“Beloved,” the man said.
Chapter Seventy-One
“Daddy!" Teresa wept, clutching her mother. “Daddy! Mommy’s dead!”
But the man in the jagged doorway didn’t look at her. He didn’t seem like her father at all, because the expression he wore was different. He looked like someone else had crawled into his skin.
“It’s taken me so long to come to you,” he said, his arms outstretched.
Chapter Seventy-Two
Agnes felt a doorway open within herself. He had found the key, finally.
He found the key!
It was as if they were back in their nest, beneath the street in Whitechapel. It was like that last day. She was transformed—no longer in the body of the Hatcher woman, she was Agnes Graile, nineteen. Her Jack was there for her.
She went to his arms. “I’m sorry for what I did,” she whispered, pressing her face against his neck. “I brought you all these lives so we could be together forever.”
She smelled again the mildew and the coal. She kissed his neck. The scent of his soap was there—the scent of the gentleman surgeon.
“Leave them,” he whispered. “They’re nothing to us.”
She smiled, nodding, and reached into her pocket for the key to the handcuffs. She smelled wonderful, as if she’d just taken a scented bath. It was as if her entire body chemistry had changed. There was no sea to her, no blood. Just the scent of flowers after a rain. She handed the small key to him. Trey took it, and uncuffed the boy.
Then, he hooked the empty handcuff around his own wrist. If I can get her away from them. If I can just get her away from here.
“Bound for all eternity,” he said.
And then she felt the metal against the flesh of her breast.
Instinctively, she drew back from him. She saw the gun in his hand. “It’s karma,” she said dreamily, “What I did to you, you now do to me.”
She reached for the gun, her hand closing over his.
Teresa wrapped her arms around her mother, weeping. She didn’t understand why her father was acting so crazy.
Then, she felt the breath on her cheek.
She drew back, looking at her mother.
Carly opened her eyes. She felt a pain below her chest. She tried to speak, but had some trouble. She tried to rise up, but had little energy.
Agnes squeezed the trigger of the gun—
Trey pulled it back and up, not wanting to kill her—
The bullet grazed Hatcher’s shoulder—
Agnes knocked Trey backwards with all her weight. It was as if she had the strength of several strong men. He felt his knees buckle, and the wind was knocked out of him.
He fell to the floor, unconscious.
Agnes leaned over him. “I didn’t mean to,” she said, “It was the locket. I didn’t mean to…the oven…”
Trey, waking, hearing her babbling about “locket” and “oven,” realized that his act as her beloved Jack had sent her mind back to her repressed memory. He drifted in and out of consciousness, for a few moments, had the hallucination that he was inside some dark cold metal closet and could hear rain outside.
As the rain spattered the streets and leaked into the basement, Agnes opened the small locket and saw the lock of dark hair and the woman’s picture. It was some society woman. Jack had betrayed her.
He was there, hiding in the oven so that the police would not find him if they searched their nest. He was hiding behind rags and coal.
She felt the blood boil within her.
How could he betray her like that? They had sworn eternal devotion! They had mixed their blood with the blood of others—they were bound together for all time and eternity.
She soaked more rags in oil.
When she had several such rags, she opened the oven door slightly. She held the oil lamp up. In the light from the lamp, she saw his eyes. He looked at her with love. She knew it was not meant for her. She was just a whore. She was just the street-rag he had worn for a period of time. This other woman in the locket—she was the one he loved.
“Are they gone?” he whispered.
She answered him with fire.
Carly whispered to Teresa, “The knife.”
Teresa stretched as far as she could to reach the fishing knife which had fallen in the dirt.
She said to Mark, “Marky! Help…Mommy needs help…” She pointed towards the knife, which was just a few feet from him.
Mark took a step towards the fishing knife.
It lay in the dirt, its metal shining red in the unholy light from the flares.
The images of Jesus on the cross seemed to dance in the flickering glow.
Trey came to full consciousness. He reached for the gun, but it wasn’t near him.
Agnes, cuffed to him, dragged him up to his feet.
“I had to do it,” she said, tears streaming down a face which still looked like a tigress ready to spring. She held the gun in her hand. “I had to. You were going to run off with her. You were going to forsake me. I couldn’t let you. I knew it was the flesh that drew you. I knew that. I did it for us. So our love would not be tainted…”
She pointed the gun towards Carly. She drew Trey towards his wife and children. The handcuffs chafed his wrist. “When she dies, you’ll understand.”
“I do understand,” Trey said. “And I love you.”
A glimmer of hope sparkled in Agnes Hatcher’s eyes.
For the first time since he’d been in his twenties, Trey thought she looked human. She was no longer the Gorgon or the Surgeon, but a much-abused girl who had not been allowed to fully develop. She looked like the most pitiable creature on the face of the earth. In a moment, he remembered her life: the torture as a young girl, the darkness that was forced to blossom within her mind.
“If you love me, you’ll watch her die,” Agnes said. She aimed the gun for Carly’s face.
Carly’s eyes grew wide with terror.
Trey brought his free hand to Agnes Hatcher’s face. He turned it towards his own. He kissed her strongly, passionately. “It’s me. It’s Jack,” he said. Then, he took the gun from her hand. “Let me murder the whore.”
Carly whispered, “Trey?”
“Shut up!” He yelled at her. Then, softly, to Agnes, “We can always be together now.”
“Do you forgive me?” Agnes asked.
“For what?”
Her mood suddenly changed. She wasn’t buying the act. She went for the gun. “You’ll know when I kill her. Your eyes’ll be opened.”
Using all the strength he could muster, Trey jerked the handcuff. The gun dropped without firing. He and Agnes fell to the floor of the chamber. He groaned as he felt her knee connect with his groin, hard. She ground her knee into him there. He retched, and jabbed his elbow into her stomach.
She scratched at him, blindly, as if fighting for her life. He punched her as hard as he could in the face. She bit down hard on his neck, drawing blood. They wrestled to the well—the rim of rocks at its edge keeping them from falling over. She managed to bring him down. She rolled on top of him, and put her face close to his.
She foamed at the mouth. It was like having a bobcat sitting on top of him, small but strong and mean. “I’ll make it right,” she spat at him. “It’s not your fault.” Through the wild look on her face, he saw into her eyes. She was a child there, they were swirls of colors, and she was lost within them. It was like watching someone where half their soul was at war with the other half. “It’s not your fault. It's 'cause of me, what I did. That night.”
And then a calm came over her. She half-smiled. “I know you love me. I know I was wrong.”
Her strength seemed to mellow, and she was no longer a heavy weight bearing down upon him, but light. He felt he could push her off.
He was about to do just that.
And then, as if fulfilling some destiny, she rolled over the edge of the chasm.
Chapter Seventy-Three
Trey held onto one o
f the stone markers at the edge of the great well with his free arm.
The handcuff with Agnes’ weight pulling on it, sliced into his wrist like a razor.
If he tried, he could pull her up.
He could save her.
All his training had been to save and help and understand.
But this woman was a monster.
This woman had stabbed his wife in her side.
This woman would’ve tortured and killed his family.
If he raised her up from the pit, even if he could, she would tear into him like a lion. But something within him still believed that she could be saved. That something in that monster soul could be salvaged.
Carly crawled slowly, snake-like, to the edge of the precipice. Teresa crawled along with her, still handcuffed to her.
Carly gripped Trey’s arm where the handcuff was cutting into his wrist.
Agnes, dangling, but holding on, too, to what she could of the walls of the natural well.
“Jack,” she whispered, “please, help me. I love you.”
Then, she tugged harder on the handcuff, kicking out from the wall. She didn’t want help being brought up to safety.
She wanted to bring Trey over the edge with her.
Chapter Seventy-Four
Carly held the fishing knife up in her free hand and brought it down.
She hacked at Agnes Hatcher’s wrist, cutting deep into her flesh.
Carly sawed with the knife until Agnes’ small hand, bloody and torn, slipped loose from the cuff.
Agnes dropped into the darkness of the pit.
Chapter Seventy-Five
Trey held his wife and children as close to himself as he could get them. He tore his shirt off and wrapped it around Carly’s side to help stop the wound up. He wanted to drown in the feeling of their skin, their smell, their sound, their taste as he kissed Mark’s forehead and Teresa’s cheek. He held his wife the longest, and they cried.
When he felt the strength, he helped Carly up. “Maybe you should go get help,” she said.
“No,” he said. “We’ll make it back to the boat. I’m not going to leave you.”
Carly was feeling weak, but she leaned against him as they walked back down the winding path of the cavern. Teresa held Mark’s hand, but kept one hand on her father’s back as he walked, just to make sure he was there.
When they came to the lower exit from the caverns, they saw that the water had risen. The boats were gone, washed out with the tide.
“So, what now? An earthquake?” Carly asked, keeping her sense of humor intact.
Trey held up the flare. He set Carly down at the edge of the path. He instructed Mark and Teresa to stay with her.
Trey Campbell walked out into the dark sea, flare held high.
The water reached his chest, and he found a rock to climb onto.
He waved the flare back and forth, trusting that someone would see it and send help.
Within an hour, he saw the lights of another boat. As it got closer, he saw that it was an old fashioned fishing trawler. A man on board waved a lantern, and Trey shouted, waving the flare faster until it seemed like he’d painted the sky red with it.
Chapter Seventy-Six
She heard him. The shout. Like a cry of joy.
Agnes Hatcher lay on a slanting rock shelf of the monk’s well. The smells all around her were of sea anemone and urchin, and dead fish. The water was gently lapping at her back where it had risen with the tide.
She would drown, or die from the fall. Or she would live and starve, too weak to call out for help—and then die slowly in several days. It didn’t matter to her.
She stared up the sheer wall to the white chalk of the cavern, which seemed to glow in the dark. A memory came to her, not of a basement in Whitechapel, nor with the man who had taken her from the gas station restroom.
She was ten, and at her parents’ house. It was her birthday, and her father was taking her to the park to ride the ponies.
The memory was brief but intense, like a birthday candle just before it was blown out.
Her small hand within her father’s larger hand.
Warmth.
She could not move, no matter how hard she tried. She felt the blood pulsing from her wrist.
It was like being in that room again at Darden.
Restrained.
But the cloth was off her face. She could see. At least, she could still see.
Sight was its own kind of freedom.
Her lungs hurt, and breathing was difficult. All her energy went into each breath.
Minutes later, she heard the rush of water as it flooded the well-like chamber.
The salt stung the stab wounds in her wrist. But pain was distant, like the crashing waves outside the caverns.
Death was like going home. It had to take you in when there was nowhere else to go.
And she was going home, finally. After all this time.
She awaited, patiently, the next incarnation.
It came to her, not as the sea rushing over her face, nor as the blood drained from her body, but as a cloak of fire in her mind.
Chapter Seventy-Seven
After the old fisherman had located them and brought them back to town, and after Carly got patched up at a local clinic, they had spent the morning at the police station, giving their statements to Oscar Arboles.
They passed the afternoon sleeping at the Breakers Hotel. Trey slept in the bed,his body wrapped around his wife’s; his children lay in cots in the same room.
He didn’t know how long a time would pass until he would allow them out of his sight again.
Trey awoke to the explosions and whistles of firecrackers.
“Oh,” he said, waking Carly. “I forgot it’s July fourth.”
She rubbed her eyes. He kissed her several times before he could bring himself to get out of bed.
“Would it be foolish to take the kids to see the fireworks?” Carly asked. She was feeling better. “I mean, after all we’ve been through?”
“We’re on vacation,” Trey answered. “Why not?”
In the bay, a flat barge shot off the brilliant fireworks. Yachts and sloops of all sizes speckled the horizon. A band played John Phillip Sousa marches from the docks. The beach lit up with sparklers. Tourists had packed the place in twenty-four hours.
That night, Trey sat out in another rented boat holding Carly, while Mark and Teresa were amazed by the night fireworks.
The last rocket launched and sprayed a rainbow of color across the night.
For a second, Trey felt a strange tug within him. He shivered slightly.
“Something wrong?” Carly asked, noticing his change of expression.
He didn’t want to say what he felt. He said, “Just happy we made it through.”
“They’ll find her body,” Carly said. “No one could survive that fall. Not even her.”
Trey Campbell returned his attention to the falling sparkles, and to the renewed joy in his children’s faces.
But he felt it again.
Within him.
She’s gone.
He thought he’d heard her voice whisper to him, Beloved!
Trey imagined a stone alley, and a shivering young girl standing in its corner. She watched the basement of an adjoining tenement rage with fire. As the flames shot up through the night, the girl moved closer to the fire, as if looking for something.
“Are you there?” she asked the fire. “Jack?”
Trey tried to warn her away, but the girl pulled her cloak closer around her shoulders. She moved towards the burning building. She lifted a grate that was red from heat. The flesh of her fingers burned against it. As the tongues of fire shot up from below, the girl descended into the burning room.
Trey thought he saw them clutch at each other as if they were the only souls in the world. Clutch and claw and embrace as the flames engulfed them.
He watched the sky brighten with one last shattering spray of light.
For a moment, it illuminated the heavens.
And then, the sky was dark, a mystery.
Trey Campbell wondered if, somewhere safe, she would be reborn.
Be sure and read Books 2 and 3 of The Criminally Insane series:
Red Angel
Night Cage
Discover this Haunting Thriller
The Hour Before Dark
Never play the Dark Game. It will take you over. It will come alive...
After the brutal murder of a loved one, Nemo Raglan must return to the New England island he thought he'd escaped for good…and the shadowy home called Hawthorn.
Get The Hour Before Dark by Douglas Clegg
From The Hour Before Dark:
…It attacked with the ferocity of a wild animal.
At the point my father, Gordie Raglan, entered the smokehouse, his life was nearly over.
Even if you'd told him that, it probably wouldn't have stopped him.
Knowing my father, he probably had been thinking about the Boston Celtics and if they were going to kick any ass that winter. Or whether he was going to have shepherd's pie without peas for supper when he got back. Or how he was going to repair the half-rotted roof of the cabin down by the duck pond when he knew he should just let the cabin fall apart.
He was a guy who was fairly transparent in his thinking and, though smart, was a simple man. He liked his world to be orderly.
[Criminally Insane 01.0] Bad Karma Page 18
