into their sockets. The wood floor beneath me turned to mud. I turned around, but did so in slow motion. I screamed but the sound of my voice was like an old vinyl record played at slow speed. When my eyes connected with his, I felt all oxygen leave my lungs. It was as if I’d been kicked in the stomach by an invisible booted foot.
There he was: the source of my fear; the author of my texts.
You are one day early…
He was the old man from the Hollywood Carwash. His was the face from ViCAP. He was the monster from my dreams. He was shaven clean now, and what had been long white hair was now a bald scalp. His face was gaunt, cheeks sallow, chin protruding. His pallor was chalk-pale. Dark round eyes made the paleness all the whiter.
Now for certain I remembered the face. I remembered the man; the monster.
I took in all these details with every single one of my senses as he approached me in the hall of my apartment, dressed in the worn work-boots and the blue uniform of the apartment complex maintenance crew. Standing there I could only wonder how he managed to get Michael out of there without anyone spotting him. He must have wrapped Michael up in the rug, dragged him out the front door like a piece of furniture. There were always people moving in and out of these apartments. Who would notice?
In one hand he held a needle and syringe. In the other, a pistol. He stared into my eyes as I began to feel myself losing all sense of balance.
“My other little kitten is gone,” he sobbed, in a gruff, high-pitched moan.
“Molly died,” I choked.
“Cry, cry, cry,” he whispered, his eyes tearing, his bottom lip protruding out in pout position. “Cry, cry, cry.”
He hadn’t yet touched me with the tip of that needle before I passed out.
Chapter 47
Molly enters the house in the woods before me. She is not bothered by the smell anymore than she is bothered by the creepy feel of spider webs that hang from the ceilings and the walls. In a word, the interior is trashed, with broken furniture scattered all about what was once an open living room. Looking all around me, I see that most of the walls have been opened up probably with claw hammers, almost all of the copper piping and wiring torn away by scrap hunters. There’s an old chandelier that hangs from the ceiling, its bulbs gone along with any crystals that once hung from it.
And that smell. It’s just as bad inside as it is outside.
“ Come on,” Molly says. “I want to show you the upstairs.”
Out the corner of my eye, I make out the staircase that leads up to a second floor. Its treads are no longer level, but leaning inwards. Just looking at them frightens me so that I can’t imagine stepping on them, bearing weight upon them. But Molly isn’t the least bit afraid. She heads to the stairs and in the home’s semi-darkness, begins climbing them, one at a time.
I follow.
As we ascend the staircase in near pitch darkness I begin to smell a new odor. It’s the same smell you get inside an old abandoned barn. The smell of cats and their urine. As we come to the second floor landing, a black cat scurries out from a room at the far end of the hall, runs right past us.
“ Hi Blacky,” Mol says, as the cat leaps back down the steps.
“ Obviously you two are acquainted,” I say.
“ We’re old friends,” she adds.
“ Look at all this room, Bec,” she goes on. “There’re two rooms apiece for us.”
I go no further than the first bedroom. There’s an old bare mattress set out on the floor, its rusted springs sticking out of the holes. There are dark spatter stains on the walls that remind me of blood. There’s an exposed light bulb that hangs down from a wire. If it were not for the sunlight that sneaks in through the cracked double- hung windows, the place would be pitch black.
I find myself shaking. I’m having trouble breathing. I get the feeling something bad has happened here. Something bad enough for the place to have been abandoned.
“ I’m going back down, Mol,” I say through shivering teeth. “I don’t like it up here.”
“ Don’t like it?” she says, running from room to room, jumping up and down on the bare mattresses. “It’s all ours.”
I turn back for the stairs. That’s when I hear the front door slam shut.
The Woods
Chapter 48
The cell phone woke me from out of a drug-induced sleep. I raised myself up, scraping away the wet pine needles that were stuck to my right cheek. I opened my eyes onto a darkness broken only by a tiny flashing red light embedded inside the plastic phone casing. Climbing onto my knees, I reached out for the phone, opened it, and held it up to my ear.
I was wet and shivering. I was also dizzy, out of balance. Out of instinct, I pressed the phone to my ear, listened for a voice. But then it dawned on me that there would be no voice.
Setting the phone flat in the palm of my hand, I peered down at the light radiant screen. Opening and closing my eyes, I tried hard to focus.
Do you luv Michael little kitten?
I thumbed in an answer. Pounded it in.
Do not hurt him.
It took forever to type in the letters, my eyes straining to focus in the light rain and through the haze of the sedation.
Another text came through.
Cry, cry, cry little kitten.
No choice but to play the game. That meant telling the truth.
I luv Michael.
I awaited Whalen’s reply. It came quickly, as though the text had been prepared well ahead of time as a quick text.
Flashlight is at your feet. Pick it up and turn it on little kitten.
From down on my knees, I reached out with my free hand, probing the wet mix of pine needles, leaves and raw earth with bear fingers until I located the heavy flashlight. The light not only provided me with a means of vision, it also revealed the truth: Whalen had dropped me inside a patch of thick woods. The monster had drugged me, hauled me out to some remote area and dropped my unconscious body inside it. Somewhere wild, somewhere dense with cover. Somewhere cold.
Another text.
Go to pictures little kitten.
I thumbed the menu key. A second screen appeared, this one offering eight options. The first for recent calls, the second for personal phone book, the third for games. And so on. I fingered the number 6 on the keypad. A picture appeared. A man who had been bound with silver duct tape. A man of medium build forced down on his knees. Like me, he seemed to be kneeling inside a thick patch of woods, while a bright white light shined on him, as if coming from a set of headlights. In the picture I could see that the man’s hair was dark, thick. He was bare- chested. The mustached face had been covered with separate strips of duct tape, one covering the eyes, the other covering the mouth, leaving only an exposed nose through which to breathe.
