314 Book 3 (Widowsfield Trilogy) (37 page)

The pavement was cracking as Desmond ran. He screamed out Raymond’s name over and over, desperately searching for the boy he knew was still trapped here.

He avoided the light, and stuck to the cold shadows as he made his way to a familiar street. It became clear that the storm was centered around a house on Sycamore, and he knew which one. The house he’d bought for his daughter was ahead, and he understood that this hellish world revolved around whatever was hidden within those walls.

Terry’s cabin was the only building in
Widowsfield that wasn’t falling apart. He approached the house, and the door opened as if someone inside was expecting him. He heard a familiar voice say, “Hi, Dad.”

“Terry?”

He recognized his daughter’s voice, but didn’t see her. Within the cabin he heard the distinct bark of Terry’s dog, Killer. The barks echoed, as if they were coming from far away.

“Why are you here?” asked Terry from somewhere inside.

Desmond walked in and saw the house as it had been when he first purchased it for his daughter. There was no furniture, and the home looked like it had been well cared for by its former owner. He remembered helping his daughter move in, and thinking that she might be able to have a good life here. Above all else, he’d wanted her to be happy, but simply buying her a house hadn’t been enough to change her life. In fact, it only seemed to make things worse. Without the incentive to pay rent or a mortgage, Terry had fallen deeper into the drug world that she’d dabbled in before. Over the years, he’d watched as this once nice house had fallen into disrepair.

“Terry, where are you?”

“I’m here,” said his daughter as she revealed herself by coming down the stairs. He saw her bare feet as they padded gently down the wooden staircase that was partially hidden behind the kitchen. She was wearing a white dress that he recognized as having once belonged to her mother. Her skin was pale, but had a healthy glow to it, like it had before she’d started using meth.

“Terry,” said Desmond as his heart swelled with emotion. “You look so pretty.”

She stood on the bottom step and gave him a pained grin. “I’m sorry I made you hate me.”

“Oh, honey,” said Desmond as he took a step closer to her. She backed away, taking a step up the stairs again as he approached. “Terry, I never hated you.
Never.”

“Then why aren’t you here looking for me? Why are you here looking for Raymond?”

“Because he’s my son,” said Desmond, his voice heavy with guilt. “I love you both.”

“Don’t worry, I don’t blame you.”

“Terry, I don’t hate you. I love you.” Emotion caused his voice to quake as he took a step closer to his daughter. “I’ve always loved you.”

“Don’t come up here, Dad,” said Terry as she took another step up the stairs. “You should just leave.”

“Terry, help me find your brother. Let’s all leave together. Okay? I want you to come with me.”

“I can’t,” said Terry. “And neither can Ray. He’s with The Watcher now, and we all have to play our roles.” She reached the top of the stairs as Desmond followed her up. Terry was walking backwards, towards the bedroom at the end of the hall. As Desmond followed, he saw the home changing back into the way it had looked after Terry owned it. The walls became darker, and cobwebs grew in the corners. The stench of drugs became prevalent as he watched his daughter back her way into the bedroom.

Terry’s glowing skin turned paler and the dark circles under her eyes returned. She no longer looked like the cherub-faced girl he once knew, but now resembled the addict she’d become near the end of her life. Her teeth began to fall out, and they tapped on the wood floor.

Desmond saw that there were scratches on the floor of her bedroom, and blood began to seep from them to form a pool. Terry walked into the growing blood and began to lie down on it. The center of her dress, over her stomach,
bloomed red with blood as if she’d been wounded, and then the cloth began to melt away until she was left nude. Her gut was open, and Desmond could see her intestines within as she lay back. The skin on her face began to turn bright red and blister, and white foam began to coat her lips as she looked up at him and said, “Don’t look at me. I don’t want you to see…”

She choked and a gush of the white foam and blood surged over her lips.

“Terry!” Desmond screamed his daughter’s name over and over as he tried to reach out to her. As he grasped, she faded away. All that was left was the blood where she’d died. He knelt over where his daughter had been murdered and wailed in agony.

“I’m so sorry, baby. I love you. I love you so much. Don’t go away again.”

Her blood began to seep back into the stab wounds on the floor. Terry was lost again, and the cabin began to crumble, just like the rest of the world. The Watcher was starting over, and Desmond was caught in the walls as the cords swallowed him once again.

“Daddy,” said Terry. “Go home. Raymond’s hiding there.”

Widowsfield

March 13
th
, 2012

“Are you telling me we have to wait in this fucking haunted ass house for a day?” asked Jacker as they walked back into the house that none of them ever wanted to be inside of again.

“Not a full day. Just until 3:14 in the morning,” said Alma as she looked at the tile in the kitchen where she’d scrawled ‘314’ with her own blood. There was no number on the floor there anymore. She looked at her palm and realized that she’d never actually been cut. The realization made her question which parts of her memory were true, and which were fabrications. She glanced over at the window and saw that a pane was still broken out of it from where her mother had forced her to crawl through so many years earlier.

Paul was carrying Ben in his arms. “Where do we want him?”

“Upstairs,” said Alma. “Put him on the bed.”

Ben did his best to speak, but he was still only able to croak out a few words at a time. “Alma, please… Kill…”

“He was talking earlier,” said
Jacker. “Back in the van he was talking just fine.”

“Maybe he was fucking with your head,” said Rachel. “You said he was trying to get you to drive away, right? Maybe he was the one creating the visions you were seeing.”

“He can do that?” asked Jacker.

“Rosemary said she didn’t know what he was capable of,” said Alma.

“And we’re going to have to stay in the same house with him?” asked Stephen.

“Not just any house, either,” said Rachel as she pointed at the floor.
“This damn house.”

“Guys, if you don’t want to stay I’d understand,” said Alma.

“Didn’t we just have this exact same conversation a day ago?” asked Jacker with a weak grin.

“Yep,” said Rachel. “And I wanted to take off back then too. But, I’m not going to abandon you guys. You didn’t have to come looking for Stephen and me in the basement of that place, so I’m not going to leave you guys either.
As much of an idiot as that makes me.” She shook her head and looked out the window.

“Well, thanks,” said Alma.
“Although, I don’t know what to expect tomorrow.”

“No one knows,” said
Jacker. “But I sure the hell know a couple things for certain: I’m starving and exhausted.”

“Same here,” said Stephen.

“I can drive the security van out by where we first arrived and see if my van’s still there,” said Jacker. “If it is, then I can take it and swing out to a fast food joint around here and get some food for our slumber party in Creepsville.”

“Stephen,” said Rachel, “go with him.”

Alma sensed that Rachel wanted Stephen to go along not only to help, but to make sure Jacker didn’t take off. Rachel still didn’t trust Jacker after she discovered that he was wanted by the police back in Chicago.

Stephen agreed, and soon he was headed out with
Jacker. Paul took Ben upstairs, and they put Michael on the couch. Alma’s father had become lethargic after leaving Cada E.I.B., and Alma suspected that whatever drugs he’d been taking that gave him so much energy had finally begun to wear off.

“I’m so tired it feels like the floor’s moving,” said Rachel after
Jacker and Stephen had left.

“We should try and get some sleep,” said Alma. “We can do it in shifts, that way someone can watch Ben and my dad.”

They were standing in the kitchen, near where Alma had scrawled the number ‘314’ in her own blood on the floor. It was the same spot where Alma’s mother had performed the ritual that had re-ignited Alma’s memory of Ben.

“I’m so sorry we convinced you to come back here, Alma,” said Rachel.

“It’s not your fault,” said Alma as she looked around the room. Oliver and Rosemary had done a good job recreating the cabin to look like it had sixteen years ago. “I think I needed to come back. There’re so many things about my past that got wiped out of my memory. When we were getting my dad from Branson, Rosemary told me that my mother tried to kill me.”

“Are you serious?” asked Rachel.

Alma nodded and explained, “She drove me off the cliff. The same one I drove you guys off of in our dream, or whatever the hell that was. She tried to kill me, but I don’t have any memory of it at all. It’s just like how I couldn’t remember Ben. There’re just whole parts of my life that were stolen from me.”

“Maybe that’s for the best,” said Rachel. “Remembering how your mother tried to kill you might screw with your head.”

They heard Paul coming back down the stairs, and Alma noted how it sounded as his footsteps thumped on the carpet. She looked quizzically at him as he approached.

“Ben’s in the bed,” said Paul. He saw Alma’s odd stare and asked, “Is everything okay?”

Alma could distinctly recall the sound of her father coming down the stairs. The couch that Ben and Alma always sat on was faced away from the stairs, and whenever they heard the loud sound of their father’s footsteps she recalled feeling tense and nervous. “There wasn’t carpet,” she said as she walked past Paul and to the stairs. She studied the way the carpet on the stairs stopped at the bottom floor, and she looked up in confusion.

“What are you talking about?” asked Paul.

“There wasn’t carpet here before,” said Alma. “Someone put that here after what happened.”

“Maybe it was part of how Rosemary was lying to Oliver,” said Paul.

Alma nodded in agreement, but wasn’t satisfied. She went to the kitchen and reached for one of the knives in the butcher block. She noticed how the butcher knife was already missing, so she took a smaller blade and headed for the stairs.

“What are you doing?” asked Rachel.

“Checking on something,” said Alma. Paul and Rachel followed her up the stairs as she walked quickly down the hall. She stopped just before entering the bedroom and set her hand against the wall to steady herself.

“Alma,” said Paul as he walked up behind her to provide support. “You okay?”

“Yeah, sorry,” said Alma. “Just a little dizzy. I think it’s from not sleeping.”

“What are we doing up here?” asked Rachel.

Alma walked slowly into the bedroom where Ben was lying. Paul had placed him beneath the covers, but the invalid was writhing where he’d been left. He was agitated by their intrusion, and called out his sister’s name over and over.

Alma knelt down near the foot of the bed and set the tip of the knife into the dirty carpet. She dug the blade in and used it to force the carpet up before sawing into it. She gripped the flap that she’d cut free and then pulled up on it before asking Paul to hold it. He did as he was asked and Alma continued to cut a hole in the carpet. Eventually, she finished the circle and Paul pulled the cut portion away.
The wood beneath bore a deep, brown stain. Chunks of the wood had been cut away, and Alma pointed the tip of her knife at them.

“There,” said Alma as she made a stabbing motion with the knife at the gouges that were already in the wood. “That’s where he killed her. That’s where my dad kept stabbing her over and over.” She stabbed the knife down hard, revealing the extent of her pent up anger. The blade stuck easily in the wood and wobbled in place as she let it go.

“They covered it up,” said Alma as she watched the blade waver. “They covered it up for him, but this is where he killed Terry.”

At the Harper Residence

June, 1995

Ben knocked on the bathroom door. It was late, well past midnight, but he could hear his sister crying and he wanted to make sure she was okay. “Alma?”

“Don’t come in,” she said. “I’m taking a shower.”

She hadn’t been, but she quickly turned on the shower to drown out her weeping. He could hear her trying to hum, but she kept breaking into sobs.

Ben glanced across the hall at their parents’ closed door. Their father had returned from one of his frequent business trips, and had been in a foul mood most of the day. Ben and Alma had learned how best to deal with him during these times, although it was impossible to completely avoid his frequent outbursts. Their mother almost always sided with Michael, and explained to Ben and Alma how they needed to obey their father so that he would come home and spend more time with the family. Ben wasn’t certain he wanted that.