The Remains (22 page)

My drenched body shivered.

I shined the light upstream. Through the
trees and the thick brush, I could make out the clapboard
farmhouse. A dull beam of flashlight lit up the exterior wall. Just
ahead of me was a narrow trail. I burst into an all out sprint
along that trail in the direction of the house

Body tingled, head buzzed, lungs filled with
oxygen. My feet moved rapidly beneath me, the pain in my legs
having all but disappeared. Not ten feet of trail separated me from
the house in the woods when a hand reached out, grabbing hold of my
long blonde hair.

HE’S RIGHT BEHIND US. The mad man is
following us the entire time. He grabs Molly’s hair, pulls it
back.

She screams. He laughs.

“
Cry, cry, cry,” he spits.

He pulls mine. I begin to weep. I fall,
bringing Molly down with me.

There’s a pistol barrel in our faces. He is
holding the pistol that he now tucks into his pant waist. Bending,
he grabs my left foot and Molly’s right, starts dragging us back
across the narrow foot trail to the house.

“
Little kittens lost their mittens. Cry,
cry, cry, little kittens.”

When he gets us to the porch, he pulls out a
long silver knife from the sheath on his belt, cuts the tape that
binds our wrists. I lie still on the ground while Molly jumps up,
tries to run. But he is too quick for her. He grabs hold of her
T-shirt, drags her back down and once more whips her over the head
with the pistol grip.

Molly goes to sleep again.

That’s when the devil grabs hold of me. The
devil drags me up the porch steps, in through the open front door,
across the floor, through a door that leads to a black, rank
basement.

He pulls me down the basement stairs by my
hair. My spine pounds against the wood treads. At the bottom of the
stairs he pulls me across the cold dirt floor. He handcuffs me to
something. It’s pitch dark. The place smells of must, urine and
death. I’m shivering with fear and disbelief.

An overhead light is turned on.

I can see that I’m chained to this iron pipe
in the middle of a square-shaped room. It’s a basement room
constructed of stone, concrete, narrow windows located at the very
top of the walls. Heavy gauge wires hang from the exposed rafters.
Besides the wires are big hooks. They look like the hooks the
farmers use to hang their freshly butchered meat. From where I sit,
I can see that the hooks are stained with blood.

For a time the beast just stares down at me.
He’s breathing hard.

“
What are you going to do to me?” I beg,
the handcuffs tight and cutting into my wrists.

“
Cry, cry, cry, little kitten,” he
sings.

I scream.

But only the devil can hear me.

WHALEN LET GO OF my hair and pressed the
pistol barrel against the small of my back.

“Walk little kitten. Walk away.”

I did it,
without a word of protest. I wasn’t frightened anymore. I felt
resolved somehow. I knew what was coming, where I was going. I’d
known for a while now where I was going. I’d been there before. In
a strange way I
wanted
to go
back down there. The situation reeked of inevitability, as if I’d
been waiting for this moment for thirty years; as if what happened
to Molly and I when we were twelve was merely a prologue to this
very moment in time. I wanted to go back down there if only to be
with Michael; to finish this thing while holding him
tightly.

We entered the house.

Whalen used his own flashlight to light the
way across a floor that over three decades had become even more
warped and rotted. When we came to the door that led into the
basement, I could see that an electric light was already on.

When he gave me a shove, I resisted. But when
he pushed me I lost my footing and fell.

I slid down the wooden stairs, my body
slamming against each wood tread. By the time I landed, I thought
I’d pass out from the pain. My vision was distorted, going in and
out of focus.

He descended the stairs, the soles of his
leather boots stamping the wood treads one by one. I could already
smell him. When he made it to the landing, he tucked his pistol
into the waist of his filthy dungarees. He slipped his hands under
my arms, dragging me across the dirt floor. My head hung so that I
was staring up at the exposed beams, at the wires and meat hooks
that still descended from them.

He reached down and touched my lips with his
fingers. But when I bit his hand, I tasted blood.

He reared back with his hand, slapped my
face.

As he straightened up, I laid my head back.
The figure caught my eye. The figure of a man. Arms, legs and torso
hanging upside down from the ceiling. Bare feet chained to the
rafters.

Michael.

Whalen had hung him upside down like a
slaughtered animal. My eyes filled with the sight of his lifeless
body. I screamed without making a sound. I sobbed without shedding
a tear. I died but with a beating heart.

I AM NEARLY DELIRIOUS with fear by the time
he drags Molly down into the basement and lays her out beside me. I
can see that she’s awake, her eyes going from me to him to me
again. He looks at her with a calm confident smile.

I sense that Molly is about to scream,
cry.

But she doesn’t. She grits her teeth, stares
the devil in the eye and spits in his face.

He reaches out, slaps her.

“
Don’t struggle against him, Bec,” she
insists. “Promise me you won’t struggle.”

I look away.

I CAME TO.

How long had I been passed out?

Long enough for him to dig a good sized
trench in the dirt floor. For a time I just locked my eyes onto
him; watched him working, a lit cigarette dangling from his lips.
That wiry body soaked with sweat, plastered with dirt and filth,
reeking of tobacco. Tiny, yellow teeth ground against one another
while he worked, shoveling one spade full of dirt at a time.

Then he caught sight of me.

He saw that I was conscious and he
smiled.

“Hello little kitten,” he said, softly. “Cry,
cry, cry, little kitten.”

I knew then that what he had in store had
nothing to do with his old motivation—his taste for young girls.
There would be no touching here. No violations.

There would only be death.

He reached for me. I had no strength left in
me to resist. He dragged me the few feet to the trench. He dumped
me in. I did a complete roll, landing on my back. I heard him
laugh. At least, I thought it was a laugh. It might just as easily
have been a sob. He was standing above me, the little monster of a
man looking almost huge now. God like.

He had that shovel in his hand.

He stabbed at the dirt pile, retrieved a
shovelful of earth, held it over my prone body, and tossed it into
the trench. The dirt smacked my body, sprayed into my face. It
invaded my mouth, nostrils and blocked my air supply.

There was something inside the dirt.
Something other than rock and gravel and clay. The black and
white-colored shards of bone. The very old bones covered me. A jaw
bone, the teeth still embedded in the broken jaw. A small portion
of skull cap. A leg bone. Here finally were the remains of the
victims of Whalen’s torture. At long last, the bodies had been
found.

Another shovelful of bone-filled dirt fell
onto me, this one down by my feet.

He was burying me alive, adding me to his
basement cemetery.

Yet another shovel of dirt slapped my face. I
coughed, choked as a worm wiggled in my mouth. I tried to wipe the
dirt from my eyes, but all strength was bled out. I was already
dead. I could still see him, but only through a cloud of dirt and
pain.

The bone shards and dirt kept coming, filling
the trench, filling my mouth and nostrils. With each shovelful,
another bit of life emptied out of me.

I was still alive, but already dead.

MOLLY DOESN’T RESIST.

I don’t resist when he unlocks me from the
radiator, grabs my hair.

No struggling.

Our passivity seems to make the monster sad.
He has Molly on the dirt floor on her back. He’s pinning her
shoulders against the floor. She does nothing to resist. He can’t
go through with it. He can’t do it. He grabs hold of me.

I don’t resist.

He throws me on my back.

I don’t resist.

His lips form a pout. He stands up and
begins to cry.

“
Cry, cry, cry,” he chants through his own
tears.

Molly and I turn to one another, lie on the
dirt floor hugging one another. Until Molly spots something. Only a
few feet away, a shovel. She lets go of me, lunges for the shovel
and grips it in her hand. She sits up quick, raises the shovel
high, brings it down hard on the monster’s head.

He drops face first to the dirt.

Molly drops the shovel and takes me in her
arms. We shiver, we cry and we hold one another.

We did not resist.

We did not resist.

We did not resist.

Molly gets back onto her feet. She wipes her
eyes, stemming a silent flow of tears. Marking the right side of
her face is a streak of brown mud.

“
That’s enough, Bec,” she says, with a
stone face.

With that, she reaches her hand out for me,
helping me up off the dirt floor.

THEN I SPOTTED SOMEBODY else. A short, squat
silhouette of a man.

I stared at the man through the dirt and
tears. Only I was aware of him.

Franny.

It was Franny and he had something in his
hand. An iron bar of some kind. A two or three foot length of
rusted rebar.

Franny.

Franny was holding the iron bar two-fisted
over Whalen’s head. Unaware of Franny’s presence, the monster went
about his work filling in the trench, burying me. It was all
happening now in slow motion, one frame slowly following another as
that iron bar came down, smacking Whalen in the center of his
skull. Even from deep down inside the trench, the sound of metal
coming down against skull and bone was like a mallet smacked
against a rotting pumpkin. His black eyes went wide as knees gave
out; as he collapsed onto my dirt-covered stomach.

Franny dropped the iron bar to the floor.

He came to me, bent down, and extended his
left hand.

“Safe. Safe, safe, safe.”

WITH FRANNY’S HELP, I managed to get back up
onto my feet. As the fresh dirt fell off of me, I stood wobbly, out
of balance. I spit out dirt and the skeletal remains of the long
departed. I tried to spit out the taste of death.

But it was impossible.

Even to Franny I must have appeared a strange
and desperate sight with my filthy clothing, cuts and bruises, and
dirt-matted hair. Outside the house now you could hear the sound of
thunder. Reaching out to me, Franny tried to brush off some of the
dirt from my arms and face.

I grabbed hold of his hand and kissed it. I
felt my lips on his hand. I smelled his skin, listened to his
breaths. He averted his eyes and stared at the dirt floor.

Not three feet away, Whalen’s body occupied a
trench meant for me. An open grave. His head was bleeding. Not a
muscle in his body moved. Now I knew for certain that the monster
was finally dead.

Cry, cry, cry…

But what if he wasn’t dead? What if he was
alive still?

Behind me, Michael’s body hung upside-down
from the ceiling, a blood pool directly below him staining the dirt
floor, soaking it.

I wanted to go to him. Franny somehow knew
this.

“No, Rebecca. NO! NO! NO!”

He put his arm around me, lifting me up off
my feet. As I burst into tears, he carried me across the floor, up
the stairs, out of the house and into the woods.

A GRAY DAWN ERUPTED over Mount Desolation as
we moved fast through the forest. We took no chances. By the time
we made it to the stream bank, we hit the water running. Franny
held onto me, wrapped his arms around me, keeping both our heads
and shoulders just barely above water, feet kicking beneath him
against the current.

As I held onto him with all the strength I
had left in me, Franny pumped and pumped. But the drag of the
storm-driven white water was too powerful, too relentless. Almost
immediately it began to drag us downstream. I didn’t care. I wanted
to drown. Still I held on, my arms wrapped around his shoulders and
neck, fingernails digging into his skin. But how I managed to hang
onto him without being swept away I did not know.

The frigid, white water was a shock to my
body.

But I didn’t scream.

We were pulled under. But I didn’t panic,
even when I swallowed water into my lungs. The water pulled us
down. It poured over our heads. It filled our mouths. Until
suddenly we reemerged gasping for breath, the water flowing out of
our nostrils and mouths like blood from stab wounds.

I knew that if the stream were any wider, it
would have consumed us entirely.

But the stream was not wide. I knew that
without the heavy rain, the stream would not run full with heavy
white water. But now it ran swift and heavy because of the
torrential rains. Despite its pull, momentum was on our side. As
the opposite bank approached, we swam and kicked. The cold water
injected new life into our veins. It washed away the blood and the
dirt that came from the devil’s basement.

When Franny reached out with his free hand
and located a handhold along the opposite bank, I knew for sure we
would survive. Pulling me in toward him, he wrenched my forearm
from off his neck. At the same time, I was able to locate a thick
tree root that stuck out of the bank. I gripped the root with both
hands while my legs and feet continued their downstream trek,
twisting my body sideways until parallel with the bank.