BoneMan's Daughters (41 page)

He flipped the small picture over and stared at a note scrawled in fresh blue ink.

Here’s you daughter, you ingrate.

I put her up a month after this picture

was taken caus she wouldn’t shut up.

Rot in hell. Betsy.

A red line was drawn through the name.

Ryan couldn’t stop the tremble in his hand, but he had to read the note again because he was sure he’d misread the words.
There was a mistake. He had to read this again!

He grabbed the picture with both hands and scanned the lines again. This could not be, not his angel, not born to that . .
.

Revulsion smothered him all at once. He realized that he’d stopped breathing, and now he sucked at the air in loud, halting
gasps. The nausea he’d felt a minute earlier rose through his throat and he couldn’t stop himself from heaving. His stomach
was empty so they were dry heaves, but they watered his eyes and contorted his body.

Bethany was Alvin Finch’s daughter by birth. He’d discovered it only recently and gone after her. And he would as soon break
her bones as love her because in BoneMan’s twisted mind there was no difference.

Ryan lost his reason then. He almost screamed his rage. Under any other circumstances the mere thought that Bethany was born
to the man in the basement would have inspired him to smash the windows and bloody his hands, breaking the walls as an expression
of his fury over the injustice of it all.

But at this very moment BoneMan’s daughter, who was now Ryan’s daughter, cowered in the basement, giving her soul to him!

Still gripping the picture between white fingers, he leapt over the bed and tore from the room, only barely caring that he
might be giving himself away now.

He grabbed the wall at the stairwell, spun through the doorway, and plunged down a flight of concrete stairs built as part
of the foundation. Down into darkness. With each step he felt the end rushing up at him. This was BoneMan’s world, where BoneMan
killed. But the realization didn’t slow him.

This was where Bethany was, captive to the father of lies.

The room he’d been held captive in sat at the end of the hall, door opened to empty darkness. Bethany’s room was the other
way, at the other end.

He reached the bottom of the steps, spun around the bottom rail, and stopped. An empty hall ran up to the same door BoneMan
has shoved him through. The doorway to Bethany’s room was open and glowed with orange light.

They were waiting for him. Ryan’s heart crashed in his chest. BoneMan was waiting to fulfill his promise.

Or they were already gone, on another road out the back way.

He released the railing, shoved the picture in his belt, and limped down the hall, mind clouded with rage and fear and Bethany.

He was halfway down the hall when he heard the voice. BoneMan’s voice. A low and kind voice that sounded like the weeping
of children in Ryan’s mind.

“It looks very pretty on you.”

Ryan covered the last ten yards without being able to think. And then he was in the open doorway staring at the room with
the cross on the wall.

He saw the entire scene as if it were a single snapshot that his mind had studied for long seconds, not the mere moment it
took for him to comprehend what he was looking at.

Alvin Finch stood shirtless with his pale, veiny back to Ryan, blocking his view of Bethany. The man was so completely absorbed
by the object of his jealousy that he didn’t turn.

The rest of the room was as Ryan remembered—the lamp hung from a nail on the overhead timber. The bed ran along the wall across
the room, empty now, and beside it the piss pot. The sledgehammer leaned against the cross, thick steel head resting on the
concrete.

“My mother was short,” Alvin Finch said. “You’ll grow into it in a year or two.”

He took a step forward, and when he moved, Bethany came into view. She stood in a white wedding dress, hemmed in lace and
yellowed by time.

“Do you want to touch my chest?” Alvin asked.

The fury coursing through Ryan’s body now felt like the intense, dry heat of a sauna blown in his face. The sight of the white
monster who called himself Satan standing over his daughter made him instantly ill and he felt as though he was going to throw
up. He could not breathe, he could not think, he could not move.

He could only shake.

“I’ve just applied lotion,” Alvin said.

Bethany saw Ryan then, and her eyes shifted ever so slightly.

And Ryan started to turn.

Ryan wasn’t sure why or how or even that he was moving, but he was. Grunting and panting he leaped across the room to the
cross.

With both hands, Ryan grabbed the sledgehammer by the long handle and began his swing from the floor as he turned.

He bolted for them, roaring like a bull, and swung the hammer, adjusting the trajectory of the head as best he could, given
the energy he’d already thrown into the swing.

BoneMan still had his back to him and was turning with a stunned stare. The head of the sledgehammer landed on the side of
the man’s head with a sickening
crack
.

A sharp jar ran up Ryan’s arms. He felt the hammer slip from his grasp and drop on the concrete next to Bethany. His nemesis
stared from bulging eyes that peered from a skull bleeding on one side.

And then Alvin Finch, aka BoneMan, aka Satan, toppled to his left. He bounced off the post in the middle of the room, struck
the concrete next to the hammer’s head with a loud slap, and lay still.

For three long seconds Ryan stared at the form, still uncertain that he’d caught him flat-footed. The man’s own sickness had
killed him. If he hadn’t been so consumed with possessing what he could not have, he might have heard Ryan coming.

Instead, he lay on the floor, either dead or close to it, and Ryan felt nothing even remotely similar to remorse.

Bethany was looking at him. He glanced at the hammer by her feet, then back at her lost eyes. Finish it…

A wave of rage washed over him. The hammer was there, by Bethany’s feet, and the beast who’d abused her was there, on the
floor. Ryan wanted to scream out for his daughter to pick up the hammer and slug this bull in the head again and again, until
there could be no doubt that he’d been appropriately punished for his indiscretion.

“Kill him,” he muttered.

But Bethany just looked at him. She stood still like a limp doll swimming in the mother’s wedding dress.

It occurred to him then that even now, BoneMan’s hooks were still in her mind. She really had given her captor a part of herself
and would have to wrestle it back. The rage would come later.

“You came back for me,” she said. Without shifting her eyes from him, she reached up and pulled the dress off her shoulders.
It fell to the floor around her feet, but she just stood there in her pajamas staring at him and he wasn’t sure if she was
angry or glad. Her face slowly twisted into a knot, and tears sprang to her eyes. Her shoulders began to shake.

A knot crowded his throat so he couldn’t tell her how much he loved her, although that was all he wanted to do.

Bethany looked at the fallen form to her right, then up at Ryan again and now began to wail. Panic washed into his mind. She
was crying over his death? Over
BoneMan’s
death?

No! No, Bethany dear, it’s not like that! I saved you. Don’t cry, please don’t
…

Bethany lifted both arms and stumbled forward and only when she reached him did he realize she was coming with an embrace.

Blurting a sob, he stepped forward and threw his arms around her. She wrapped her thin arms around his body and rested against
his chest.

“Thank you,” she managed to whisper. Then again, a strained whisper, “Thank you.” She held him with more strength than he
imagined possible after her extended captivity. And then she wept unreservedly.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“No!” she cried. “No!”

“I want to be your father. I—”

Bethany put her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek. “You came back for me. You are my father and I’ll never leave you.”

It was almost more than he could bear. He couldn’t speak so he held her close and wept into her hair.

But another sound joined their cries of remorse. Behind them BoneMan groaned.

Bethany jumped at the sound.

He wasn’t dead?

Ryan turned slowly and stared at BoneMan’s face. The man’s eyes shifted about, darting from Ryan to Bethany and back. Despite
his broken skull he was clearly conscious. And in his blue eyes Ryan could see that he clung stubbornly to a desire.

For a long moment he stood still, allowing the blood in his veins to grow hot, gripping his hands slowly into fists so tight
he might have cut his palm with his fingernails.

BoneMan was alive still. And with every lustful breath the monster took, Ryan felt robbed of life. The man’s display of raw
evil was even worse now for expressing itself in those hideous eyes despite his utter failure to win the daughter.

Ryan roared and threw himself blindly at BoneMan.

Gripping the man by his trousers and shirt, he hefted him up like a weight lifter snatching up dumbbells. He twisted, roaring
still, and slammed the body against the wall.

Onto the blocks of wood.

Bethany was shrieking now, diving in, grabbing at the ropes still fastened through the blocks that had held Ryan’s arms and
legs.

“Tie him!” Ryan cried. “Tie him!”

She sobbed and she bound him in quick short movements, spinning from limb to limb. It only took a few seconds and in those
seconds Ryan and Bethany were one, undivided in their purpose.

It was enough to make him want to cry.

Bethany leapt back, eyes wide on Alvin Finch, who was strapped to the wooden blocks. Ryan let him go and stepped back. The
man’s body sagged, then hung still, unmoving except for the slow rise and fall of his chest.

Bethany grabbed the lantern from the beam and held out her hand. “Come on.”

Together they staggered from the room, leaving BoneMan incapacitated on the wall, watching them with desire. When Ryan looked
back at the door he had to fight back a strong urge to pick up the sledge and close those eyes once and for all.

“Come on,” Bethany said, tugging him.

They limped down the hall and up the stairs without a word.

She let the door slam shut behind them and squinted in the light. Ryan took her hand again and hurried her away from the house,
toward the driveway, toward the large oak that spread its long limbs over the road. He stopped and turned back, still unsure
if they really had escaped the monster.

Crickets screeched. A gentle breeze rustled the leaves overhead. The old, dilapidated house stood in the setting sun, quiet
and serene, belying the horror that it had harbored for so many years. Cracked windows, crooked door, flaking paint—just another
house set far back from the well-traveled roads that wound unsuspecting through Texas.

Beside him, Bethany sniffed, then shook with a sob. Ryan’s mind snapped back to the child, back to his daughter, and for the
moment the house ceased to exist. All that mattered now was Bethany.

He grabbed the lantern from her free hand and set it down on the ground. Then swung around to face her. He was only halfway
around when her arms wrapped around his neck and pulled him tight. She buried her face in his neck like a leech, drawing life
in a desperate silence.

Ryan stood immobilized. Slowly he put his arms around her waist and held her close. Father and daughter.

They clung to life as one, and Ryan couldn’t remember ever feeling so grateful, so full of love, so blessed as he did now
holding his daughter, Bethany.

The afternoon heat smothered them, a welcome furnace of love kindled by deep, deep longing and relief. If Ryan died then of
a heart attack, he would have lived a full life, if only in these last few moments. No heaven that awaited could possibly
be any more satisfying than the gratitude that now swept through his mind and body.

“I love you, Daddy,” Bethany whispered into his neck through trembling lips. “I love you so much.”

He wanted to push her away so that he could look into her eyes and tell her that she didn’t need to feel any guilt. This was
all his fault now. He would never let her go again.

But he realized that she wasn’t clinging to him in order to deflect guilt. She was holding tight to him, her savior, her father,
the one who’d moved heaven and earth to rescue her.

And then it struck him: they
were
in heaven. Not literally, but just as real. He was the father who’d come to rescue his lost child from this Lucifer’s hell.
He was the father embracing his prodigal child.

“I will never leave you, Bethany. Never!”

Ryan wasn’t sure how much time passed as they embraced under the oak’s majestic branches; it had either sped by or slowed
to a crawl, he didn’t know which. But gradually the sound of crickets and rustling leaves became realities again.

Bethany pulled back, kissed his cheek tenderly. “Thank you,” she whispered.

His throat was still in a knot; he didn’t know what to say anyway.

She turned and faced the house, holding tightly to his arm. An image of BoneMan strapped to the beams below filled Ryan’s
mind. The thought that they’d left the man—the beast, this Lucifer who came from the pit of hell—alive. How could they do
that?

What if he was still alive? What if he’d managed to escape? What if the wall had some kind of safe passage built in? What
if this father of lies lived to hunt down his daughter once again?

He swallowed hard, aware of a growing ringing in his ears.

“Will they come for us?”

“There’s a road nearby. We can walk out.”

But she made no move to flee. Her breathing had thickened and her hands were steady.

“I hate this place,” Bethany said.

“I hate it too.”

They stared at the house.

“This house is hell to me. It will haunt me.”

Yes
, he thought. And,
No, he would not let anything like this haunt his daughter.