From Twisted Roots

by Tobias Wade

  I woke up some time later in pitch blackness. It took me a long moment of near panic to remember where I was. Grandma had tucked a blanket around me, but wasn’t on the couch with me anymore. I sat up a bit, blinking and rubbing my eyes until they’d adjusted as much as they could.

  Dark shapes loomed in the shadows around me. I recognized the shape of a high backed chair next to the couch, the outline of a grandfather clock against the wall, and a coffee table in the middle of the room. I was starting to calm down, telling myself only babies were afraid of the dark, when a floorboard creaked behind the couch.

  I turned sharply, half expecting to see Grandma coming into the room. There was nothing. With a whimper, I lay back down, grabbing the blanket to tug it all the way up to my chin. I squeezed my eyes shut. It was just my imagination. Just like Dad and Mom were always telling me after nightmares.

  I didn’t have to be afraid.

  “Have you come to play?”

  The whispered question sounded like it was only inches from my face. It sounded like a little girl. My eyes flew open, but again, there was only darkness. I pressed myself as far back into the couch as I could and gripped the blanket tight.

  “We like to play,” came another girl’s voice, thin and soft, this one down by my feet.

  “Won’t you be our friend?” A third asked quietly from behind the couch.

  “Get up!”

  The blanket was ripped away, and I squeaked in terror. I wanted to scream, but my throat was tight and my voice frozen.

  “Wake up!”

  A hand, small and cold, grabbed at my ankle. I yanked it away, and a ripple of giggles echoed around the room.

  “Play with us!”

  The girl’s voices were getting louder, less playful in their demands despite the wicked laughter following their words. I felt fingers twist around my ponytail, jerking my head harshly back.

  “Silly cow! Stupid girl!”

  Someone was tearing roughly at my nightshirt. A stinging slap landed across one cheek. Nails dug into my ankle and pulled at my leg again. Clawed hands scratched at my face, my arms, and my chest, with more pulling at my hair.

  Their hollow, mirthless laughter surrounded me.

  I curled up into the tightest, smallest ball I could manage and I started to scream.

  A light came on in the hallway and the attack stopped all at once.

  Grandma was next to me, touching my face and my hair, saying something, trying to calm me down. I couldn’t hear her over my own terrified shrieks.

  The next time I saw myself was in the hotel mirror. Grandma took us there after I’d run out to the car and refused to go back into her house. Long, vicious red lines ran down one cheek. My forearms and one of my legs had them too, marking where I’d been scratched. The hem of my shirt was stretched and torn. My hair was a gnarled mess from where fingers had tangled in it.

  Grandma didn’t say anything for a long time. She cleaned me up as best she could, bandaging the cuts and putting ice on the fast-forming bruise under my eye where I’d been slapped. She rubbed my back in small, slow circles.

  “I’m sorry, Sheila,” she said at last, her voice quiet and heartbroken. “I tried to keep you away. I was only gone for a moment to use the bathroom. I didn’t think it would be long enough…”

  I could only stare at her. The fear I’d felt, so absolute, was still coursing through me. I thought if I opened my mouth to speak, the only thing that would come out would be more screaming.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered again.

  Every family has a skeleton or two in their closet; the kind of deep, dark secret that’s shared in hushed tones behind closed doors. That night, I found out that my family was no exception.

  Grandma told me that my great, great grandpa had built the house she was now living in not as a family home, but as an orphanage for girls. The community viewed him as an upstanding citizen, a near saint for those poor unfortunate children, and they lavished praise on him for his selflessness. By all appearances, he was a philanthropic soul who created a home for those with nowhere else to go and no one else to care for them.

  Although Grandma was vague with the details, only saying that Great Great Grandpa had done very awful things, I came to understand years later just what she truly meant.

  Far from being the kind, generous man that he made himself out to be, he had collected these girls for himself. He used and abused them in every terrible way imaginable. His wife knew, but he had given her a lavish lifestyle and a son, and she let him do as he pleased so long as he kept it out of sight and away from their boy. His appetites were sick and sadistic, and some girls had a tendency to go missing while in his “care”. They were initially dubbed runaways.

  But those girls had never left.

  Once he was done with them, they’d be cut up. Parts were dropped into vats of boiling lye, and whatever remained was buried in the basement.

  He was forced to stop ten years after he began when people started to take more notice of just how often his girls went missing. His wife was faced with a loss of status and reputation should he be found out.

  More than three dozen girls between the ages of five and thirteen went missing in those years.

  Grandma had heard him admit to all of it in his later years, when his mind was slipping, and he claimed the little girls were waiting for him. By then, he was already a very elderly man close to death and his crimes were decades old. Going to the police seemed pointless. The family agreed to let sleeping dogs lie.

  “When he was alive, they stayed hidden; my father never experienced anything supernatural and I never saw them when I was a child. After that horrible man died, however, strange things would happen, although only to the kids. It was almost playful, at first, but as the years went on, it got more aggressive. The boys would get bite marks and scratches when we’d visit my father, but nothing like you have now. It seems like...the longer they’re trapped there, the angrier they become.”

  Grandma believed they were afraid of adults and only went after children. It was jealousy, she supposed, or a desire to inflict the same pain they’d felt. Either way, it was too dangerous for kids to be there.

  “That’s why I told you not to come. I didn’t want any of this to happen. I’ve been trying to find out how to help them. To free them. I’ve had religious ceremonies and cleansings. I’ve searched for their bones. Nothing worked, and I can’t sell the house knowing they might hurt someone.”

  She thought that her presence would be enough to keep them away, and that a five minute bathroom visit wouldn’t be enough for them to cause me any harm. She hasn’t realized how eager they’d become.

  “Don’t worry, Sheila,” she said, holding me close. “I’ll never make that mistake again.”

  I wrapped my arms around her and held on tight, trembling. She didn’t need to worry about making “that mistake” with me though.

  I already knew I’d never set foot in that house ever again.

  The Aftermath of Murder

  On March 12th, a teenage girl from my town went missing on her walk to school. Leona Joy Vans was 15. She was a cute kid who played clarinet for the Highschool band and volunteered at the nearby animal shelter on weekends. She dreamed of going to college for music and getting a position with an orchestra. It was impossible not to know these things—her parents were all over the news for days, pleading with anyone to come forward with information. No one had seen or heard anything.

  Search parties were organized, a few of which I joined with my mother and brother. The town was thoroughly combed for the girl. We walked through woods, divers dragged the nearby lakes, and cadaver dogs sniffed their way in circles. No sign of Leona.

  It went on for a week. Rewards were offered, tearful pleas from friends and family were broadcast on every local channel, candlelit vigils held, and everyone was still holding out hope that she would somehow make it home safely.

  On the se
venth day after her disappearance, that hope was snuffed out.

  I was driving home from work, which took me passed the street my mother and brother live on, when I was overtaken by a cop car with lights and sirens blaring. I pulled over to let it pass and checked my rear view mirror to see two more speeding along after it. I got back on the road and trailed more slowly behind them until all three turned sharply onto Hamilton, my family’s street.

  I tried to dismiss it as coincidence. Hamilton had a lot of houses, and they could be going to any one of them. A cold sweat still broke out across the back of my neck. I glanced in my rear view mirror at the fast fading street sign and shook my head. No need to be foolish. When the uneasiness refused to subside, I turned up my music. It did little to drown out the niggling little voice that was demanding I turn around.

  “They’re going to Mom’s house!” it said.

  No, they wouldn’t be. There was no reason for them to.

  I made it another mile before making an illegal u-turn and heading back. Sometimes you just can’t shake that intuitive feeling that something is very wrong.

  I was only planning to drive by and prove to myself that everything was fine; no one would even know I was there. Except all the neighbors who were standing in their yards, watching as officers taped off the street and my mother’s yard. Cop cars and an ambulance were parked all along the street in front of her house, their lights still flashing. Mom was standing on the front stoop with an officer. I’d never seen that expression on her face before: some terrible combination of horror and deep cut sorrow that aged her immeasurably.

  In a daze, I pulled into a nearby driveway. Ignoring the incredulous looks from the homeowners, I left my car running while slowly approaching the police tape on with leaden feet.

  “Sir, please return to your vehicle.” A cop was suddenly in front of me, holding up a hand.

  “That’s my mom,” I said.

  “What?”

  I pointed dumbly to the house.

  “Caleb!” Mom shrieked more than called my name. She was tearing across the lawn toward me, oblivious to the stares from her neighbors. She almost collapsed into my arms.

  The cop helped me catch her and lower her to the curb. She sat and shivered, groaning my name over and over again. I held her against my chest and rocked with her, back and forth, completely at a loss. I looked helplessly to the officer, who had stepped back to give us some room.

  “Did something happen to Art?” I asked.

  Mom wailed at the sound of my brother’s name.

  “Mom? What happened?” My throat was tightening with panic. “Where’s Art?”

  There was no getting through to her. Whatever composure she had was gone, and she could only sob hysterically.

  “Somebody tell me what’s going on!” I demanded. The flurry of people continued to move around us, and I got no immediate answers.

  A gurney was wheeled out of the house some time later. The unmistakable black bag lying atop it nearly made my heart stop.

  “Mom!” I pushed her back to arm’s length, my fingers digging into her flesh. “Is that Art? What happened? Talk to me!”

  My shouting must have startled her enough to bring her halfway back to reality. She touched my face gently and shook her head, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “Leona.”

  It was a while before the cops would speak to me. I had to wait until Leona’s body was put into the back of the ambulance and taken away and they’d finished up photographing the crime scene and collecting evidence.

  Crime scene. Evidence. I could hardly wrap my head around those words. They’d made sense once; now they sounded foreign and difficult to comprehend. Nothing about this made any real sense.

  When I finally managed to speak to someone, details were fleeting. All they would tell me is that they received a 911 call from my mother saying she’d found Leona’s body in her attic.

  “We’ll know more after the autopsy,” was a popular phrase.

  They let Mom back in long enough to pack a suitcase under intense supervision. They only let her leave once I provided my address as where she’d be staying. She wasn’t even allowed to take her car as they hadn’t searched it yet.

  “Don’t leave town. Either of you,” we were told as we crossed the street to my car. The neighbor had been nice enough to shut it off for me and leave the keys in the ignition.

  Mom didn’t speak again until the next morning. We were sitting at the kitchen table with breakfast and coffee in front of us, untouched.

  “She was in your dad’s old trunk. The brown one with all the stickers on it,” she said numbly. “I went up to get the Easter decorations, and there was this awful smell...”

  “Mom,” I put my hand over hers and she gripped it tight, “where’s Art?”

  “I don’t know. He went out in the morning to run some errands after I said I was going to decorate. He never came home.”

  “He knew you were going to the attic.”

  She turned her dark rimmed, sunken eyes to me. “He knew I was going to find her.”

  We stopped talking after that.

  The month that followed was a hellish one. Art remained missing, but people needed someone to blame, and we were the best thing. We answered and re-answered the cops’ questions and offered all the information we had, but it never felt like enough. It was as if they thought we’d eventually break if they just kept applying pressure. We had nothing left to give them: no secrets, no involvement, nothing.

  It didn’t matter.

  Mom was quietly let go from her workplace two weeks after Leona was found. She was told that her performance had been slipping and she was unfocused, but we knew the real reason. Her friends stopped calling for the most part, and she didn’t get invited out anywhere. The only time her phone did ring, it was the police with more questions. Either that or unlisted numbers calling to tell her she was a monster, a whore, blaming her for what Art had done.

  She stopped leaving my house except to go for more interrogation; the stares and whispers were too much for her to handle. We got toilet papered and egged on more than one occasion, and one particularly bold bastard spray painted “Murderer!” across the front of my house.

  It only got worse once the autopsy results came back and were leaked. Leona had been tortured before she died: raped, cut, choked, beaten, and finally stabbed half a dozen times in her chest and stomach. There was some evidence that she’d still been alive when Art put her in the trunk where she succumbed to her injuries alone in the dark.

  The calls got worse. Mom had to shut her phone off. My car tires were slashed and all of the glass was smashed. Rocks were thrown through the house windows. Reporters started lurking on the edges of my yard, and any time we so much as looked outside, they’d start screaming questions. They demanded to know if we’d heard from Art, if we knew where he was, or if we thought he was capable of something like this.

  The last one was the worst. I’d never been close to Art since I was eight years older than him, but we’d gotten along okay. He seemed shy and nerdy as a teen, but he had friends and a social life. I’d worried a bit about him as an adult—he was an unemployed 22 year old who lived with our mom—but he’d been taking some online college classes and never gave any signs that he was unhappy. At least not when I was around. He’d certainly never shown any indication that he would do something like this.

  A journal found by the police proved otherwise. In it, Art documented his anger, his depression, and his loneliness. Women were a source of constant frustration for him that morphed into a confusing combination of vulgar hatred and idolization. I found out he resented me for my success and thought our mother favored me while looking down on him. He wrote that she was “just another bitch”, and he couldn’t wait for her to die so he could get his inheritance.

  When the cops read that to Mom, she got up, gathered her things, and left the station.

  “It real
ly is my fault,” she said to me on the drive home. “How did I miss so much?”

  No matter what I said, she wouldn’t and couldn’t stop blaming herself.

  I started hearing her move around in the night. Often she’d just cry, sometimes it sounded like she was pacing, other times I’d hear her talking. It was always quiet and muffled by the wall between us, but it still kept me up. I didn’t tell her that though. I thought she might be praying and didn’t want to interrupt.

  In the mornings, she’d come to the kitchen looking older than the day before. She seemed to be shrinking into herself, her shoulders hunched and head bowed. I swear her hair was graying more every time I saw her.

  “Maybe we should see someone. A therapist or something to help us,” I suggested gently over breakfast.

  “That wouldn’t help.”

  “It could.”

  “No.”

  “Mom—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it!”

  She slammed her spoon onto the table and shoved her chair back. I tried to apologize, but she left the room, her robe hugged tightly around her thin frame.

  I left for work, clouded with grief and worry, and dwelled on thoughts of mom and Art and Leona all day. I was at a loss and felt completely isolated, which caused ripples of guilt to stir. I struggled with wanting to reach out for help as part of me believed we didn’t deserve it. Maybe we should have noticed what was going on with Art; maybe there was something we could have done to stop it. I didn’t know what, but something. Had we just buried our heads and ignored the warning signs? Could we have saved Leona?

  I got home that evening in time to see someone running away from my house, a mask pulled over their face. They flipped me off as I drove up, disappearing around the side of my neighbor’s house across the street. They’d left a present for me though: a burning bag of feces on my welcome mat outside my front door. I smelled it before I saw it. I ran inside for the fire extinguisher and found Mom huddled in the entryway, sobbing hysterically.