The Summoning (23 page)

Mr. Murdock struggled back up to his feet much more quickly than Ryan had anticipated.

But it didn’t matter that Mr. Murdock was back on his feet. Ryan already had his straight razor out, the blade opened. He brought the razor down across Mr. Murdock’s face and throat in a diagonal slash. Then he slashed again and again in vicious movements that cut deep into the flesh of the man’s face and throat. Blood gushed out. Mr. Murdock held up a hand in defense, and Ryan sliced off two of the man’s fingers as neatly as if he’d stuck his fingers into a meat-cutting saw.

Mr. Murdock collapsed onto the floor, trying to scream and cry out in pain, but his vocal chords were slashed, and much like his associate Lita, he was drowning in his own blood as it poured into his lungs.

But Ryan didn’t stop; he slashed again and again, until the cuts crisscrossed on Mr. Murdock’s face, until sections of blood-soaked skin fell away from his face in layers.

Amber moved out of the way of Mr. Murdock and Ryan and headed towards the back of the couch for safety. Carol dropped to her hands and knees and picked up Lita’s gun on the floor.

This was it, Carol thought as she held the gun. This was the way it could all be fixed. Her husband, back from the grave, had told her so.

She aimed the gun at the fighting men. Except this wasn’t a fight anymore, it was a slaughter. Ryan slashed and slashed at the man’s face and throat. Pulpy pieces of flesh were scattered everywhere. Blood soaked the wood floor. If Carol ever needed any proof that Cutter was inside of Ryan,
this
was proof enough now.

She watched as Ryan stood over top of Mr. Murdock. He had finally stopped his savage attack with the straight razor. He was breathing heavily, his back to her, staring down at his mutilated victim on the floor who somehow clung to life, gurgling out his last breaths.

She watched Ryan turn to Amber who cowered by the couch, holding onto it like a woman holding onto a lifeboat in a stormy sea.

“I did it for you!” Ryan yelled at Amber with an insane smile and a killer’s glee in his wide blue eyes. “They will never come after you now. You’ll be free!”

Ryan took a step towards Amber. Mr. Murdock’s blood was streaked across his face.

“Stop right there, Cutter,” Carol said, aiming Lita’s gun at Ryan. She knew how to use a gun, her husband had showed her how when they were first married. The memory caused a split-second moment of nostalgia, but she pushed it away. She knew what she needed to do here; she needed to do what her husband had told her to do.

Ryan froze.

Carol pulled the trigger and shot Ryan in the chest.

“No!!” Amber screamed. She watched Carol shoot Ryan. She saw the bullet hit him right in the chest and knock him backwards; he fell over the dying man in the dark suit and landed on the floor near him.

Amber rushed across the floor to Ryan and fell down beside him as he clutched at the wound in his chest.

“Get away from him,” Carol growled at Amber.

Amber didn’t listen to the old woman. She held Ryan’s head, cradling it. He stared up at her with his blue eyes that seemed to wonder where he was.

“Ryan,” she said and then cried.

“It’s okay,” he told her in a hoarse voice. “You need to take the money and get out of here.”

“No,” Amber whimpered. “Not without you.”

Carol took a step closer to them, her gun still aimed down at Ryan. “You killed my husband, Cutter,” she said to Ryan as she took another step closer. “You tortured him. You mutilated him.”

Ryan held his hand over the wound on his chest as his blood oozed out between his fingers.

“He didn’t deserve what you did to him,” Carol said as she took another step closer. The gun in her hand shook as her hands trembled.

“Don’t,” Amber said to Carol as she sat in front of Ryan like she was trying to shield him. “Please don’t shoot him again.”

Ryan smiled as a little bit of blood leaked out of his mouth. He struggled to sit up so he could stare at Carol in the eye. He had something to tell her. He remembered everything now. He
was
Cutter and he knew what he had done to his victims – the tortures, the murders. But there was something that Carol needed to know.

“There’s something I need to tell you about your husband,” Ryan said as he sat up.

“Shut up,” Carol said and took another step closer to them.

“He wasn’t just another victim,” Ryan went on. “He wasn’t some random person I selected.”

“Shut up!” Carol said a little louder. “I don’t want to hear your lies!”

“He was my helper,” Ryan said. “He helped me pick out my victims. He helped me torture them. He helped me kill them. All of them.”

“Shut up!”

“I wanted to stop, but he wouldn’t let me. He was my last victim and then I ended it for good.”

“I said, SHUT UP!!”

Carol pulled the trigger again and shot Ryan in the shoulder. The gunshot was only a spit of noise because of the silencer. Amber ducked out of the way just in time, falling down to her side. She turned back to the old woman, afraid to move now, afraid Carol was going to shoot her next.

“Don’t you move, either,” Carol told Amber. “I’ll shoot you, too. There’s only one way out of this. Only one way to send my husband and Cutter back to where they came from. Back to where they belong now.”

Ryan managed to sit up even with the fresh bullet wound in his shoulder, he looked at Amber. “You need to run,” he told her.

“No,” Amber whispered and shook her head no.

“This is the way it needs to be,” he told her.

Carol shot Ryan again in the chest, and the bullet knocked him back down flat to the floor with a thump.

Ryan laid flat on his back and struggled for breath. He stared up at the dark ceiling with wide eyes.

Carol aimed the gun at Amber.

Amber shook her head no, crying even harder now.

“Please, Carol,” Ryan whispered. “Don’t shoot her.”

“I have to,” Carol said.

Amber closed her eyes as Carol tightened her finger around the trigger.

But before she could shoot, Victor launched himself at Carol. He tackled her and knocked her to the ground as she squeezed off another bullet that went astray. She screamed under his weight as he held her on the ground. Even though his wounds pained him, he managed to knock the gun out of her hand.

Carol writhed on the floor underneath Victor, but he wouldn’t let her go.

“I’ve got to send them back!” Carol yelled.

Victor held her down. “You can’t kill that girl,” he whispered into her ear, trying to calm her down. “She’s got nothing to do with this.”

Carol stopped struggling and cried even harder.

“You sent him back,” Victor whispered into her ear. “Cutter’s dying. He’s going back. You did it, Carol. You sent him back.”

Amber scrambled back over to Ryan, but she could see that he was dying; there was no hope for him now. She stared down at him through blurred vision from her tears.

Ryan lay in an ever-widening pool of his own blood, struggling to keep his eyes open.

“Hold on, Ryan,” Amber cried. “I know you’re Cutter. But I know you could be different if you had another chance.”

“Please, Amber,” Ryan croaked out and coughed up a little blood. “Let me go.” Ryan struggled to smile. “Let me go, and I think you’ll be seeing me again real soon.”

Amber wasn’t sure what he meant by that.

“Now go!” Ryan coughed out through a spray of blood, he held out the keys to his car. He closed his eyes and his breathing stopped.

Amber grabbed Ryan’s car keys and jumped to her feet. She grabbed the duffel bag by the couch. She looked over at Carol and Victor. Victor still held Carol down on the floor and he was still whispering into her ear, trying to calm her down, trying to soothe her.

But there would never be any peace for her, Amber thought.

She ran out through the front door to Ryan’s car.

Ryan opened his eyes one more time even though he wasn’t breathing anymore. He watched Amber run to the front door. He smiled and closed his eyes.

But he didn’t have any other thoughts after that.

He drifted off into darkness and …

… pure white.

Heavy breathing.

The red-haired man stared down at the naked man on the table, the man’s head encased in the wood and leather straps, his hands held down in the wooden boxes, the straps cutting deep into his flesh and holding him down to the wood table. The red-haired man walked slowly around the table, he didn’t need to hurry. Cutter could run, but he couldn’t run forever. It was only a matter of time before he was caught and brought back here where he belonged – back in Hell.

And now he would have eternity for his pleasure, an eternity to torture Cutter, an eternity to pay him back for what he had done to him.

He leaned over Cutter’s face which was hidden underneath the blood-stained white cloth. He could hear his grunts and groans. He watched him try to struggle against his bonds, but there was no hope. He didn’t know how he had escaped Hell and jumped into the dying body of Ryan Freeman, but he was going to make sure that it never happened again.

“We’ll have all of eternity to find out how you did it, Cutter,” the red-haired man said. “How you jumped into Ryan’s body.”

The red-haired man reached out with his ruined fingertips and tore the white cloth away from the Cutter’s face.

But it wasn’t Cutter beneath the white cloth.

Ryan Freeman, the
real
Ryan Freeman, stared up at him with wide brown eyes. He didn’t know where he was. He was hyperventilating, trying to catch his breath.

“Where am I?” Ryan asked as best he could through clenched teeth. He tried to work his jaws open against the leather strap under his chin, but the strap was too tight. “How did I get here?”

The red-haired man looked up at the wood ceiling of exposed trusses in the shack that was now back in Hell where it belonged.

“Cutter!!” the red-haired man who used to be Carol’s husband, the man who used to be Cutter’s partner, screamed up at the ceiling.

But Cutter was gone again.

Amber ran across the front yard through the rain. She carried the duffel bag. She got to Ryan’s car and got inside. She tossed the duffel bag on the passenger seat floor. She was still crying, but she needed to get control of herself. Ryan was dead now, and this was what he wanted for her. He wanted her to start over. He wanted her to be happy.

He loved her.

She jabbed the key into the ignition, shaking from the cold, shaking from shock, from sorrow. She started the car and the headlights came on automatically. She shifted into reverse and backed out of the driveway. She didn’t even look for other cars; she fishtailed out into the street, and then turned the wheel and shifted into drive. She stomped her foot on the gas pedal and the tires spun for a moment on the wet pavement, and then the car lurched forward. She drove down the wet street with tears in her eyes.

Amber pulled up into the driveway of her house. She parked right behind Gary’s truck. He was probably waiting up for her, but she didn’t care. This would be the last time she would ever see him. She just wanted to get something from her bedroom, something she couldn’t leave without.

She turned off the car and got out. The duffel bag was on the passenger floorboard. If she had thrown it in the backseat, she might have seen the person hiding on the floorboards behind the seats.

But she didn’t.

Amber hurried through the rain to the front door. She got her keys out, but found the door unlocked. She entered, bracing herself for her brother’s shouting and cursing, but then she stopped and stared at her dead brother on the couch. He would never yell at her again. She closed the door, but didn’t lock it. She knew that the man and woman in the dark clothing had killed her brother.

But they wouldn’t be coming after her now – Ryan had taken care of that.

She looked at Gary for a moment, she stared at his bloody knees, his body slumped over on the couch, the neat bullet holes in one side of his head, and the other side of his head down on the couch, stuck to the couch cushions with thick, drying blood.

She wanted to feel sad, she wanted to cry, but she couldn’t. Maybe later, but not right now.

Amber hurried to her bedroom. She unlocked her bedroom door and rushed inside. She grabbed the things she wanted from the top of her dresser – the small, framed photos of her mom. It was all she wanted from this place. She didn’t take a change of clothes with her and she didn’t take any of her other possessions. She was going to start over. Everything new, nothing that reminded her of this place.

She knew she would have to talk to the police eventually. Explain to them that she had found Gary dead like this. No one would ever suspect her. The police would think it was a robbery or even that Gary was involved with the dead criminals in Carol’s house. Or it would be just one more unsolved murder – one more mystery in Edrington.

Amber left Gary’s house (she still could only think of it as Gary’s house – it had never been hers) and drove out of the town of Edrington and into the woods on Winter Road. She started crying again as she drove and she had to slow the car down. She knew she should probably pull over, it would be safer. But she needed to get away from this town for a little while. She had to think about things for a moment.

She saw the road that lead deeper into the woods, the road she and Ryan had taken to find the shack in the woods. She thought of going back to that shack, to see if it was still there. But she had a feeling that the shack wouldn’t be there now – it had been a vision from Hell, and that’s where it had gone back to now.

As she drove slowly down the rain-soaked back roads through the woods, she saw something in her rearview mirror, a flash of movement that caught her eye, a dark shape sitting up in the backseat.

Her eyes widened with terror.

Jake sat up in the backseat of the car and looked at her. He held the blood-stained hunting knife in his hand.

The Impala slid off the road and came to a stop in the tall grass, barely missing a tree. The headlights were still on, stabbing through the darkness as the rain poured down. The engine was still running.