Possessed

room.

Inside the apartment, Cass whirled and saw the doorknob on the apartment door turning. She hadn’t locked it. When she’d walked inside, she’d let the cats loose and then the phone had rung and she hadn’t locked it.

Cass jumped for the door, pushing against it to keep whoever was on the other side out, but in her room, the monster roared.

Sha-a uh-h-h! Sha-a uh-h-h!

It swung at her, and Cass felt the contact immediately to the side of her face. The momentum of the blow threw her back against the wall inside her white room, and physically she tumbled and fell butt first on the linoleum kitchen floor. Too far away now. All she could do was watch as the door opened and a slim figure in a hooded sweatshirt walked through it.

The girl pulled back the sweatshirt. Her eyes were surrounded by dark bruises and her brown hair was cropped short. She smiled and when she did, Cass noted that a tooth was missing.

“Hi, Cassandra. It’s so good to finally meet you. And I see you’ve met Daddy.”

Chapter 18

Sha-a uh-h-h! Sha-a uh-h-h!

“Can you hear him?” Chris asked as she stood over Cass. “Yes, you can. That’s what I’ve wanted. What I’ve waited for. Ever since Dr. Farver told me about you.”

In her room, Cass shuffled back, away from the monster. Its foul face and form didn’t seem to move but stood over her, still shouting the same unintelligible words.

In the kitchen, she tried to get to her feet but stumbled backward as the two worlds vied for her attention.

“Chr-Chris,” she stuttered, but for the life of her she couldn’t think of a thing to say. Not to a multiple murderer.

The younger woman moved inside and bolted the door behind her, something that Cass would curse herself forever for not doing as soon as she’d walked through it.

If she ever got out of this mess.

Cass figured the girl couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen. Like one of the baristas she had worked with at the coffeehouse. This girl should be making frappuccinos, not removing women’s tongues.

She was tall and, although she was slim, she still had probably about twenty pounds on Cass. She wasn’t weak. That was certain. Not if she’d managed to kill three other women of varying sizes. And, of course, it took a decent amount of hand strength to cut out a tongue.

“We’re going to be friends,” the girl said, smiling, even as she opened the drawer nearest to her and extracted a medium-size steak knife.

Cass thought about her stun gun, really the only other weapon in the apartment. She kept it in the cabinet above her refrigerator. But when she glanced over her shoulder from her position on the floor, it seemed so far away. She needed time. Time to think about the next move.

“I don’t see how that’s possible if I’m dead.”

“Oh, I’m not going to kill you. I never wanted to hurt you, Cassandra. I only wanted to find you. I needed your help.”

Inside her head, the beast suddenly charged and Cass found herself huddling into a tight position as its hooflike foot kicked her back.

Get up. This time the voice inside her head was hers. Rolling to her knees, she scrambled between the beast’s legs and, once clear of it, she managed to gain her footing. It turned and howled again, but this time Cass was ready. It swung its arm at her and, instinctively, she put into play what she had practiced and dodged the blow.

Charged with a surge of confidence that her mental form was using what her body had learned, Cass once more focused on Chris, who was now moving about the apartment, the knife gripped in her right hand.

“Those women didn’t deserve to die.”

“I know,” she whispered. “I couldn’t help that. The first lady, she was supposed to be you, but she didn’t hear Daddy. I asked her over and over again and she said I was crazy. I’m not crazy. The voice is real. You know that.”

Chris turned around and faced Cass, who had managed to pull herself off the floor using the refrigerator as leverage even while in her mind she continued to duck the blows of the raging monster.

It wasn’t possible. She was never going to be able to defend herself against two enemies.

“No, you’re not crazy,” she assured her. “The voice is real. I can hear it.”

“Yes,” Chris burst with excitement. “You can hear it. But that lady couldn’t and I got so mad. When she told me to leave I got so mad. Then I saw the knife on the counter in her kitchen. It was just out there. She’d been cooking when I walked in and the words kept coming back. ‘If you don’t shut your mouth I’m going to cut out your tongue.’ That’s what Daddy always said. He said it when I told him about the voices. He would beat me and say it when I cried. He would rape me and say it when I told him I was going to tell Mommy. ‘I’m going to cut out your tongue. Shut up. Shut up or I’m going to cut out your tongue.’”

Cass cringed at the image the girl painted and now the mental image of a monster made sense. He wasn’t a man. He was evil. And he had hurt his daughter in every way that he could.

“Is that why your mother killed him? Did she finally see what he was doing to you?”

Chris laughed, but there was no humor in the sound. She wiped her forearm across her brow, brushing the knife perilously close to her face, but it was evident that she wouldn’t have felt the sting of any cut, as far lost in her insanity as she was.

“Mommy didn’t kill Daddy. Mommy couldn’t have. She was weak and pitiful and scared of him. More scared than I was.”

Another revelation. “You killed him. You killed him and cut out his tongue.”

The look of pure joy that shone in the girl’s dark eyes was more frightening than her father’s form.

“I did. I killed him and I cut out his tongue. I thought it would be over. I didn’t think he could be a voice. But he is. He came back. He came back and now he haunts me and he won’t shut up!”

The sick joy in her expression was replaced by rage. “Over and over again. He yells and it hurts. It hurts as bad as when he used to hit me, and I have to make it go away. They put me in the hospital, but he didn’t go away. They gave me all these drugs, but he still wouldn’t go away. Then Dr. Farver came and he believed me. He believed that I could hear things and he told me about you and how you used to hear things, like me. He said we would be able to communicate without words. He said you would know what was inside my head. Do you, Cassandra? Do you know what’s inside my head? I think you do.”

Her attention distracted, Cass felt the impact of another blow to her body. She hadn’t moved fast enough and the pain was startling. She should be used to it, but each time he landed a hit, it was like her body trembled from the inside out. She slid boneless back down the refrigerator to the floor.

“Call him off, Chris. Block him out,” she urged, thinking that possibly the girl wielded some control.

But she merely shook her head. “I can’t stop Daddy.”

“You can. My grandfather. He tries to come through, too, but I won’t let him.”

“No. Daddy is too strong. I can’t block him out. Not like I can with the others. But now that you’re here he’s not as loud in my head. I don’t feel him like I normally do. He’s distracted by you. That’s good. That’s very, very good. That’s what I’d hoped. That’s why I had to keep looking for you. When I realized you weren’t at the address that was listed in Dr. Farver’s folder, I went to the other place.”

“What other place?” Cass gasped as she backed away from what she saw in her mind as another swing.

“Your home. Where you grew up in Baltimore. But there was no one there. So I thought maybe I would just come back to Philadelphia. Maybe the number of the apartment was wrong. Dr. Farver made mistakes. He made