The Dark: A Collection (Point Horror) (11 page)

"Look, I'll do
anything you want. Just let Katie go!" Bianca pleaded.

Harry lunged at his
brother. He surprised Mike, who lost his balance and toppled backward
on to the ground, dropping the knife. Harry leaped on top of Mike and
started rolling from side to side, trying to keep his brother from
reaching the weapon.

"Bianca, grab the
knife! Run! Quick!" Harry shouted.

Bianca had eyes for
only one thing. When Mike had fallen backward, he'd also lost his
grip on Little Katie. The child had rolled on to the ground and was
now toddling about, tripping over the gravestones while bawling at
the top of her lungs.

Bianca snatched the
little girl up in her arms. It felt so good to hold her after she'd
feared that the toddler was dead.

"Don't worry,
I'll take you home, honey," Bianca promised.

She saw something
silver on the ground and picked it up. It was the knife. She looked
toward Harry. He was barely holding his own against his brother. She
owed something to Harry, She couldn't just leave him here with
Mike.

"Run, Bianca! Run
while you have a chance! You owe it to the baby."

"Will you be all
right?" she called, reluctant to leave Harry in such a fix.

"You can bet on
it."

Bianca stuffed the
knife into her pocket. She turned and fled into the murky mists. She
was headed in the direction of the back of the cemetery and home.
Normally she wouldn't be able to function alone in such a place in
the darkness. For Little Katie she could do anything.

Katie was fussing.
Bianca searched through her handbag to see if she could find anything
to quiet her. Her hand closed around a six-inch stuffed black bear
called TR. He must have been there since last Friday night when she
had baby-sat for Little Katie. He was one of the girl's favorite
toys.

She pulled the bear
out and stuffed him into Little Katie's hands. The child took him
eagerly. She immediately began sucking on the bear's ear. He was as
good as a bottle to the toddler. That way Katie kept herself occupied
while Bianca tried to make her way through the morass of tombstones
and underbrush.

Most of the graves
dated back centuries. Tombstones had fallen over and were lying flat
on the ground, crumbled into bits. Others had partially collapsed and
stood as sharp, jagged ruins to snag the clothes of the unwary. Still
others lay flat on the ground, half sunken into the earth. Their
surfaces were slick with the night mists. Bianca slipped and nearly
fell when she skidded over them.

The child was lying
in her arms, calmly sucking on her toy. The two-year-old trusted
Bianca to get her safely back to her crib. Bianca couldn't give up
for Little Katie's sake. She couldn't give up though she wandered
until daybreak, not even if the darkness made her lose her mind with
fear.

A white mist hung
around the back fence of the cemetery. Her subdivision was on the
other side. She had only to crawl over the fence then she'd be in
somebody's backyard. Once she found one backyard, she could find
others. The Shipleys had the biggest backyard, the one closest to the
cemetery. Their house was probably located just on the other side of
that fence.

Bianca stumbled and
fell. She rolled over a bulging live oak tree root and nearly tumbled
into a gaping black hole in the ground.

What on earth could
that be? It was far too deep to be a hole dug by a squirrel or a dog.
It was too geometric to be a hole left by the roots of a tree that
had been pulled up from the ground after falling over during a
violent thunderstorm or hurricane.

She drew back from
the edge. This had to be a hole dug for a grave for an upcoming
funeral. She'd almost fallen headfirst into it. She could have
broken her neck and gotten killed.

Bianca peered down
into it as mists floated over the top, sometimes revealing its
blackness, sometimes concealing it. There was a quality to its
blackness that was darker than anything she'd seen — darker than
midnight, darker than a room with no light, darker than fear itself.

Cold beads of sweat
formed on Bianca's forehead. She shook. She couldn't make her
arms and legs obey her. She couldn't run away. She couldn't move.

"Help me!" Bianca
pleaded. "Somebody help me!" Tears rolled down her cheeks. "If
only I could see! If only there was a light somewhere!"

Maybe Doc was right.
Maybe her case was getting more serious.

Katie started to
fuss. The toddler sensed that something was wrong.

Bianca heard
footsteps approaching.

"Harry?" She
asked hopefully, spinning around.

A big, lumbering form
lunged at her out of the darkness. "Where in the hell did you go,
bitch? Trying to give me a run for my money, huh?"

She screamed and
tried to escape, but he leaped on her first. She couldn't get away.

"What — what have
you done to Harry?" Bianca gasped.

"Let's just say
that he won't bother us any more tonight." Mike pinned Bianca
down on all fours.

Little Katie rolled
out of Bianca's arms. The child sat there, fussing a little but
mostly sucking on her bear.

"I took what I
needed out of his wallet. He owes it to me. After all, he's got a
job and gets paid. I don't." Mike flashed some cash as he sat on
top of her and stuffed it back into his pocket again.

"But — but you
didn't hurt him, did you?" Bianca pleaded. "You know, he
doesn't have a job any more. He got fired tonight. The manager told
him to turn in his uniform."

"I didn't hurt
Harry as much as I'm going to hurt you and that bratty baby if you
keep on yapping about him!" Mike growled. "You've already
caused me enough trouble snitching to the police so they're hot on
my trail." He reached into her pocket and felt for the knife until
he found it.

"No — no! I — I
didn't tell them a thing about you. Honest." Mike had been the
farthest thing from her mind hours earlier. "They'd already heard
that you'd escaped from the state penitentiary."

"Yeah, but they
didn't know where I'd gone after that."'

"The police chief
said he thought you'd come back to St. Simons Island."

"The island's a
big place — miles long. You narrowed it down too much." He smiled
at her with a twisted sort of smile as he brushed the back of his
hand against her cheek. "But maybe you can make up for it. You can
put out for me the way you put out for my kid brother. Start acting
nice instead of telling the cops wild stories about me in the movie
theater."

He started to slobber
all over her. He yanked at her T-shirt and tugged at her jeans,
trying to work the button loose.

"Good thing my
contacts could tell me where you were headed. I knew right where to
come to find you after I took the little girl."

"No!" She
struggled. Now he was tugging at her underpants. Nobody had treated
her like this before. She couldn't allow it, certainly not in front
of Little Katie. She screeched at the top of her lungs and madly
pummeled Mike as hard as she could.

Mike fell back,
groaning. She'd kicked him in a sore spot.

"You bitch! Can't
you stop caterwauling?" He clutched himself. "Maybe I ought to
make sure of that." Mike threatened her with his knife. "Maybe I
ought to cut out your tongue."

She shrank away even
as she straightened her pants and buttoned her jeans.

A demonic smile
spread over his face. "Better yet, I'll cut out the baby's
tongue. That'll shut the brat up for good. And it'll put the fear
of God into you."

Mike reached for
Little Katie, who was innocently sucking on TR Bear.

Bianca let out a
blood-curdling cry and lunged at Mike.

Mike stopped cold. He
never touched Little Katie. His hand spasmed. The knife fell to the
ground. He looked up and stared at seemingly nothing. His eyes got
bigger and bigger.

"I — I hear
footsteps. Is this some kind of trap?" Mike's eyes got wild. He
looked at Bianca accusingly as if she had betrayed him. "Jesus! You
must have called the cops again."

He didn't wait for
an answer. Mike darted away from her and Katie into the fog and
shadows.

Bianca picked up
Katie and stepped forward into the mists. She kept on creeping about
from tombstone to tombstone. Katie contentedly sucked on TR Bear. The
toddler seemed unconcerned with what was going on as long as she had
Bianca to hold her and her favorite stuffed bear to occupy her.

Someone lurched out
of the mists. Bianca gasped.

"It's me!"
Harry announced.

She breathed more
easily. In this fog she couldn't see two feet ahead of herself.
Everyone looked like a ghostly wraith until they were nose-to-nose.

She touched the
bruises on his face. He had marks everywhere. He even had a black
eye.

Harry hugged her.
"I've been so worried. I heard you screaming. Then I heard Mike
running away. I've been looking for you ever since. Can't see my
own hand in front of my face in this fog."

She took some Kleenex
out of her jeans pocket and wiped the dirt off his cheek. Then she
kissed him on the lips.

He kissed her back.
"What did you do to Mike? How did you get rid of him?"

"He heard footsteps
and got scared. He thought it was a trap."

"Look, this isn't
the place for a big long conversation. We'd better scram, too,"
Harry remarked.

She soon discovered
that Harry couldn't walk as fast as she could. He was limping
badly. His left ankle was sprained from his fight with Mike. That
probably accounted for his not finding her more quickly despite the
yelling and shouting and the fact that Christ's Church Cemetery was
only a few acres in size.

"Here, let me help
you!" She tried to get him to lean against her shoulder.

"I'm OK!" he
protested indignantly. He grimaced in pain as he tried to put some
weight on his ankle.

"I thought we
agreed to help each other," she reminded him.

He smiled. "You
caught me there. See what I told you about how you're smarter and
braver than you think?"

He consented to let
her help him but only when they got to the tougher spots, tripping
over graves, live oak roots, bushes and things like that.

"Look!" he
admitted after a while. "I'm holding you back. Why don't you go
on ahead of me? Your home's just over that fence up ahead."

"Harry!"

"I'll never be
able to climb it in this condition. I'll either have to find a
break in the fence or wait until you get home and send help. If
nothing else, the graveyard attendant who comes on duty at dawn will
call my mom for me."

Just the thought of
leaving him alone in this place in the dark was enough to send chills
through her body.

"We've got to
stay together, no matter what!"

Harry bit his lip. "I
didn't want to have to tell you this. Maybe I have to. You've got
to hurry, and faster than I can go."

"But Mike's
gone!"

"Yeah, Mike may be
gone for now. The others aren't."

"The others?"

"Yeah, the ones who
have been following us all night — ever since we left the theater.
Remember the black car?"

Chapter 9

"Rick Roscoe and
Marianna are here. They followed us. I practically ran right into
them when I was trying to find you. I don't think they saw me in
all the thick fog. I ducked behind a gravestone."

She remembered Mike
saying something about his "contacts at the theater". Marianna
and Rick seemed slimy enough. Had they tipped Mike off about what
store to knock over once he escaped from jail? They would be mean
enough to follow Bianca and Harry here and call Mike to let him know
where they were.

"We've got to
hurry," Harry urged.

Bianca slipped her
arm around Harry and tried to pull him along while she carried Katie
in the other arm. She supported the child on her hip. She had no
choice except to push forward. Two people were now depending upon
her. She couldn't let either one down.

Someone landed on top
of Bianca and knocked her to the ground. Whoever it was must have
leaped down from a live oak tree. She screamed. Katie started
bawling.

Harry cursed as Rick
and two slimy-looking guys he'd brought along landed on top of him.

Bianca struggled but
couldn't get to her feet. Marianna was holding her fast. It was all
that Bianca could do to hold on to Katie with both arms.

"We're going to
have a chicken roast." Rick glared at Harry. "Maybe it took us
awhile to find you in all this damn fog. But better late than never."

"Let Bianca and
Katie go!" Harry demanded.

"No girl messes
around with other guys when she's dating Rick. Isn't that right,
Ricky?" Marianna purred.

Bianca got up her
courage. "We've only been out once, Rick. We hardly know each
other. What do you care what I do?"

Marianna hissed.
"Ricky needs money real bad. He doesn't earn much more money at
his job than I do. You're his meal ticket. You're not good for
much else, you know. You're too scared of your own shadow."

Bianca wished that
the Shipleys had never given her the trust fund. It caused more
trouble than it was worth.

"I deserve a rich
girlfriend," Rick crowed. "I'm not going to have that squirt
over there interfering!" Rick strutted up to Harry, and punched him
in the nose while the two toughs held him fast.

"You'd do
anything for cold cash, Roscoe, wouldn't you?" Harry spat. "Even
murder!"

"Look who's
talking!" Rick tweaked Harry's nose as Harry tried to break loose
from Rick's friends. "You and Mike must be in cahoots. You
murdered the maid and let Bianca and the baby go. You figured the
Shipleys would give her money. Your brother went for the kid when he
broke out of jail."

"Sounds like a
confession to me, Roscoe," Harry snapped. "You and your friends
were over at the Shipleys two years ago looking for something to
steal. Bianca and Mrs. Ingersoll got in the way. Now you're leaning
on Bianca 'cause she's almost eighteen and ready to come into all
that cold cash."