Caroline’s voice was low and warm, like melting butter. Or maybe Ginny was melting, dissolving into the darkness and shadows. She put a hand between her legs and it came away wet, the smell of copper strong on her fingers. She was bleeding. A lot.
“He took me to the mall and gave me money to buy a new suit. He saw all my friends wearing them. He wanted me to have one. To be like them. They fought about it, really loud. Brendan hid in his room with his music playing loud, but I could hear them in their bedroom. He won the fight. He always won the fights. And he brought the suit to me; he tossed it down on the bed, and told me to try it on. To show him how it fit. So I did.”
Pause. A breath. Silence, but for the sound of water, trickling.
“I figured out then that I could get whatever I wanted out of him. Out of boys, in general. With just a little show of T and A.”
The phrase seemed oddly innocent, but fitting.
“Do you know,” Caroline asked suddenly, “if she knew there was something going on? My mother, I mean. She had to have known. Didn’t she?”
Ginny couldn’t tell if Caroline was desperate for affirmation or denial. “I don’t know.”
“She knew,” Caroline whispered. Then, even softer, “Do you think she misses me? Will she be happy to see me again?”
“Oh, Caroline. I’m so sorry. But your mom passed away.”
More silence. The baby made a meeping grunt, but settled. Ginny’s thighs stuck together when she moved.
“So…I’m an orphan.” Rusty, grating laughter became a sob. “Just as well. Just as well.”
Ginny had lost track of time long ago. She listened for the sound of shouts or voices, but heard nothing. “These rooms…soundproofed?”
“Yes. He built this house like this, you know. Back before he even met my mom. He built this house himself.”
Ginny’s lips pulled back from her teeth. “Jesus Christ.”
“He told me he was taking me to the beach for the weekend. As a special treat. We weren’t supposed to let Mom know. He said nobody could know, or they’d want to come along. That’s why he picked me up on the way home from school. I was walking. I was just scuffing my feet along in the leaves and thinking about going to the football game the next day. He pulled up in a van. I didn’t know it, and I would never ever have gone inside.” Caroline paused. Coughed. She coughed for a long time, and when she stopped, her voice had gone rough and thick with phlegm. “But I saw it was my daddy, so I got in.”
“Someone reported it. The van. They saw you get into it.”
“But they didn’t know it was him. Obviously. They thought a stranger took me.”
“Yes,” Ginny said.
Caroline snorted. “They were right.”
A sound like distant thunder rumbled, then stopped. Ginny felt the vibration in the bed, or maybe just thought she did. She strained, listening. They all did. But nothing else happened.
“When he showed me the bookcase, the hidden stairs, I thought it was amazing. So cool. And then when he showed me this little space, like a playroom, I thought it was so much fun. He told me this was our place, our special place, that nobody would ever know about it, and until he left me there and didn’t let me out, I thought it was going to be great.” Caroline sounded tired. “Also, he lied. Because it wasn’t just our special place. Not until later. Not until after.”
“After what?”
“After she died,” Caroline said wearily, casually. “I wasn’t the first one.”
“Oh. Oh God.” There should’ve been more words than that, but Ginny had none.
“Her name was Terry. She was jealous of me, right from the start, because I had long hair and pretty teeth. She didn’t have teeth. He’d pulled them so she couldn’t bite.”
“Please. You don’t have to tell me this.”
“I have to tell you this!” Caroline hissed. “I have been waiting for too long to tell someone this!”
Ginny shut up after that. Caroline talked. Ginny listened.
“He never touched me, not until she died.” That seemed to be an important fact. “He promised he’d let me out. But I saw what he did to Terry. I didn’t want to lose my teeth, or have him cut my hair. I thought someone would find me. I mean, I was in the house. In the goddamned house, right? How could they not know? How could they not hear me screaming? I did try to get away. So he put on the chain. And then…a baby.”
At every pause, Ginny hoped Caroline wouldn’t say anything else. She prayed for someone to find them. But other than another rumble that sounded like distant thunder, there was only blackness and Caroline’s voice.
“He took it away from me. It was a boy. He said I wasn’t old enough to take care of a baby. I was fifteen by then, or…I think I was. I lost track of time. I made marks, for a while, on the wall. But he saw them and erased them. So he took the baby. It was small anyway. I think it would’ve died. I think…it did die. Didn’t it, Ginny? Did my baby die?”
Ginny thought of the bones in her backyard. “I think so, honey. Yes.”
Caroline gave a shuddering sigh. “Then came Tate, and he let me keep him. Said I needed something to keep me occupied when he couldn’t visit me. Tell me something. When did my mother die?”
“I’m not sure, Caroline. But I know that she and your brother moved out of this house about a year after you went missing.”
“Oh. Oh. Oh,” Caroline said. “Oh. She didn’t stay? So she didn’t know. Really? She didn’t know I was here?”
Mrs. Miller might have suspected something, but it couldn’t have been this. “I don’t think so, honey. I’m sure she didn’t know. I think she really thought you were…gone.”
“She thought I was dead.”
“Yes. I think so.”
Caroline gave a barking sob. “Oh. Okay. That’s good. That’s good, you know? Because she just thought I was dead, she didn’t leave me here on purpose.”
“No. I don’t think so.” Ginny reached blindly to find Caroline.
Caroline turned and pressed herself to Ginny’s shoulder. Her tears were hot and wet on Ginny’s neck; the baby gave a startled cry. Ginny put her hand between Caroline and the baby, but didn’t push the other woman away. She cradled her as best she could.
“No, Caroline. She didn’t leave you here on purpose. I’m sure of it.”
They sat that way for another interminable amount of time. Ginny had never known kids to be so quiet for so long, but thought perhaps they’d all fallen asleep. Her muscles were stiff, and her back ached. Every movement sent another hot pulse between her legs, and her head spun.
“I’m bleeding,” Ginny said. “Too much, I think.”
“I thought once the children came, he’d leave me alone. He promised, after each one, he would take us all upstairs. After the ones that didn’t make it, he always said he would take me to the hospital. But he never did.”
“How many times?”
“I don’t know,” Caroline said, but Ginny knew that was a lie. No mother who lost a child could ever forget it, no matter how many times it happened.
“Caroline, I feel really bad. I feel really sick. I’m losing too much blood.”
“Wait.”
The bed moved as Caroline got up and returned a few minutes later. She took away the material bunched between Ginny’s legs and replaced it with another. Ginny forced her mind from thinking of germs. Sepsis. Her breath shuddered. Oh God. Where was Sean? Where were the police?
“Shh. Shhh, listen.” Ginny sounded drunk. She wished she were.
Deke spoke up. “It’s Tate!”
“Tate’s gone,” Linna snapped. “Don’t be a dumb-bum. Tate went up and he didn’t come back. He’s dead!”
“Tate knew he was getting old. Tate said, what happened if he died? What would happen when he didn’t bring the food? So Tate tried to get the key, the spe
cial key, but he pushed Tate down so hard it cracked his head open. And then he went crazy.” Deke was sobbing, shouting as Caroline and Linna tried to shush him.
His shouts startled the baby awake. He began to wail. Ginny rocked and soothed, but nothing would calm the infant.
“Tate said the only way out was through the walls! And we didn’t have food anymore, it was gone, and the heat was off, the ’lectric was off, it was cold! Tate went up,” Deke said, more quietly, “and he didn’t come back.”
“When did Tate go up?” Ginny asked. “Not so long ago. After we moved in, right? It was after that. George died in the hospital, and we bought the house four months after that. Your food ran out. Your power ran out. And Tate went up, into the duct, and didn’t come back.”
The furnace. The flickering lights. Oh God.
The flies.
Ginny heard herself muttering, though her words were a slurred jumble of sounds she couldn’t distinguish, even to herself. She struggled to move, to get up, and felt herself falling into a different sort of darkness. She clutched her screaming baby. She would not drop the baby. She would not drop her son.
The sound of thunder wasn’t distant this time.
“Ginny! Wake up! You have to get up! Now!”
Ginny fought the waves of black and red, the swirling descent of gray. Someone shook her. Someone tried to take her baby from her arms, and she screamed, fighting.
The roar grew louder. So did the sound of water. Someone pulled her, got her standing, pushed her toward a spindle-legged chair shoved in front of the dresser. Which she could see.
There was light.
Faint, from the room outside this one, but after so long in the dark, any speck of light was bright as a star. Ginny put one hand on top of the dresser, the other cradling her shrieking child. Screams were good, better than silence. Better than a baby who made no sound. Someone shoved her from behind, and her muscles protested as she tried to lift her leg and get on top. Something ripped inside her, something slid down her thighs, something thick and tearing her on the way out.
Clarity hit her along with the pain. The rumble and roar had been the basement wall collapsing. The water was rushing in, frothing and foaming and rising.
The ceiling in these rooms was not high.
Trixie was already crouched on top of the dresser. There was no room for Ginny there. Instead, Ginny put her baby there, one hand on her son to keep him from toppling off. The naked infant squalled in fury.
The water rose.
Caroline and Ginny clung to the dresser. On the opposite side of the room, Linna, clutching the cat, and Deke had scrambled on top of the table. The water had already reached their shins and was still climbing. Their backs pressed to the ceiling, necks angled.
Impossibly, the water rose.
It was up to Ginny’s chest, and filled with rubble. Something sharp hit her leg and sent her swirling into the muck, her head under the water with barely enough time to grab a breath. She came up choking, flailing with one hand, the other hooked into the dresser’s metal handle.
“Asher!” Until that moment, she hadn’t known what she wanted to call her baby. But now she knew there was nothing else to call him.
Ginny got to her feet and put a hand on top of the dresser, found her son and held him in place. She didn’t need a chair to get to the top of it now, because the water buoyed her. Trixie shuddered, and Ginny took her hand. She looked into her face, realized she could make out the sight of the girl’s dark eyes, her open mouth.
The water rose and pushed her upward, to the low-hung ceiling. She clung to the dresser. She kicked to keep herself from being swept away. She focused on Trixie’s face.
“I’m here,” she cried. “I’m here. I’m here.”
Someone shouted her name. More light poured into the room, bright and glaring and focused in beams. Flashlights. Men in boots and yellow overcoats.
And Sean.
He grabbed her, but she wouldn’t let go of the dresser without Asher safely cradled against her. Firemen, the other men were firemen. They shouted, pointing, grabbing at Linna and Deke. Sean, hair plastered to his face, reached for Trixie and pulled her from the dresser, into the water that was now neck high. Ginny held her son over her head and moved, following him, the front of her nightgown gripped tight in Sean’s hand.
Somehow, he pulled them out, over the remnants of the collapsed basement wall and the dirt that filled the space. Down the corridor that rose at the slight incline so that by the time they reached the metal door, propped open with a large metal shaft, the water was only to their knees. Then they were through the door, the stairs in front of them and the firemen with the other children close behind them.
Then they went up.
And they didn’t come back down.
Chapter Forty-Five
Ginny rocked.
Asher, warm and clean, sucked sporadically at one breast, rosebud mouth going periodically lax. Ginny smoothed her hand over the baby’s soft, downy hair. She sang him a lullaby, soothing her son to sleep. In the next room, her husband slept too.
In another house, another place, Caroline Miller and her children were also warm and fed and safe. But did they sleep? Did they dream? Ginny didn’t know. The police and Social Services and Brendan Miller and lawyers and the media had all taken their pieces of Caroline and the children from the basement. Ginny had visited them in the hospital just once, right after they were found, and then only because she and Asher had been admitted as well.
She and Sean had managed, so far, to keep the reporters camped out in front of the house from bothering them too much; she supposed at some point they’d have to talk to them, or they would all give up and go away. They bothered Sean more than they did her, if only because Ginny clung to the idea that somehow sharing what happened might help Caroline and her family more than keeping all of it as yet one more secret.
Ginny was tired of secrets.
In her arms, Asher stirred and let out one small cry, then fell further into sleep. Ginny rocked, her eyes closed, smiling at the sound of Noodles’s collar jingling as the cat padded into the library and jumped onto the Victorian couch where she’d taken to spending most of her time. She was still too thin, but she never got underfoot anymore, and she never ran into places she wasn’t supposed to go.
Ginny rocked, dozing in the dark. There came the creep of small bare feet, the whisper of cold air swirling, the soft brush of fingertips against her own. Maybe those things would always be in this house. They’d never go away. But Ginny didn’t open her eyes, because she knew it was all a dream. That was all, just a dream.
She wasn’t haunted any longer.
About the Author
Megan Hart writes books. Some of them use a lot of bad words, but most of the other words are okay.
She can’t live without music, the internet, or the ocean, though she and soda have achieved an amicable parting of ways. She can’t stand the feeling of corduroy or velvet, and modern art leaves her cold. She writes a little bit of everything from horror to romance.
Find her at: www.meganhart.com, www.twitter.com/megan_hart, and www.facebook.com/megan.hart!
Live fast, die young, and leave a bloodthirsty corpse!
Ghost Heart
© 2016 John Palisano
Live fast, die young, and leave a bloodthirsty corpse. That’s the saying of a new pack of fiendish predators infesting a New England town. They’re infected with the Ghost Heart, a condition that causes them to become irresistible and invincible…as long as they drink the blood of the living. But these vampires don’t live forever, and as the Ghost Heart claims them, their skin loses color and their hearts turn pale. When a young mechanic is seduced by the pack’s muse, he finds falling in love will break more than his heart.
Enjoy the following excerpt for Ghost Heart:
We head
ed outside, toward the alley behind the bar; we walked into the nice, cool drizzle. I loved the change in climate. The bar had been so hot and stuffy, so being outside was welcome. Mike hiked up the collar of his leather jacket and couldn’t walk fast enough.
Once we made it around the corner I spotted the Whistleville River just beyond the bridge. I thought about how, a few miles up, on the east side of town, the Jeep in my shop had plunged over that same bridge. I imagined the bodies of the kids stuck there, tangled in the water grass, decomposing, and slowly turning into fish food. I shook off the idea––just chalked it up to collateral damage from a nice Anchor Steam buzz.
We rounded the old brick building and made our way toward the parking lot in back. Rain filtered through the street lamps, falling in curtains, shifting and moving in the crosswinds. A new spotlight lit the rain from the side. Headlights. Tires screeched a few hundred feet in front of us.
There was a Jeep. Another damn Jeep, I thought. It raced toward us, stopping with a hard jerk. The rainfall increased.
A window rolled down, but I couldn’t see inside.
A raspy, deep voice, said, “Hey.”
“What do you need, man?” I asked. “Come on.”
“You know exactly what you did,” he said. “Disrespecting me and my girl.”
“I don’t know you, man,” I said. “I think you’re mistaking me for someone else.”
“So you’re calling me a liar?”
I pulled my collar up. “Look, friend,” I said. “I don’t have time for this. I’m drunk. I want to go home.”
“Oh, sure,” he said. “You just want to go home and forget all of this.”
His door opened. It was the big, bald guy that had been next to Minarette. “Too late,” he said. “The damage is already done. Talking about me.” Two others got out of the Jeep. They looked like normal, clean-cut guys in their 20s, only there was something wrong with their expressions. I thought they had to have been high on something. Their eyes seemed so vacant.