Reaching the basement, Marla fancied that she heard Jessie’s voice. Not the usual cocky, wisecracking tone, but rather a—whimper? Had she injured herself? Perhaps she’d fallen over on the stairs or tripped in the mess of the cellar. Marla headed down the steps to the basement, taking care not to tumble down them herself, her nose wrinkling at the stagnant cocktail of smells emanating from the depths.
Marla’s eyes adjusted from the gloom of the stairwell to the dark of the basement, pupils widening to admit the scantest extreme of the spectrum. Another whimper. She turned to spy out its source. What she saw there shook her to the core. Jessie was, impossibly, levitating a full two feet off the floor. Her face was horribly contorted and streaked with dark shadows. Marla stood dumbstruck at the sight of her and tried to focus on what she was seeing, her eyes struggling to make sense of the details in the dim light. In what seemed like slow motion, her panicked brain pieced together the jigsaw. The dark streaks on Jessie’s face were rivulets of blood, held in their course by great fingers. Fingers that penetrated the flesh covering Jessie’s skull so Marla could not tell where the fingertips ended and where Jessie began. Even as the horror of the scene dawned on her, Marla saw that Jessie was not floating above the floor as she’d first imagined. The hideous fat fingers that had burrowed their way into her soft face were connected to great hands—as big as shovels—and these in turn were extensions of massive arms, like those of a circus strongman. The hulking form anchoring the weight of Jessie’s helpless body loomed darkly, becoming clearer to Marla’s eyes as it shifted its bulk in the shadows. Jessie looked like a doll in its massive hands. She made a pitiful whimpering, gurgling sound as the red lines of blood quickened from her face into the sinewy network of fleshy guttering that was the man’s hand. Marla took a step back, bile rising in her throat as she did so, and heard her foot scrape noisily against some hard object. A brick? Did he hear it too? Eyes, black and shiny as an insect’s, burned their answer at her from the shadows. She felt them on her. The hulking thing had seen her and mortal panic took her breath away. Then, a sickening crack as the shape twisted Jessie’s head in mid-air, snapping her neck as casually as a snap of the fingers. Marla turned and fled, desperate to be rid of the sight of this horror, feeling the sensation of her revulsion at the cellar and its secrets creep through every fiber of her body.
She clambered up the steps and wondered breathlessly how many—no, how few seconds would pass until she felt the grip of those foul butcher’s hands on her body.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Thud. Thud. Thud. Mara’s heart pounded inside her body, fit to burst. She’d battered and bruised herself clambering out of the basement in a white panic, bouncing off the walls of the narrow corridor like a pinball before clattering her way back through the games room. She felt no pain from her little injuries, the tidal wave of adrenaline coursing through her body saw to that. All she had was a kind of focus, like someone undergoing hypnosis keeping his or her gaze fixed on a pinpoint of light. Don’t turn around, don’t turn around, don’t…was the mantra pulsing in her brain like a drumbeat. And she did not turn around. How could she? Knowing that hulking thing was there in the shadows behind her, probably taking one giant step for every four or five of hers, closing in on her in the darkness with those great hands outstretched. Those hands—she remembered how they looked in the dark, like thick twigs growing out of twisted tree branches—slicked with Jessie’s blood. She pushed through a door into another corridor and it rebounded against the wall making a sharp cracking sound, like that of Jessie’s neck when he—that thing—snapped it so casually. Don’t turn around! Don’t…
Bang. Bang. Bang. Was that the sound of her heart? Ready to split like a plum and sputter from her chest, utterly spent out of fear and terror and things that go bump in the basement. No, this was a new sound, joining the thudding of her heart in sympathy. Louder now. Bang! Bang! She turned her head towards the perimeter of the room through which she was tumbling and caught sight of the huge metal shutters there. The shutters—that was it. Fowler’s men were trying to break through the shutters! Marla’s face grimaced into what only a madman would recognize as a laugh at this new banging sound—this artificial mockery of her plight. In her mind’s eye she could see them, the men, outside. Under the watchful scorn-filled eye of Chief of Security Fowler they’d be hard at it, chiseling away for all their lives were worth, trying to gain access to the house through its cloak of impenetrable steel. And she’d wanted to keep them out. Jessie had put the same fear into her mind, the same paranoia that had warped her all these long months on the island—and for what? To be locked in with the very thing they should have feared most. Whatever that she’d seen in the basement, it was more terrifying than a thousand Fowlers, more awful than a million of his security guards pointing guns at her head. She’d wanted to keep them out. Idiot! Now she’d do anything for them to break through the damned shutters and rush in to cuff her and take her away. All the better to be away from this house, to be away from that thing.
Bang! Bang! Bang! What the hell was keeping them? Didn’t they know this house? Know all about its weaknesses? Couldn’t they find that chink in the armor and take advantage of it, peel open the protective skin keeping her from making good her escape. Bang! Bang! Marla skidded to a halt as she reached the foot of the stairs, damp oxygen raw in her throat. Please don’t turn around, she thought, but of course she did. She had to know if the monstrous shadow shape was there, ready to finish her before she took her first futile step. Trembling with fear, she took a scant look over her shoulder and saw only the shadows looming behind her. Her nostrils fancied they could smell the metallic taint of Jessie’s blood in the air and the meal she’d eaten earlier rebelled in her stomach, muscles ready to spasm. She swallowed hard and turned her revulsion into momentum, willing her legs into motion and lurching onto the steps. Marla felt numb, catching sight of her faint shadow like that of a puppet in a shadow theater on the wall as she propelled herself up the stairwell.
Each step was an enemy, willing her to fail. Marla pushed on, her breath whistling through clenched teeth. Reaching the first landing felt like a milestone and afforded the opportunity to look behind her once again. Ignoring the voice in her head that pleaded for her not to look, Marla glanced over the banister and saw only the stairs winding down into the hallway. Where was her pursuer? Her mind raced, conjuring visions of the monster appearing at the top of the stairs she’d been fighting to climb—cutting her off by way of some secret route. These terrors quickened her panic, but she remained rooted to the spot all the same. Her lungs needed oxygen and her heart needed respite, however brief, and so she stood leaning on the banister daring to catch her breath. The wood was cool and soft beneath her clammy hands. She noticed just how exquisitely carved the banister was for the first time. Devilish details suddenly struck her. Each vertical support was part of the whole, with no discernable join between it and the handrail. Her eye traced the flowing forms carved into the wood, finding suggested physical forms here and there. It was as if the entire banister had been washed up from the beach long ago, swallowing up human swimmers in its wake then settling here in this big house. More driftwood. Movement between the struts caught her eye and she saw a spider crawling into hiding. Good idea. She pushed on toward the top of the stairs.