The Dark Ones (14 page)

She could think of no way to explain it.

She only knew she had to get away
right now
.

She backed up one step.

And that was when Derek’s head snapped toward her. There was that horrible, knowing grin again. And his eyes weren’t just too dark, they were black.
Entirely
black. He snarled and bounded off the bed, crossing the room in two leaping strides.

Suzie was able to take one more backward step.

Then the door was open and he had her by a wrist. His grip was impossibly strong, like iron.

There were tears in her eyes. “Derek . . . DeeDee . . . I . . . please . . .”

He laughed and then snarled as he hauled her through the door. She screamed as he tossed her across the room. She bounced off the wall and struck the nightstand. She managed to stay upright, but the lamp tumbled to the floor and the light went out.

But she could see Derek stalking toward her in the gloom.

She felt hands grabbing her from behind.

Ella. You bitch
.

Then Derek was on top of her, pushing both of them backward onto the bed. She screamed again when she felt Ella’s bony hands ripping at her dress.

Derek backhanded her and the world went dark for a time.

T
WENTY-ONE

Two weeks after Kurt McGregor’s funeral, Natasha Wagner awoke at dawn feeling nauseated and achy. She rolled onto her side seeking relief from a pain in her lower back and winced as her stomach did a queasy roll. She stuck a knuckle in her mouth to stifle a low whimper. A sheen of sweat broke out on her forehead as she suddenly felt too hot beneath her covers. She tossed the blankets aside and lay there breathing rapidly in her black
Corpse Bride
pajamas. It was November now and a seemingly permanent chill had settled into the air outside, but she was soaked in sweat. Her teeth chattered as sudden tears stung her eyes.

Please
, a desperate voice in her mind implored.
Please just let me be sick with the flu. I can’t do the other thing, I just can’t. Please
. . .

The flu would make sense. It was getting to be that time of the year again. Her father had just gotten over a nasty cold. Perhaps he’d passed the bug on to her. But the flu wouldn’t explain the strange new tenderness in her breasts or the episode at the dinner table last night. Her mother had served up grilled chicken with broccoli, which was usually one of her favorite meals. But one whiff of the chicken had sent her scrambling to the bathroom to heave her guts out. That had led to some uncomfortable questions from Colleen Wagner. Luckily, she had lots of practice at deflecting parental concerns.

She wished she had someone to talk to about what was happening to her body. Someone other than a judgmental adult. A girlfriend. Fiona, preferably. But she hadn’t talked to Fiona at all in the last two weeks. Same went for the rest of her friends, including Mark.
Oh, Mark
. She missed him so much, but she couldn’t bear to be around him. She still loved him fiercely, but she simply couldn’t look him in the eye. She couldn’t interact with any of them in any significant way without feeling a deep, soul-crushing shame. When she was around them at school, she could think only of all the awful, degrading things they’d done together in the basement of that house. She had performed sexual acts with every one of them. It might not have been so bad had the episode merely been a wild but consensual experiment in group sex. But something had been guiding them, a malevolent thing that delighted in their debasement. There had been no choice in any of it. Natasha had prayed for death near the end of the ordeal.

Another, stronger surge of nausea accompanied the vile memories.

Knowing she could contain the sickness inside her no longer, Natasha lurched off the bed and staggered across the room to her bathroom. She groaned again and dropped to her knees in front of the toilet. She leaned over the bowl and felt her throat swell as a rush of hot vomit blasted up from the depths of her tortured stomach. Her teeth chattered again and a fresh sheen of sweat made her pale face glisten in the bright light. She continued to kneel there for a time, breathing hard as she prayed this was the end of it.

She glanced up at a framed poster mounted on the wall above the toilet. It was for the original version of
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
. It showed Leatherface with his chain saw and a girl dangling from the business end of a meat hook. The tagline on the poster read
WHO WILL SURVIVE AND WHAT WILL BE LEFT OF THEM
?

“Yes,” she said, smiling grimly through her tears. “What will be left of us?”

Another framed poster was mounted on the wall by the glass shower stall. Janet Leigh in
Psycho
. Her parents didn’t understand her interest in morbid things, but they tried. When it came to parental acceptance and tolerance, she had it a lot better than most of her friends. During one of many conversations with Colleen Wagner on the subject, Natasha had said, “Horror is my life.” Her mother didn’t scoff or admonish her to pursue more practical interests. Natasha loved her for that. Only now she wished she’d never uttered those words, because now the statement seemed more like prophecy than an expression of her fondest dreams and desires.

Yes
, she thought.
Horror is my life, for real now. And I don’t see a happy ending to this fucking movie
. . .

She stayed there in front of the toilet until she was sure her stomach had settled. Then she pushed the flush handle, got up, and had a look at herself in the mirror. She looked like hell. There were dark smudges under her eyes. She had been sleeping more now that she’d stopped going out at night, but somehow she looked more tired than ever.

I look like shit
.

Feel like it, too
.

She couldn’t bear looking at herself any longer, so she traipsed tiredly back to her room, her shoulders slumped and her head hanging down, the cuffs of her too-long pajama bottoms dragging across the carpet.

She sat on the edge of the bed and debated whether she should start getting ready for school or have her mom call in sick for her. School was another thing that was harder to deal with now. As if being violated by some kind of demon or ghost wasn’t enough, the very same night some asshole had vandalized her car, painting nasty words on the doors. Something similar had been done to Mark’s car. Under any other circumstances, she would have been livid, barely able to contain her fury. And Mark would have been on the warpath. But in the wake of their harrowing shared experience, it had amounted to little more than an afterthought. So someone wanted to be an asshole, so what? She had bigger things on her mind, including an increasingly tenuous grasp on her sanity. Still, things were undeniably tenser at school. The spell of intimidation she and her friends had cast as a group was broken. She felt the smirking stares of her classmates every time she walked the halls of Ransom High. It was annoying, but she remained too numb to care most of the time.

She noticed the glowing screen on her cell phone, which she’d left on the nightstand the night before. Someone had texted her within the last minute. She knew this because the screen always went dark again less than a minute after receiving a message.

She picked up the phone and cringed as she recognized Mark’s number.

The message read
COME OUT TONIGHT. PLEASE
?

She deleted the message without sending a reply and set the phone down again. At least not as long as she still lived in Ransom. Her breath hitched as an intense sense-memory of kissing Mark assailed her. She could almost feel his strong arms wrapped around her waist, holding her so firmly against her body. It had felt
wonderful
. She started crying again. It was almost like he was in the room with her right now.

Only he wasn’t.

And never would be again. She’d made up her mind.

She was wiping more tears away as a knock sounded at her door. “Tasha? Honey? It’s getting late. Are you ready for school yet?”

Natasha cleared her throat. “I’m not going, Mom. I think I’ve got that bug Dad had.”

“Oh, honey.” Colleen Wagner’s voice was full of concern and devoid of reproach. “You stay in bed. I’ll call the school for you.”

Natasha sniffled. “Thanks, Mom. I love you.”

“I love you, too, sweetie. Oh, honey, I have some good news.”

Good news? How novel
.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Your father told me he spoke to the boys at the paint shop. Your car will be ready today.”

Natasha sighed. “Cool.”

And then Colleen Wagner was gone, leaving Natasha alone again with her tortured thoughts. She slipped beneath the covers again, crying some more as she thought of Mark and the life she suspected was growing inside her.

The life she could never tell him about.

She buried her face in her hands and cried hard enough to shake the bed.

T
WENTY-TWO

Somebody was knocking on the door. Check that. It was more like a
hammering
on the door. A heavy, loud, relentless pounding. Clayton could hear the door rattling in the frame as he slowly became conscious and blinked against the glare of the TV screen. He sat upright with a groan and pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes to massage them.

BAMBAMBAM

Perhaps a half second of blissful silence.

Then . . .

BAMBAMBAMBAMBAMBAMBAMBAM—

His hands came away from his eyes. “STOP DOING THAT, YOU COCKSUCKING, MOTHERFUCKING ASSHOLE SON OF A FUCKING WHORE!”

This was followed by a sob.

And then laughter.

Wow, I have seriously gone off the rails. This is probably how your average psycho asshole sounds before heading out to shoot up a mall or church social
.

BAMBAMBAM

“Fuck this.” He pitched his voice a little higher. “Knock it off! I’m coming, goddamn you!”

He heaved himself to his feet and staggered out of the living room. He was still feeling the beers that had put him under a few hours back. He hadn’t checked the clock on the cable box before departing the living room, but a rough guess put the time at around midnight. He was in the foyer now, standing at the front door, with one shaking hand poised above the doorknob.

He pulled the hand back.

Hold on. Midnight?

Things hadn’t gone so well for him the last time he’d answered a late-night knock at his door. Parts of his body still ached from the beating dished out by that jackbooted thug. At least he wasn’t pissing blood anymore. That had been scary as hell and had almost been enough to make him actually go to a doctor, a thing he hadn’t done in . . . what . . . decades? Luckily the red in his urine gave way to a pinkish tinge by the second day and was back to its usual bright yellow by the third. He was hopeful his body would continue to recover well enough without outside help. One obvious and excellent way of making sure of that was avoiding any contact with a certain Nazi pig with a badge.

BAMBAM

There’s no way that jackass has a search warrant. I have nothing to hide. I’ve done nothing wrong, and I’m not letting him in
.

Clayton frowned.

His self-righteous outrage was immediate and instinctive. But some of it wasn’t quite based in actual fact. He did have some things he wouldn’t like agents of local enforcement to see. Some dope and some of the more embarrassing bits of his porn collection. And, okay, sure, he’d done some things that were technically wrong. Selling dope to minors, for instance. Selling illicit substances to
anyone
was a crime, but he thought maybe there was a stiffer penalty for selling it to the underage and impressionable. His frown deepened as he scratched his chin and thought about it. Huh. Was that right? He shrugged. He didn’t know. And it didn’t fucking matter. He’d step in front of a speeding bus before going to prison.

BAMBAMBAMBAMBAMBAMBAMBAMBAMBAMBAMBAM!

The horrendously loud banging—by far the worst burst of it yet—left his head pounding. Anger started to override his fear. Then something hit the door again, a softer sound. Instinct told him it was the sound of a body slumping against the door. Then there was another sound.

A low, hitching sob.

Then he heard it again. It was the sound of a person in deep pain. A bereft sound. Whoever this was, it wasn’t that cop. That man was a vicious monster. And he for damn sure wouldn’t be weeping on Clayton Campbell’s doorstep.

One of the kids
.
Has to be
.

He hadn’t seen any of them in weeks. Not since that terrible night. Something had happened. Something that had changed everything. He had no proof of this. No one had told him a thing. But he felt it in his heart. There had been evil in the air that night and it had touched more than just him. The death of Derek’s father the same night reinforced this opinion. And he was positive their absence had nothing to do with the bogus assault story Fiona had fed the cop. A tale like that wouldn’t fly with the other kids. They would see right through her self-serving line of bullshit.

At least he hoped so.

Despite everything, he still wanted them to like him. Even Fiona.

He turned the doorknob and eased the door open. A stench of booze wafted through the cracked door before he opened it the rest of the way and saw a slightly stooped-over Mark Bell standing on his porch. His eyes were red and wet and his head wobbled woozily on his shoulders. A liter bottle of some liquor was clenched in his right fist, a crinkled brown paper bag obscuring the brand.

Mark looked Clayton in the eye and began to weep openly, his shoulders going up and down as the force of his emotions shook his body. Clayton was flabbergasted. The Mark Bell he knew was tough. Was maybe the toughest kid he’d ever met. He grimaced and beckoned the boy inside with a tilt of his head. Mark wobbled inside, nearly toppling over as one of his feet slid awkwardly over the threshold. Clayton caught him by a shoulder and kept him upright.