The blazing fusion I’d felt after watching my onscreen rape had cooled to violent chills. Now that the gap of emptiness that had plagued me for fifteen years had been filled, I trembled like I’d been hosed down with ice water.
Whoever was filming—either Soren or Porter, I realized now, although no one in the audience would have any idea it was them—had managed to capture the crash on video. It was funny how much less dramatic the crash appeared on screen than I had expected. Somehow I’d managed to forget that this was not a movie. This was real life. No matter how much Porter maneuvered me and positioned me for drama, in the end all of this had been my life, and reality didn’t look like a movie. It was stranger than fiction, but it was also uglier, and crueler, and it made less sense.
As I watched my former car veer off the road, I thought I remembered my last moment with Miranda before it slammed into the tree that caught us. I saw myself reaching out and grabbing her hand, telling her how sorry I was that being my sister had made her life unlivable. But maybe that was wishful thinking, me wanting to believe I’d had time to apologize before she was gone for good.
I couldn’t take my eyes from the screen as the boys in their wolf masks made their way down the embankment toward the smashed ruin of my BMW.
“Shit, man!” Soren said. I recognized his voice now, though it had deepened with age. “Do you think they’re okay?”
“I don’t know,” Porter said, strangely calm. He was the one holding the camera. He moved closer, filming through the window of the BMW to get a shot of me bleeding out from the branch that split my head open. So much blood already. How could there have been any left in my body?
“We should have let them go,” Soren whined, sounding on the verge of tears. “They couldn’t have identified us.”
He was probably right. Soren had dyed his blond hair that rusty maroon for their con, and Porter had traded his glasses (I assumed he’d always worn them) for those electric green contacts. And even if I had wanted to identify them, I would have known what they had on me. That disgusting video. The things they made me do. They could have used it to blackmail me into silence, and it would have worked, because I could not have allowed the world to see me that way.
“I think they’re dead,” Porter said, his voice trembling slightly now. This was not part of his plan. He hadn’t wanted to kill me. I didn’t think he even cared about blackmailing me for Gemma, or ruining my career. More than anything, Porter had wanted to be in control of my story. He had wanted to be in my story. He’d tried to do it the old-fashioned way, but that hadn’t worked. I’d seen him as another fanboy, nothing more. So he had to try a different tack.
“She’s moving!” Soren said, pointing at Miranda, who was beginning to stir in the passenger seat. “She’s alive. What do we do?”
Porter hurried around to the passenger-side door, still filming. He covered his hand with his jacket sleeve as he pried the door open. Miranda raised her head to look at him, her eyes dazed, blood oozing from a cut on her forehead. Porter unbuckled her seat belt, and my sister spilled out of the car and onto the ground at Porter’s feet.
Porter picked up a rock and handed it to Soren. “Knock her out. We’re taking her.”
“Why?” Soren asked. He sounded nervous, and he kept looking up the hill toward the road. It was only a matter of time until a car drove by and saw the accident.
“She’s seen our car. She might have seen our faces. We need to get rid of her.”
“Maybe not.”
“Olivia!” Miranda cried, fully awake now. “Olivia, run!” Like either of us was capable of such a feat. My younger sister began to crawl across the ground away from the wolf boys.
Beside her, Soren hesitated, looking at Porter, who held the camera pointed at him. “Why are you still filming?” Soren asked. “It’ll be evidence.”
“It’s not evidence,” Porter said, sounding distant, like his mind had moved on to a more interesting matter than the possible manslaughter and assault at hand. “Don’t you get it? This is the story. We have to follow it through to the end. That’s what Jonas would do.”
Soren, wearing his wolf mask, started to nod. “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”
Miranda found her voice then and screamed for help, but the sound cut off with a meaty thud as Soren brought the rock down on her skull. Her body went limp.
My ribs felt like they’d constricted around my lungs, a shrinking cage squeezing tighter and tighter until I could barely draw breath. My fingers ached from gripping the armrests. I wanted to pry myself from the theater seat, run from the flickering images flashing in front of me. Get in my car and drive to anywhere but the places I’d been. Leave Los Angeles. Leave everything.
But an overriding thought repeated in my mind.
They didn’t kill Miranda. They didn’t kill Miranda. They didn’t kill Miranda.
The screen went black for a beat. Then:
Part III
Liv Hendricks
2018
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At least this story held no surprises, even though some of the scenes had been filmed without my knowledge. I wasn’t the only person in town with access to hidden cameras. Porter had been wearing a camera hidden in his tiepin during every encounter, including the times we’d had sex. Plus, footage I had filmed had been edited into this cut. The edit was rough and choppy, which made sense. Soren and Porter must have been working on it up until the last minute.
My story didn’t end with Gemma’s confession at the wolf sanctuary, as I’d hoped it would. It ended with a shot of me asleep in the hospital, a hand placing an invitation on the table beside me.
Then the screen cut to black. Another caption.
Epilogue: Annika Kron
2003
Annika’s scene picked up where the prologue left off, revealing the owner of the voice who had interrupted Annika as she was about to set fire to the forest. Niklas Larsen, his face porcelain-smooth, unmarred, but not for long.
“Let me take you home,” Niklas said in Norwegian, with subtitles.
Annika shook her head, backing away from him and shaking her head. “I have to stop the Wolf King.”
“Annika, the Wolf King isn’t real. Your uncle made him up.”
“He is real. He comes to me in my dreams. He says I have to give myself to him, or he’ll never leave me alone!”
“No, Annika. You’re not well. Let me help you…” He reached for the Zippo lighter, but Annika darted backward away from him. And while all this was happening, the cameraman hiding in the cottage slipped out the back window and began to creep away, continuing to film as he made his escape.
“He says if I don’t sacrifice myself to him, he’ll take another girl like me. And another. And another. And another. He’ll keep taking them until he has what he wants. I can’t let that happen!”
She flicked her thumb on the igniter, and the flame burst to life. At the same moment, Niklas lunged for the lighter, trying to knock it from her hand. He succeeded in sending the lighter flying, right into a puddle of gasoline, and in an instant fire was everywhere. It raced across the ground and climbed trees.
It was difficult to see what happened next, it was filmed from so far away. It looked like Annika sat down in the clearing. Maybe she wanted to observe the destruction, watch the cottage burn and hear the Wolf King’s screams. Or maybe she intended to be the Wolf King’s last sacrifice. If that was the case, Niklas had no intention of allowing her offering. He grabbed her under the shoulders and dragged her kicking and screaming to her feet.
“Leave me!” she shouted at him, and shoved him away from her. He stumbled backward, tripped over a fallen branch, twisting as he fell to catch himself. But his upper body splashed down into a puddle of gasoline that had yet to light up, and that puddle joined another puddle that was already aflame. In the next instant Niklas was on fire, screaming. Annika rushed to him, babbling incoherently in panicked Norwegian, slapping at the flames to try to put them out. But all she managed to do was set her gasoline-splattered hands on fire. She fell to the ground to beat them out, and Niklas began rolling to squash the flames eating him.
Cut to black.
For a moment I sat there, stunned. That couldn’t be the end. What about the missing girls? What about the end to Annika’s story? To Miranda’s?
I almost sighed in relief when the next scene faded in again, but I realized quickly that this was only a montage. There was no dialogue, only a crackly country-western song sung by a man who sounded like he’d bitten half his tongue off. Credits began to roll over the montage, the shots filmed at a variety of famous Kron locations throughout Stone’s Throw, but mostly at the wolf sanctuary. And each shot featured one of the missing women as they reenacted grotesque, pornographic versions of scenes from The Girl and the Wolf, a shocking collection of sexual acts performed by girls in Kronsplay on a man in a white wolf mask. The montages were cut together in a choppy pace so frantic it was almost like watching time lapse. There were more than three of them. Far more. At least a dozen women had participated in the films, but apparently not all of them had been required to vanish.
The red velvet curtain rustled, and then three women filed out onto stage, all of them blond, all of them in Kronsplay. They were older than they’d been when last seen, but I recognized them as the missing women. Allison Sargent, Camille Banks, and Mary Elizabeth Woodson. They had returned to Stone’s Throw for their premiere, less a little toe, which they had offered to the Wolf King to further the narrative.
It really had all been a hoax. One unfathomably long hoax, and the joke was on all of us. The audience. The people of Stone’s Throw. Even on Jonas Kron, because the one story line he’d wanted resolved had been denied him. We still didn’t know what had happened to Annika Kron. She was not among the three no-longer-missing women assembled on stage, smiling and radiant, clearly proud of what they’d been a part of. They joined hands and bowed.
That was when the applause began. Tentative at first, and then louder, more enthusiastic. The audience stood for an ovation. I rose, too, and the people around me patted me on the back and told me congratulations on my most convincing performance, exclaiming about how they’d been fooled by the whole thing, how it must have taken so much careful planning to pull off such an elaborate and shocking hoax fifteen years in the making! Bravo! Scanning the audience, I spotted only a few people whose expressions told me they understood that all of what they’d just seen had been real.
A choked sob came through the speakers, and I looked back at the screen to see an Easter egg scene at the end of the credits.
I stopped breathing. The audience quieted.
It was the bonus that had been promised to me. It was Miranda.
She was the age she’d been when I last saw her, wearing the same clothes she’d worn the night she went missing. There was an open wound on her forehead. Her face was covered in so much blood she was hardly recognizable.
A voice off screen said, “What’s your name?”
“Miranda Hill.”
“Do you like being on camera like your sisters, Miranda?”
She shook her head. “N-no. I hate it.”
“Really?” the voice said. I thought it was Porter. “That’s a shame. Well, Miranda Hill, I don’t know what we’re going to do with you.”
“You could let me go home,” she said, her eyes dissolving in tears. “I won’t tell anyone what happened tonight.”
“That’s pretty hard to believe,” Porter said. “Besides, why would you want to go home now? Your sister Olivia is dead. Your other sister is, well…I don’t know if I believe in evil, but Gemma definitely lives somewhere in that neighborhood. And then there’s your mom. Wow. It must have been rough growing up with a mother like her.”
Miranda nodded, and unconsciously began digging at the hole in her arm. The camera zoomed in on the wound.
“What happened there?” Porter asked. “Did you do that to yourself?”
“Y-yeah.”
“Do you hurt yourself often?”
She hesitated only a second before nodding.
“You must be really unhappy.”
“Yeah,” she whispered, tears spilling over her lids. She lowered her eyes to her lap.
“And things are only going to get worse. So the way I see it, we have two choices. We can kill you—”
Miranda’s head jerked up, eyes going wide with fear. She didn’t want to die. At least there was that.
“Or…we can make you disappear. You’d get to start over somewhere else. You could have a whole new life away from your mom and Gemma. Away from all the things that make you unhappy. We’ll even foot the bill to help you start over, won’t we?”
“Yep!” Soren’s off-camera voice said eagerly. “We’ll take care of everything.”
“You’ll have to change your look, of course,” Porter said. “And you can’t ever, ever come back no matter what. If you do, we’ll have to release the video we made of Olivia, and you know she wouldn’t want that, right? If people saw the video, that’s all they would remember her for. That’s the only thing people would think of when they hear the name Olivia Hill. So what do you say, Miranda? Do we have a deal? Will you disappear?”