The Dark Ones (4 page)

He heaved a breath. “What?”

She wrapped her hands around his throat and whispered huskily in his ear, “I’m thinking I want to play the choking game again.”

She began to squeeze.

F
IVE

Mark hoisted himself over the chain-link fence that bordered the rear of the Bell property and came down slightly off balance on the other side. He wobbled for a few steps as one heel turned at an awkward angle, but he got his feet solidly under him just in time to avoid a clumsy spill.

A black shape came away from the garage door. The shape drew nearer and the faint light of the moon fell across a ghostly pale face. A glossy lock of raven black hair fell across the girl’s forehead and she smiled at him.

“Hey.”

Mark loved the sound of her voice. It had a lilting, girlish quality at times, a playfulness, but mixed with that was a clear toughness. You heard it anytime she got angry or spoke passionately about something. Like Mark, Natasha Wagner had been uprooted from somewhere else not so long ago, someplace livelier and better than this dead-end shithole.

Funny thing, that. He spent so much time resenting his parents for moving to Ransom. Most among his small circle of friends expressed similar sentiments. There were times when it seemed it was all they could talk about. How much they wanted out. How they were just marking time until the day came when they could leave this godforsaken slice of backwoods hell. And yet . . . a part of him was definitely glad he was here, mostly because he would never have met Natasha otherwise.

She kicked at a piece of gravel on the driveway. It went skittering across the asphalt and bounced off a rear tire of his beat-up ’86 Camaro, which was parked at the top of the driveway. “You got something for me?”

Mark produced the Southern Comfort bottle from his jacket pocket. He screwed the cap off, took a swig, and passed it to her. She put the bottle to her lips and tipped her head back, taking several deep swallows. When she was done, she wiped her mouth with the back of a wrist and passed the now much depleted bottle back to him.

Mark stared at the bottle in mock astonishment.
“Damn.”

She smiled again. “Thirsty.”

“Fuck. I guess so.”

He took a smaller swig and screwed the cap back on before tucking the bottle away again. “So what do you wanna do?”

“You.”

Mark laughed.

Natasha wasn’t smiling now. “Serious.”

Marked stopped laughing. This wasn’t a joke. “Whoa. Wow.”

Now she smiled. Just a little one that dimpled the edges of her mouth. It made him stare at her lips, which looked plumper than usual. And darker. The sweet curve of her mouth had never looked so inviting. He realized she’d applied fresh lipstick very recently, something she rarely did prior to their nighttime excursions. There was a reason for that. Only an idiot wouldn’t get it. The deviation in her routine was a conscious thing. Between now and the time he’d seen her last—at the end of the school day—she’d made up her mind about something.

Something involving him.

Holy shit, I’m probably gonna fuck her tonight
.

Yes, all signs pointed to Mark Bell getting laid. And that was an infinitely cool fucking thing to happen anytime, but with this girl there was something extra special about it. God, she was so beautiful. Those lips. That delicate jawline. The big eyes and meticulously tweezed eyebrows. The cascade of lush black hair over her shoulder. The slender but achingly feminine body. She wore a very short black skirt over tight black leggings, accentuating the shapeliness of her legs and roundness of her ass. The very small Emily the Strange baby doll T-shirt made her medium-size breasts much larger than usual.

He wanted desperately to kiss her.

To . . . to . . .

She put a hand over her mouth and giggled.

Mark blinked. “What?”

She pointed at his crotch. “Your . . . bulge.”

Another giggle.

Mark glanced down and saw what she was talking about. A massive hard-on tented the crotch of his jeans. “Oh . . . shit.”

She laughed again. “It’s okay. I’m not offended. It’s just . . . wow.”

Mark reached into his pants and adjusted the angle of his erection. She could say she wasn’t offended all she wanted, but it was goddamn embarrassing to leave it poking out like that.

Natasha’s expression turned solemn with shocking suddenness. “Oh.”

Mark frowned. “What?”

“It’s just that . . .” She sighed and looked sad. “. . . I don’t know if all that . . . will fit in my mouth.”

Feminine laughter.

Mark groaned. “Wow. You are really fucking funny.”

She giggled more.

“Wait. This mean you’re gonna blow me?”

“We can start there.”

He took a step toward her, eager hands reaching for her. She placed the palm of a small hand flat against his chest and stopped him in his tracks. “Whoa. Not so fast. I mean, you can kiss me, whatever. But the fucking has to wait.”

He groaned again. “What? Why? We could get in my car—”

She shook her head, adamant. “No. I’ve got a better idea.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“So tell me.”

“You know that creepy old house?”

He knew the house. They all did. Their friend Derek McGregor had stumbled across it during a solo outing one night several months back. Derek liked to venture out alone a lot. It wasn’t that he was antisocial. Well, no more than the rest of them. Within the group, though, he was as relatively gregarious as any of them. He had some quirks. Again, it went with the territory. You didn’t get to be a Dark One by being Joe or Jane Normal. One of Derek’s things was that he liked to go exploring. He would walk out deep into the woods and poke around. He was sort of an amateur archaeologist. Sometimes he found cool things. A rusted canteen with the letters CSA stamped across the bottom. A rusted pistol with the cylinder removed. Another time, way out there, he found a small cluster of ramshackle dwellings that looked barely large enough to have housed actual human beings, but the things he found there—ancient pots and pans, shattered plates, and so on—indicated otherwise.

The house was his latest and greatest discovery. It wasn’t as deep into the woods as the slave shacks, but was significantly farther down from Wheaton Hills on the other side of Weakley Lane. The house wasn’t very big, a typical one-story old ranch. It was in an advanced state of disrepair. Its windows were boarded up and heavy bolts with padlocks were secured across the front and back doors. A narrow, wildly overgrown path leading to Weakley Lane had clearly once functioned as a driveway. A broken-down old Buick Special sat on blocks in a clearing in front of the house.

But it wasn’t the isolation or symptoms of neglect that made the house spooky.

It just felt somehow . . .
wrong
.

Something in the atmosphere seemed to
shift
anytime you stepped into the small clearing. The very ground seemed tainted. It felt like a place where something had gone wrong long ago. It was a place of rot and decay. Of death.

So, of course, it had appealed to all of them instantly.

He certainly wasn’t surprised that Natasha had mentioned it now.

“You want to go there.”

A statement, not a question.

She came closer to him, reached for his hands, clasped them. “I don’t just want to go to the house, Mark.”

He swallowed with difficulty. “Y-yeah?”

“I want to go inside.”

He frowned. “But—”

“We’ll break in.”

Her lips grazed his neck, slid across his throat. Mark clenched her hands tighter. “Break . . . in?”

“Uh huh.” She lifted her head and kissed a corner of his chin. “And when we get inside, we’ll . . . well . . .”

He forced his mouth open and sucked in a great breath. “Yeah?”

“I want you to fuck me in that house, Mark.”

“God . . .”

She tugged at his hand, silently urging him to come with her.

He did not resist.

S
IX

Ransom, Tennessee
Hollis House

December 6, 1984

She was bleeding.

Christ, but she was bleeding. Little spurts of red jetted from the ragged gash in her scalp. Norman Campbell wasn’t a doctor, but he figured you didn’t need to be one to know that couldn’t be good. Holy hell, she was either dying or well on her way to it if he didn’t do something about it—and soon.

How had it all gone so wrong so fast?

The call had come in at a little after noon, barely an hour ago. It was pure dumb luck he’d even been there at the time. Norman was president of Ransom Lumber & Supply. The Big Boss Man. He had a couple dozen employees working for him in the company he’d inherited from his own father nine years earlier, after the old man kicked off following a botched bypass operation. On a normal day, he wouldn’t be anywhere near the office between the hours of eleven and two. Those were the hours when he would gather with a couple of the other local fat cats for a “business lunch” at the Jackson Steakhouse. Their “business” typically consisted of smoking cigars, drinking whiskey, and telling raunchy stories. And maybe a little flirting with one of the cute waitresses. Norman had been to bed with one or two of the little honeys, bet your ass.

Point was, he should be there right now. Maybe laughing it up with the fellas over the latest tall tales of lewd ladies and close calls with cuckolded husbands (some of which were even true). Or having a halfway serious conversation with Mayor Harper about some ideas for local property development. For damn sure, he should have three or more stiff whiskey drinks in him by now.

He could use a goddamn drink.

Louella Hollis rolled onto her back and reached a trembling hand toward him. He watched a thick trickle of blood spill down her forehead and fork into two thinner crimson streams at the bridge of her nose. The blood began to pool in the corners of her eyes. She blinked slowly, laboriously, unable to clear her eyes as consciousness began to ebb.

“Shit.” Norman kicked at a rock on the ground. “Shit and double shit. You dumb little bitch.”

Goddamn his work ethic. It was the whole reason he’d been there instead of shooting the shit with the fellas at the Jackson. Ransom Lumber & Supply had recently taken on a big new account, maybe their biggest, and he’d been waiting on a call from the new client’s head honcho, Rich Winchester, when the phone in his office rang.

It wasn’t Rich Winchester on the other end.

“We need to talk,” she told him.

Her morose, almost numb tone made him instantly wary. She didn’t sound much like the vivacious young secretary he’d hired only nine months earlier. Back then she’d been bubbly, good-humored, and good-looking, just the way he liked. A good-time party girl who knew how to let her hair down and be one of the fellas when the time was right. He was poking her almost daily inside of a month. At first it’d been wonderful. She made him feel young. Made him feel like a stud, like J.R. Ewing on
Dallas
, a real mover and shaker, the cock of the walk.

That all changed three months later.

The first time she suggested he hire a hit man to kill his wife.

Turned out she wasn’t satisfied being the boss man’s fun fling on the side. She wanted to be a big shot’s wife. It struck Norman as a little funny. A gal into that kind of cold-blooded social climbing would’ve been better off just about anywhere other than a little bump in the road like Ransom. He told her this, suggesting maybe she’d be happier in Nashville or Memphis. He could give her some references, maybe set her up in a sweet deal with some likely fellas in a big city.

She wasn’t interested.

“I want her dead. It’s all I can think about, Normie.”

He’d tried to laugh it off again. “Lord, the way you think would spook a man of lesser fortitude. You want to take Audrey’s place. Fine. Dandy. There are other ways to make that happen, like divorce. Why you gotta jump straight to murder?”

“Don’t make fun of me.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re calling me crazy.”

Crazier than a shithouse rat
, he thought.

But what he actually said was, “Nonsense.”

“Now you’re calling me stupid.”

He sighed.

This conversation was a long walk down a dark, dark alley, and there looked to be only one way out. It was time to be assertive.

“Darlin’, I reckon it’s time you start looking into other career options.”

He’d allowed himself to hope that was the end of it. He should have known better. No one willing to broach the idea of cold-blooded murder was going to go quietly.

“Talk about what?” he’d asked her an hour ago, playing innocent.

“You know. You and me.”

He’d started to get angry. “There is no you and me. Thought I made that clear. Now I’m gonna hang up, and I don’t want to hear— ”

“I have pictures. Compromising pictures.”

His heart almost stopped. “What?”

“I have tape recordings. Listen.”

He heard a click from the other end, followed by his own voice. And then her voice. A goddamn recording. And there was no mistaking what was happening in the recording. Norman was shaken. His whole world was crumbling to pieces around him. Desperation engulfed him.

“Come see me,” she told him. “We’ll talk.”

What choice did he have?

He followed her directions down Weakley Lane, a lonely stretch of two-lane rural road that was mostly just woods on both sides once you got past the old National Guard base. All those tall trees spooked him. He made a mental note to feel out some developers he knew, see if any of them might be interested in knocking out a few hundred acres’ worth of these damn trees to put in a subdivision or two.

He slowed down as he neared mile marker six and kept an eye on the opposite side of the road, just like she told him. And pretty soon he saw the narrow dirt path she’d described as a driveway. Bullshit. Proper driveways were paved. The sight of the dilapidated old house as he pulled into the clearing set the hairs on the nape of his neck to prickling. But it wasn’t just the house that stirred the feeling of unease. There’d been a shift in the atmosphere as he’d entered the clearing. It was noticeable even nestled in the warmth of his 1982 Cadillac Seville. It unsettled him and he nearly turned around and left right then. It was what he should have done.