’ll burn it,” she said.

  Ryan could hardly contain his relief.

  They exchanged one long look of understanding, then turned as one and slung the lamp through the nearest window with a pronounced grunt.

  It smashed against the interior wood wall and doused it with oil, which burst into flame. They watched the flames crackle down the hall, licking at the ceiling. The house was like a tinderbox. Pillars of smoke rose into the sky for all the world to see. It was only a matter of time before the authorities arrived now.