“Ouch.”
He looked up and saw the face of the mute girl.
She was alone.
Well, that was curious. Where were the reinforcements? Where was lisa the housekeeper?
Why am I not dead? he thought.
The mystery deepened as she beckoned him forward with a bent forefinger.
Eddie cleared his throat. “Um … you want me to get up?”
She nodded.
Eddie sighed. “Sure, whatever.”
Something vaguely like a smile touched the corners of her mouth, and he didn’t even detect a spark of malice in it. Then she swirled out of the room again, leaving Eddie to ponder the bewildering turn of events.
Enigmatic, Eddie thought.
God, I hate that in a woman.
Eddie walked out of the closet and entered the bedroom. The girl was sitting at a small round table in a corner of the room. She looked up as he stepped into the room. There was an unoccupied chair next to her. Eddie steeled himself for any weirdness that was about to ensue, and sat down next to her.
There was a pad of paper on the table, pink teenage girl’s stationery. The girl’s gaze shifted to the empty page before her, dipped a pen in an ink quill, shook it, and began to write.
Eddie grunted. “Huh … a quill pen. How … retro.”
Eddie wanted to slap himself-the weirdness of the situation had apparently rendered him incapable of intelligent discourse.
She turned the pad toward him, fixed him with a serious gaze, and tapped the top page with the pen.
Eddie looked at what she had written.
YOU ARE PROBABLY WONDERING WHY I HAVEN’T SUMMONED THE MASTER.
Eddie raised an eyebrow. “Well, now that you mention it, yeah.”
She repositioned the pad and wrote some more. Eddie’s eyes followed the words as she penned them with finely turned strokes.
BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT HERE BY CHANCE.
Eddie was suddenly apprehensive again, recalling the passing thought he’d had at the last checkpoint-that he was being herded instead of chased. Well, here was the first inkling that bit of intuition wasn’t so far off track.
He tried to keep the fear out of his voice as he said, “So … why am I here?”
She dipped the quill in ink and wrote some more.
I SUMMONED YOU.
Eddie gaped at her. “But… why?”
I AM NOT READY TO TELL YOU THAT, she wrote.
Eddie squinted at the infuriating words. “Not… ready… to … tell… me.” He cleared his throat. “Well, that’s just great. You let me know when you can spare a minute to clue me in to whatever sadistic game you and The Master are playing.”
He started to get up.
“Meanwhile, I’ll catch some shut-eye.”
She hissed at him, displaying rows of perfect teeth as white as oysters-movie-star teeth. Eddie’s upward motion ceased, and his eyes widened at the incongruous sight. She was one of the loveliest women he’d ever seen, possessed of a delicate beauty that made his little soldier want to stand up and salute, and yet she looked so vicious.
So deadly.
He sat back down.
The feral quality vanished from her face, and her attention returned to the page of pink stationery, where one slim, pale hand was again spinning beautifully rendered handwriting from margin to margin at a startling speed. She filled half the page, then turned the pad toward him.
Eddie read with mild interest some dry biographical information about the girl, but boredom gave way to shock and terror as his gaze moved down the page.
Her name was Giselle Burkhardt, and she’d first come to this place in 1973, when she’d been seventeen years old and a senior in high school.
Eddie’s brow wrinkled at that bit of impossible information-Christ, the girl looked seventeen right now, thirty years after the claimed date of her arrival in The Master’s world.
But that was easy to swallow compared to what came next.
She’d been on what was to be her last vacation with her family before embarking on a new phase of her life- college in New England. The car carrying her parents and younger brother experienced engine trouble east of Chattanooga, and her father had been forced to pull off the highway. Thus began a long night of terror that culminated with the mutilation deaths of her parents. Her brother was taken to another room, and she was chained and stuffed in a crawl space, where she remained until The Master was ready to initiate the second phase of her indoctrination. She was removed from the crawl space and tortured by Ms. Wickman until she was screaming her willingness to do anything to end her agony.
Her brother was brought before her.
She remembered how heartbreakingly brave he’d looked as he stood there trembling.
It hadn’t been easy.
She wanted Eddie to know that.
But the pain was more than she could take. And she knew they could keep inflicting pain every bit the equal of what she’d already experienced-and perhaps worse-should she refuse to do their bidding.
She didn’t refuse.
Ms. Wickman gave Giselle a straight razor.
Giselle used it on her brother.
Over a long period of time.
Then finished him.
“Oh my God,” Eddie breathed as he read this. “Oh, sweet jumpin’ Jesus…”
I MURDERED MY BROTHER, the tale’s concluding paragraph began. THE MASTER ALTERED ELEMENTS OF MY BODY CHEMISTRY AND ARRESTED THE AGING PROCESS, ALLOWING ME TO SERVE HIM HERE AS HIS APPRENTICE INDEFINITELY I HAVE SERVED HIM WELL. WELL ENOUGH TO FOOL HIM. I HAVE WAITED THREE DECADES TO ATONE FOR MY SINS, AND THE TIME FOR ATONEMENT IS NEARLY AT HAND.
Eddie stared at the disturbing words a moment later, horrified by the cruelty they described, then he wrenched his gaze away. He didn’t want to look at Giselle, didn’t want to have to look into those dark eyes. He could feel them on him, studying him, taking the measure of him. He cast his gaze about the room, looking for something, anything, to divert his attention-and he realized the cat was missing.
He still wasn’t looking at her when he said, “What happened to furball?”
Giselle turned the pad to a fresh page and wrote, GONE.
Eddie frowned. “Gone?”
She elaborated: THE CAT IS A SHAPESHIFTER, ALBEIT A MORE HIGHLY EVOLVED EXAMPLE OF THAT SPECIES. IT FUNCTIONS AS MY PERSONAL MESSENGER AND SPY
A shapeshifter.
Well, sure.
Eddie had only seen the Lon Chaney wannabes Below, but he remembered his struggle with the creature in the closet and knew she was telling the truth.
Eddie was finally able to meet her gaze again. “What happened … have you always been mute?”
She scrawled a single angry word in big block letters: NO.
Eddie winced. “The Master? He …”
She wrote, I WAS A SHRILL TEENAGER. HE TOOK MY VOICE, A REMINDER THAT MY STATUS AS APPRENTICE DIDN’T MEAN HE WOULDN’T PUNISH ME HE REVELS IN SUCH PETTY CRUELTIES.
Eddie shook his head, “That’s fucked up, Giselle.”
IT WAS A VALUABLE LESSON, she wrote. I LEARNED PATIENCE. I LEARNED TO THINK. I TURNED INWARD
