Pernicious Red

by Natalie Bennett

  We might have continued, I might have let him do whatever he wanted, but my mom stood up and started screaming about how I was going to burn in hell.

  The sleep shirt Alice had given me clung to my skin. I splashed cold water on my face to clean off the sweat.

  Dropping my head to the mirror, I squeezed my eyes shut and sighed. My heartbeat was finally slowing to normal but the ache between my legs wouldn’t abate.

  I replayed the dream in my head with a sick feeling of loss. I was going to let him fuck me against the wall with my mother’s dead body behind us. None of it was real but I could still feel the blood on my hands from that night, and I could still feel Channing’s tongue skating over the roof of my mouth.

  Jesus, I was going to let him do whatever he wanted. What the hell was wrong with me?

  “It was just a dream,” I reminded myself.

  Shutting the water off, I gathered my hair and twisted it back into a ponytail.

  I’d seen Channing more times in the last few hours than I had all year. I couldn’t decide on a specific emotion to feel. He was fucking up my psyche. He turned my nightmare into an erotic fantasy, but when I thought of what I really knew about him, I didn’t come up with much.

  He and his brother were raised by their aunt and were both enigmatic as hell. That summed up my plethora of knowledge quite nicely.

  Shaking my head, I flipped off the bathroom light and made my way back to the pallet Alice had made me on her bedroom floor.

  Chapter Seven

  Channing

  I killed the engine and cut the lights, settling in for a twenty minute wait. She lived on a cul-de-sac and, after watching the area for the past two weeks, I knew everyone was tucked safe in bed at this hour.

  Thrumming my fingers on the steering wheel, I thought back to a few hours ago. Red—because Rosalie wasn’t as fitting—had been right in front of me. I had my hand around her throat and didn’t squeeze the life from her body like I’d fantasized about doing for the last four years.

  She was still the prettiest thing I’d ever laid my eyes on; so easily corruptible and perfectly tarnished, just like Grandpa said she’d be. Didn’t she know we were fated to meet the way we did?

  We were always meant to come together.

  And I let her go.

  My blue balls hated me for it and I was pissed this was all taking so long to initiate. The warm-up had gone so much faster than this.

  I had to remind myself it was all about timing. Besides, her actions spoke much louder than her words. She’d told me to let her go while her body begged me to explore every inch of it.

  I knew she wanted me as badly as I wanted her, but I wasn’t going to let my grandfather down.

  At exactly ten past two, Destiny Campbell’s baby blue coupe pulled into her driveway. I worked my jaw back and forth and then silently slipped out of my car.

  My brother had texted me that everything was ready to go; this was just a minor string that needed to be tied up.

  I crossed the street without her turning around. She was leaning down to grab something when I walked up behind her and firmly placed a hand over her mouth.

  Her muffled screams came from beneath my palm as I dragged her back towards my car. A purple bootie slid off her foot, getting left behind in freshly fallen snow.

  Her struggle was cute, halfway amusing.

  I really didn’t need to take her. She didn’t fit the profile, didn’t count as another number.

  I could have just sent a text from her phone and then deleted it, but where was the fun in that?

  Besides, she was a two-faced little bitch and Red didn’t need a friend like her in her life.

  “Stop fighting. You’re only making it harder on yourself.”

  At the sound of my voice, she went still, unsurprisingly recognizing who it was who had hold of her. Spinning us so we were facing my car, I made her begin moving forward.

  Rosalie

  “How does someone carefully and strategically place a body?” Alice asked.

  I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or the television. Either way, the corn flakes in front of me were no longer appealing.

  “They have no leads,” I pointed out right before the news reporter virtually pleaded for the public’s assistance and any information we may have.

  Alice snorted and shook her head, “And do you think they’re going to get any? This is Ponty-Poole—the entire town is probably raiding the stores like they just found out that the apocalypse is coming and boarding up their windows.”

  The situation was far from humorous but I laughed at her spot-on description. Ponty-Poole had petty theft at most; nothing ever happened here. The fact that some poor girl had been mutilated and then propped up on display on a park bench was sure to have town residents terrified. Hell, even I was a little paranoid despite knowing I was safe.

  Feeling the effects of an un-brushed mouth and after work grit, I was more than ready to get home and pull myself together. For the second night in a row, I’d gotten a shitty amount of sleep. Maybe I could take a nap without Channing interrupting.

  “Do you want to tell me what happened last night?”

  Alice asked. It was like she just plucked his name right out of my head.

  “Nothing happened. Like you said, the Burrows are assholes; he tried to scare me and it didn’t work.”

  “Motherfuckers,” she grumbled. “You know he had Cole standing century outside the door? I don’t like it. Something doesn’t feel right,” she said, more to herself than me, buying my bullshit lie.

  Something most definitely had happened in that bathroom. I couldn’t explain it beyond telling her I wanted something that was meant to be off limits to me, and that would certainly cause her to flip her shit.

  So I kept my mouth shut and pretended I didn’t have an affliction for a stalker.

  Chapter Eight

  Rosalie

  Alice dropped me off to my car and didn’t leave until I promised to call her when I got home.

  My breath puffed out in little clouds in the chilled air as I climbed inside my trusty sedan. The sun had melted away most of the snow fall from the previous night, making my life a little easier.

  “Ouch. What the fuck?” Lifting my ass off the seat, I blindly ran a hand across the cloth beneath me. With furrowed brows I stared at the black rose I clearly remembered tossing on the passenger side floor. In fact, I’d forgotten all about it until just then.

  How the hell did it get on my seat?

  Twirling the flower by its stem, I slowly glanced around the inside of the car, hitting the lock button on the door and searching for a sign that someone other than me had been inside.

  The glove box was still locked…just like my car doors should have been. Maybe I just thought I’d locked it?

  Paranoia was a motherfucker.

  How far was the park from Hawthorne’s?

  And didn’t the news anchor say the woman’s corpse was already deteriorating? Who would do something like that, and where had they kept her body?

  I shuddered, imagining the stench and feel of rotting flesh. Even as I tossed the flower back down on the floor and pulled out of the parking lot, I just knew someone had been in my car. I didn’t want to consider the implications of that, because it meant someone was fucking with me—that someone being Channing—and I wasn’t mentally capable of dealing with the force of him.

  What truly worried me was that he may have actually known my secret, and that meant I would be stuck at his mercy.

  I couldn’t shake the feeling off that I was being watched. It could have been my lack of sleep, Channing, or imagining all the ways the redhead in the park was killed, but my paranoia was rising to an all time high.

  When I got out of my car and made a dash for my apartment, I didn’t see Joyce’s Malibu in the vicinity. Thank fuck for small miracles.

  “Or not,” I muttered, stomping my snow covered feet on the rubber mat just inside the entry. A piece of pape
r was taped on the lift reading Out of order.

  “One thing goes right and twelve more go wrong,” I grumbled, heading towards the staircase.

  I was huffing and puffing like an out of water beached whale when I finally got to my floor.

  A man standing at the end of the hall had me coming up short.

  He had his hands shoved in the pockets of his old trench coat with a creepy smile that appeared the second he saw me. No one in the modern century dressed the way he was.

  “Are you looking for someone?” I asked, quickly going to my door.

  He shook his head and continued to grin, slowly pulling something out of his pocket.

  It was a rose. A black rose.

  I wasn’t a believer in coincidences. In my eyes, this confirmed that someone was definitely screwing with me. I kept one eye on him as I hurriedly unlocked the door.

  “It’s starting soon,” he called out just as I stepped over my threshold, officially all the way freaked the hell out. I slammed the door and locked all three locks. My stomach twisted into a ball of nervous apprehension.

  I took back being glad Joyce wasn’t home. Now, I was alone with some weirdo standing right down the goddamn hall.

  What were these flowers meant to represent? I hoped to God it wasn’t death.

  Black roses held no significance to me that I could think of off the top of my head. Then again, my head was a pretty messy place at the moment.

  Retrieving my cell, I wet my mouth and trudged towards the main living space. Alice’s phone rang to voicemail so I shot her a quick text, telling her to call me pronto.

  “What the fuck is going on?” My voice seemed to echo inside the empty apartment. I stood frozen in place at the end of my entry hall, staring at a large metal chest in the spot my coffee table should have been.

  It was almost as long as my entire sofa. Walking over to it, I scanned the non-descript box, wondering what it could possibly be there for.

  Curiously trying to lift the lid, I cursed in annoyance when it snagged on a metal lock I had overlooked. This had Joyce written all over it.

  Whatever the hell this thing was, it was heavy.

  Since there was no way to move it, and opening the lid was impossible, I gave up.

  Walking down the hall, I scrolled through my inbox until I found her name.

  I had text her I wasn’t coming home the night before and she never responded.

  Before I could hit send, I paused once again in my bedroom doorway. Everything appeared to be in place and untouched, just like the inside of my car, but there in the center of my bed sat another rose, and what looked like a piece of paper.

  Spinning in a circle, I looked in ridiculous places, expecting someone to jump out at me. The corner where my wicker hamper sat. Beneath the vanity on the far wall. Inside the tiny closet that could barely hold a large purse.

  “Ugh, fuck this.” Growling with a determination not to let this situation get to me, I marched towards the bed and snatched the piece of paper.

  Rolling my eyes to the ceiling, I studied the red ink I guessed was meant to be blood and scanned the text.

  Chapter Nine

  Rosalie

  Little Red, Little Red,

  do you want to play a game?

  It starts with twelve

  and it ends with one.

  If you win,

  you get to live.

  There's only one rule:

  don't go into the woods.

  “What the hell?”

  I read the damn thing once, and then I read it again.

  The first inkling of fear spilled in my gut when I finally noticed the tiny silver key taped to the bottom of the page. My mind scrambled to present a logical explanation for the riddle I held in my shaky hands.

  Little Red may not have been linked to the nickname Channing bestowed on me the other night, but there was no mistaking who owned a certain stretch of woodland in Ponty-Poole—and the Burrows had deemed their land private years ago. It was the only part of the woods full of No Trespassing signs. I peeled the key away and let the paper flutter from my hand before finally hitting send on Joyce’s name.

  On the second ring, her melodic ringtone began to play from down the hall. Damn near jumping out of my skin, I cautiously stepped back into the hallway, trying to look everywhere at once.

  Her phone continued to ring as I crept towards the living room. It stopped for just a second and then the melody started all over again.

  The silver key dug into the flesh of my palm as I squeezed it for some form of reassurance.

  She’s not here, I told myself, staring at the metal chest the sound was emanating from. My cell beeped twice in my hand, signaling an incoming call.

  I didn’t recognize the area code, but I answered because I was desperate to hear something other than the blaring silence surrounding me.

  “Hello?”

  “Don’t hang up,” a calm, distorted voice commanded through the speaker.

  My phone’s the thin plastic frame clicked from the pressure I exerted around it. I don’t know what it was, but something compelled me not to hang up the phone.

  “This is your only chance to ask me a question.”

  “Is Joyce behind this? Is she with you? Is this her?”

  They softly clucked in my ear before letting out an exaggerated sigh. You’re already not following instructions. I said ask a question; you asked four.”

  There was a slight pause before they said, “The wolf wants to play.”

  I pulled the phone from my ear and glared at it.

  “Well, I don’t want to play. You have one minute to tell me what the fuck you want before I hang up and call the police.”

  “But if you did that, someone might get hurt,” they crooned.

  I didn’t have many people close to me aside from my grandmother and Alice, and who would hurt an old lady in a wheelchair? Then, I thought of Joyce and remembered the woman from the park bench.

  My mind immediately jumped to the conclusion that this was all related. That woman was a total stranger, but I didn’t need anyone else’s blood on my hands.

  I couldn’t lie and say I wasn’t afraid. Someone had been in my car—in my house. And were they watching me right then? Was it the man at the end of the hall?

  So caught up in the thoughts swirling inside my head, it took me a second to process what the voice was saying.

  “Open the box and retrieve the second key and the bag. Do not open it. When you’re done, go back down to the parking lot and get in the black truck. Your next instructions are under the visor. You have fifteen minutes.”

  “What do you—? Damnit.”

  The phone beeped again, signaling they had hung up. My mouth dried as I eyed the metal chest. I didn’t want to open it, but something told me to trust my intuition, and right now it was telling me to do as I was told.

  They said I had fifteen minutes and I’d just wasted two. Fingering the key, I knelt down and bravely inserted it into the bottom of the lock.

  Once it was off, I shut my eyes and counted to three before lifting the lid.

  At the sight of Joyce’s naked body, I cupped a hand over my mouth and fell backward onto my ass.

  The top came back down with a metallic bang. My heart slammed against my ribs and I had to repeatedly swallow down the bile trying to emerge from my throat.

  Holy fucking shit! This wasn’t a joke, this was real. The body of my roommate was more proof than I needed. This was real. My roommate was stuffed in the metal box right in front of me.

  “No cops,” I repeated to myself, fighting the urge to call them anyway, struggling against the part of my brain begging for safety. I had no idea who was behind this or who would get hurt. The fifteen minute time limit loomed over my head and spurred me back into action.

  Taking a deep breath, I reopened the chest and tried not to look at Joyce’s face, but it was impossible. She was damn near unrecognizable.

  The entire left side was
sunken in, cheekbone protruded near her busted upper lip. One eye was bloodied and swollen shut. She looked more like a prop from a horror movie than anything human. I turned my head and gagged, curling my fingers around the solid lid.

  Her usually pin-straight hair was a mess of crimson curls around her head. Whoever did this had to have attacked her in the shower

  Rapidly blinking in an attempt to hold back tears, I grabbed the small black knap-sack off her legs. It took a little more effort to pull the golden chain with the key on it from around her neck.

  With both items in my possession, I let the lid slam shut again and backed away from her body like it was a ticking time bomb.

  My phone chimed, and without unlocking it, I saw the partial text warning me I had five minutes left.

  It felt so wrong to leave her like this. I felt like an idiot for not calling the police but I was trying to think with logic, not emotion. That could make this all so much worse.

  I could say this wasn’t my fault but if I hadn’t been gone, something told me this wouldn’t have happened.

  This was a taunt—some sick, fucked up sign letting me know just how serious they were.

  Murder wasn’t off limits.

  My life was now under their control.

  I didn’t know who this so called Wolf was, but I had no choice but to play along.

  Part Two

  Chapter Ten

  Rosalie

  The hairs on the back of my neck rose as I stared at the spot I’d parked my car.

  It was gone, and in its place sat a large black truck. A ball of dread began to form in my lower stomach as the magnitude of the situation fully settled into my brain.

  Bracing my free hand against the cold door panel, I exhaled a breath. I didn’t understand why this was happening.