The Remains (19 page)

I made my way back into the bathroom, yanked
up the shade and stared out the window onto the parking lot. Blue
and black clouds filled the sky. The occasional flicker of distant
lightning lit them up. The usual cars were parked in the lot,
including Michael’s truck. From where I stood it was impossible for
me to see my Cabriolet.

Turning, I held the phone back up to my face,
staring down at the display panel. I thumbed the command that would
reveal Whalen’s number. The caller ID came back, “Restricted
Number.” With trembling fingers I began to dial 9-1-1.

But before I fingered the second number in
the sequence, I stopped myself cold.

I stared
out into the thickening darkness and the silence of the
apartment.
What if the police come to my home? Whalen must be watching
me. He must have been watching me now for weeks; months. What will
he do when he sees the police car? What kind of revenge will he
take out on Michael?

All strength seeped out of me. My hand and
the phone it gripped fell to the side. I had no idea which way to
turn for help. Not without getting Michael killed in the
process.

I sensed someone behind me.

I knew he was there before I actually saw
him. Something inside my brain went click. My eyes rolled back into
their sockets. The wood floor beneath me turned to mud. I turned
around, but did so in slow motion. I screamed but the sound of my
voice was like an old vinyl record played at slow speed. When my
eyes connected with his, I felt all oxygen leave my lungs. It was
as if I’d been kicked in the stomach by an invisible booted
foot.

There he was: the source of my fear; the
author of my texts.

You are one day early…

He was the old man from the Hollywood
Carwash. His was the face from ViCAP. He was the monster from my
dreams. He was shaven clean now, and what had been long white hair
was now a bald scalp. His face was gaunt, cheeks sallow, chin
protruding. His pallor was chalk-pale. Dark round eyes made the
paleness all the whiter.

Now for certain I remembered the face. I
remembered the man; the monster.

I took in all these details with every single
one of my senses as he approached me in the hall of my apartment,
dressed in the worn work-boots and the blue uniform of the
apartment complex maintenance crew. Standing there I could only
wonder how he managed to get Michael out of there without anyone
spotting him. He must have wrapped Michael up in the rug, dragged
him out the front door like a piece of furniture. There were always
people moving in and out of these apartments. Who would notice?

In one hand he held a needle and syringe. In
the other, a pistol. He stared into my eyes as I began to feel
myself losing all sense of balance.

“My other little kitten is gone,” he sobbed,
in a gruff, high-pitched moan.

“Molly died,” I choked.

“Cry, cry, cry,” he whispered, his eyes
tearing, his bottom lip protruding out in pout position. “Cry, cry,
cry.”

He hadn’t yet touched me with the tip of that
needle before I passed out.

MOLLY ENTERS THE HOUSE in the woods before
me. She is not bothered by the smell anymore than she is bothered
by the creepy feel of spider webs that hang from the ceilings and
the walls. In a word, the interior is trashed, with broken
furniture scattered all about what was once an open living room.
Looking all around me, I see that most of the walls have been
opened up probably with claw hammers, almost all of the copper
piping and wiring torn away by scrap hunters. There’s an old
chandelier that hangs from the ceiling, its bulbs gone along with
any crystals that once hung from it.

And that smell. It’s just as bad inside as
it is outside.

“
Come on,” Molly says. “I want to show you
the upstairs.”

Out the corner of my eye, I make out the
staircase that leads up to a second floor. Its treads are no longer
level, but leaning inwards. Just looking at them frightens me so
that I can’t imagine stepping on them, bearing weight upon them.
But Molly isn’t the least bit afraid. She heads to the stairs and
in the home’s semi-darkness, begins climbing them, one at a
time.

I follow.

As we ascend the staircase in near pitch
darkness I begin to smell a new odor. It’s the same smell you get
inside an old abandoned barn. The smell of cats and their urine. As
we come to the second floor landing, a black cat scurries out from
a room at the far end of the hall, runs right past us.

“
Hi Blacky,” Mol says, as the cat leaps
back down the steps.

“
Obviously you two are acquainted,” I
say.

“
We’re old friends,” she adds.

“
Look at all this room, Bec,” she goes on.
“There’re two rooms apiece for us.”

I go no further than the first bedroom.
There’s an old bare mattress set out on the floor, its rusted
springs sticking out of the holes. There are dark spatter stains on
the walls that remind me of blood. There’s an exposed light bulb
that hangs down from a wire. If it were not for the sunlight that
sneaks in through the cracked double-hung windows, the place would
be pitch black.

I find myself shaking. I’m having trouble
breathing. I get the feeling something bad has happened here.
Something bad enough for the place to have been abandoned.

“
I’m going back down, Mol,” I say through
shivering teeth. “I don’t like it up here.”

“
Don’t like it?” she says, running from
room to room, jumping up and down on the bare mattresses. “It’s all
ours.”

I turn back for the stairs. That’s when I
hear the front door slam shut.

THE CELL PHONE WOKE me from out of a
drug-induced sleep. I raised myself up, scraping away the wet pine
needles that were stuck to my right cheek. I opened my eyes onto a
darkness broken only by a tiny flashing red light embedded inside
the plastic phone casing. Climbing onto my knees, I reached out for
the phone, opened it, and held it up to my ear.

I was wet and shivering. I was also dizzy,
out of balance. Out of instinct, I pressed the phone to my ear,
listened for a voice. But then it dawned on me that there would be
no voice.

Setting the phone flat in the palm of my
hand, I peered down at the light radiant screen. Opening and
closing my eyes, I tried hard to focus.

Do you luv Michael little kitten?

I thumbed in an answer. Pounded it in.

Do not hurt him.

It took forever to type in the letters, my
eyes straining to focus in the light rain and through the haze of
the sedation.

Another text came through.

Cry, cry, cry little kitten.

No choice but to play the game. That meant
telling the truth.

I luv Michael.

I awaited Whalen’s reply. It came quickly, as
though the text had been prepared well ahead of time as a quick
text.

Flashlight is at your feet. Pick it up and
turn it on little kitten.

From down on my knees, I reached out with my
free hand, probing the wet mix of pine needles, leaves and raw
earth with bear fingers until I located the heavy flashlight. The
light not only provided me with a means of vision, it also revealed
the truth: Whalen had dropped me inside a patch of thick woods. The
monster had drugged me, hauled me out to some remote area and
dropped my unconscious body inside it. Somewhere wild, somewhere
dense with cover. Somewhere cold.

Another text.

Go to pictures little kitten.

I thumbed the menu key. A second screen
appeared, this one offering eight options. The first for recent
calls, the second for personal phone book, the third for games. And
so on. I fingered the number 6 on the keypad. A picture appeared. A
man who had been bound with silver duct tape. A man of medium build
forced down on his knees. Like me, he seemed to be kneeling inside
a thick patch of woods, while a bright white light shined on him,
as if coming from a set of headlights. In the picture I could see
that the man’s hair was dark, thick. He was bare-chested. The
mustached face had been covered with separate strips of duct tape,
one covering the eyes, the other covering the mouth, leaving only
an exposed nose through which to breathe.

The tape acted like a mask. But I didn’t need
to view the entire face to recognize Michael.

I wiped the beaded rainwater from the small
screen, moving on to the next picture. Michael was still down on
his knees. Only this time, he wasn’t inside a patch of woods. He
was inside a building or a house. Down inside a basement. He was
down on his knees on a hard-packed gravel and dirt floor.
Surrounding him were stone and cinder block walls. He was bathed in
harsh white light, just like in the previous picture. Probably from
an exposed light bulb. I knew that basement, knew what had happened
there. To Molly and me.

I dropped the phone, fell to my knees, and
coughed up bile. The acidic bile filled my mouth, burned my throat.
Spitting it out, I inhaled deeply of the cool wet air. I was afraid
to pick the phone back up; afraid of what came next. I’d already
seen enough.

But then I had no choice but to pick the
phone back up. No choice but to keep on looking. It seemed to take
every ounce of my will, but I thumbed to the next picture and drew
my eyes to the screen.

This time I saw myself. Rather, not only
myself, but Michael and I seated on the couch in my apartment,
sipping wine. The picture appeared to have been snapped from
directly outside the apartment window.

I depressed the keypad, moved on to the next
picture. And the next, and the next…

Me, knapsack in one hand, one of Franny’s
canvases in the other, moving toward my Cabriolet inside an empty
downtown Broadway parking garage; me running for the Cabriolet; me
jumping behind the wheel… Me standing on the porch of my parents’
home, staring out onto the woods and Mount Desolation beyond them…
Me holding the black and white photo of Molly and me in my hand as
I sat down onto the porch, pressed my back up against the clapboard
wall… Me in bed, my eyes wide open in alarm, Michael asleep beside
me…

I guess I wasn’t nuts after all. Whalen had
been following me all along.

More photos appeared. Black and white
images.

Molly and I when we were no more than three,
running in the backyard behind our farmhouse. A color shot of Molly
and me waiting for the school bus in our St. Catherine’s elementary
school white and blue checkered uniform skirts. Molly and I as
pre-teens playing one of our nightly games of flashlight tag in the
tall grass behind our home on a hot summer’s night. Molly in her
bed asleep; me undressing in my bedroom, both photos no doubt
having been shot from outside our windows where Whalen must have
perched himself on the porch overhang.

All those years ago…

THE PHONE PULSED IN my hand. Thumbing SEND I
read,

Run away little kitten. I’m going to chase u
now. You remember the game. Flashlight tag. Cry, cry, cry.

I peered at the radiant display hoping that I
would wake up from a dream. But this wasn’t a dream. It was the
past relived. This was Whalen chasing Molly and me through the
woods, again.

I closed the phone, shoved it in my pocket,
looked up at the sky and saw only darkness and clouds illuminated
by the distant flicker of lightning. I had to find a way to deal,
get a grip.

I started by gripping the flashlight and
aiming it dead ahead.

THE FLASHLIGHT LIT UP a stand of brush, vines
and trees directly in front of me. Making my way through that thick
stuff would have been impossible. Shifting clockwise I began to
pivot on the balls of my feet like a dancer pirouetting in slow
motion. I kept this rotation up, keeping the shining light out
ahead of me, until I recognized a narrow foot or deer trail that
cut through the thick woods. Probably the same trail that had been
here since Molly and I were girls.

I was doing my best to think clearly, without
panic. Doing my best not to lose it. Doing my best not to lose my
mind. If ever I wished Molly by my side, now was the time. I had to
force myself to think like her. What would she do?

Swallowing a breath, I spoke to myself in a calm, collected
manner.
You
need to figure out which way you are going so that you do not start
running around in circles.

I aimed the flashlight up at a black and blue
sky. No chance of viewing any stars or moon. Not that it would make
an ounce of difference. I shined the light straight ahead toward
the trail, then turning, shined it behind me. That’s when something
began to go rapidly south.

The flashlight began to fade.

The beam started to fade to a kind of
yellowish half light. My pulse picked up. I opened my mouth,
allowing some of the rain to fall onto my tongue.

What I would do without the light? What
would I do in the pitch dark? How would I find the house? How would
I find Michael?

I shook the flashlight, but it was a useless,
wasted motion. Common sense told me to use whatever available power
I had left in the flashlight to enter onto the trailhead and get
the hell away from this place. I aimed the dim light out ahead of
me, making my way across the clearing in what I could only pray was
Michael’s direction.

I was standing at the edge of the chosen
trail when the flashlight went dead.

RAIN BEGAN TO POUR down in sheets of painful,
ice-like bullets. The heavy cloud cover surrounded the hillside
like a vapor ring. Directly before me came the intermittent
explosions of lightning. Without them the darkness of the woods
would have been absolute and impenetrable. Because of the cloud
cover, no stars shined up above. No moonbeams penetrated the low
lying mist and fog.