“Good morning,” he said, the softness of his voice carrying a menace that made Lindsay’s heart falter.
Now she saw that he’d brought a large box with him.
“It’s a special day,” he said as he set it on the table. “A special day for all of us!” He ripped the tape from Lindsay’s mouth, and she gasped in pain, but choked off the accompanying cry that might give her captor satisfaction.
The flashlight went out, and a moment later he began to light candles, until the chamber was filled with flickering illumination. As the light grew brighter, Lindsay saw Shannon’s body, still lying on the floor, her head in a pool of dried blood. A cry rose in her throat, and she squelched it before any sound could escape, and turning away from Shannon, caught sight of Ellen Fine.
Ellen’s eyes were fixed on her, boring into her, and though her mouth was still covered with tape, Lindsay understood the message Ellen was trying to convey as clearly as if she’d spoken it aloud.
Forcing herself to act against every instinct inside her, Lindsay twisted her lips into a smile and whispered a single word through her parched lips. “Please?” The man’s eyes fixed on her, and she managed to utter three more words. “I’m so thirsty.”
“This isn’t your party,” he said, his voice hard. “This is my celebration.”
Lindsay glanced at Ellen, whose eyes were open and watching.
When the room was lit by nearly two dozen candles, the man opened the box and began removing its contents, carefully placing each object on the tiny table.
A birthday cake, complete with candles.
Party hats, the kind of brightly colored, foil-covered cones Lindsay and her friends used to have at all their birthday parties.
Toy horns, and whistles from which paper tongues extended when you blew them.
And finally, small paper plates, plastic forks, and napkins that matched the plates.
The man arranged everything on the table, looked at Ellen, then at Lindsay. In the flickering candlelight, the grotesquely scrawled smile on his surgical mask seemed to come alive, making Lindsay’s skin crawl as he leered at her. “It’s my birthday,” he said. “So we’re going to have a party!”
He picked up the little hats and put one on, bringing the elastic band down over both his masks, giving him the look of a maniacal clown that Lindsay knew she would see in her nightmares for the rest of her life.
Wordlessly, he put a hat on her head, then one on Ellen's, and Lindsay was barely able to control her urge to twist her head away from his touch.
When the hats were secured to both of them, he lifted Shannon’s limp body from the floor and placed it in her chair.
She toppled forward, her lifeless face smashing onto the table.
“Sit up!” he demanded, pulling Shannon’s body straight. But as soon as he let her go, she fell forward again. Wordlessly, he pulled her up once again, and this time wrapped a loop of tape around her chest to keep her upright.
One side of Shannon’s face was flattened from where it had been pressed against the floor for hours, the blood that pooled in it giving it the look of a bruise.
One of her eyes was open, staring blankly at Lindsay.
Lindsay turned her eyes away as their tormentor put a party hat on Shannon’s head and drew the elastic under her chin.
“Isn’t this fun?” he asked, his voice going cold as he turned toward her. “Are we all happy?”
Lindsay forced herself to smile, feeling her lower lip crack as it stretched, and all she could think of was water.
But there was no water.
There was nothing but the cake, and the grotesque hats, and the terrifying figure whose visage was now looming only a few inches from her eyes.
“You’re not smiling,” the man whispered as he jerked her head back by her hair and leaned still closer to her face. She tried to look away, but he spoke again, his whispered words lashing at her like tiny whips. “Look at me!” His voice trembled with fury as he ripped off a length of duct tape and slapped it over her mouth, then used an almost ruined red felt-tip marker to scrawl the smile he’d just demanded. Then, his anger unassuaged, he put another length of tape over Lindsay’s eyes, and drew two new ones on the tape, smearing her smile as he worked so it twisted upward into a grotesque sneer.
When he was done, she sensed him pulling back, admiring his handiwork. “Better,” he said. “Now you look happy.”
As Lindsay tried to sense what was happening, her tormentor turned to Ellen. “Are we all happy?” he asked.
Doing her best not to betray her fear, Ellen managed a nod.
“Very well, then,” the man said. He flicked his lighter on again and began to light the candles on the cake. “I hope you brought me presents,” he said. “You know how much little boys like their presents.” When all the candles had been lit, he stood back and admired the macabre scene. “Good,” he crooned. “Good.”
Lindsay, blinded and muted by the tape over her eyes and mouth, sat absolutely still, silently praying that by doing nothing, she might escape her captor’s notice, at least for a moment or two. Then he spoke again, and she knew her prayers had been in vain.
“Sing,” the softly menacing voice demanded. “It’s time to sing!”
Her heart began to race as she thought of what he might do if she didn’t comply. But how could she? Not with—
A searing pain ripped across the lower part of her face, and for a moment she thought her lower lip had been torn away along with the tape. Then the tape across her eyes was stripped away, too, taking most of her eyebrows and lashes with it. Despite her determination to show no fear, a whimper rose in her throat, but even as it escaped her lips, the man who loomed above her began singing.
“Hap… py… birth… day… to… you…” He enunciated each syllable as if it were a separate word. “Hap… py… birth—” He cut the song off mid-word, his eyes flashing as he glowered at Ellen. In a blur of motion, he reached out and ripped the tape from her mouth as furiously as he’d torn it from Lindsay’s seconds ago. “Now you can sing. Now we can all sing.” His hand moved, and it was a second or two before Lindsay realized what he was doing: conducting, as if he was the choirmaster and she and Ellen Fine the choir.
She heard Ellen clear her throat, and though Lindsay wasn’t sure she could muster up even a single sound, she was terrified of what might happen if she didn’t.
“Sing!” the man demanded. “Sing to me!” Suddenly, he picked up the burning cake and thrust it into Lindsay’s face. “Sing!” he shouted as she recoiled, the burning candles scorching her brows. “Sing!” the darkly leering figure demanded again. “Hap… py… birth… day…”
Her cheeks were stinging from the hot wax that had splashed onto them, but she forced herself to ignore the pain. “To you,” Lindsay picked up, willing her barely audible voice into unison with Ellen.
The man nodded, then pushed the fiery cake toward Ellen.
“Louder!”
Lindsay and Ellen struggled to find the strength to continue. “Happy birthday to you,” they sang together.
The man wheeled and thrust the partially crushed cake at Shannon. As Lindsay watched helplessly, Shannon’s hair sizzled and began to burn, filling the air with acrid smoke and the stench of burning hair.
“Sing!” he demanded as Shannon’s hair continued to burn.
Lindsay and Ellen raised their voices higher as the flames consumed Shannon’s hair, but as the flames died away and they came to the end of the song, so too did their voices.
“Sing it again!” their torturer demanded. “Louder!”
Despair began to overcome the determination that until now had made Lindsay’s terror almost bearable. She knew there was nothing she would be able to do to satisfy this creature who had snatched her from what should have been the safety of her home, and in the end she — and Ellen — were going to die. Die here, in the flickering candlelight, like Shannon had died before them.
