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Within ten minutes, they broke through the clusters of trees and clumps of thick bushes, and he dragged her into a small clearing.
“Here we are,” he announced, still not releasing his hold on her arm.
His fingers had dug in so hard, she was sure she’d feel them for hours to come, even when he’d let go of her, if she managed to live that long.
Cassandra had expected to see a cabin—something to mark the place—but there was nothing here. Nothing except the forest floor, blanketed with a carpet of fallen pine leaves, some exposed patches of dirt, and yet more trees. The branches reached out over her head, as though trying to create a shelter for her. A bright blue sky peeped through the foliage. It was actually a beautiful day—too beautiful for something as awful as this to be happening. Surely rain and thunder and an angry sky filled with bulbous gray clouds would be more fitting?
“The... The other girls,” she blurted. “Where are they? You said they were here.”
He didn’t answer her, but instead dragged her over to one of the trees. The trunk was broad, the surface rough. To her horror, she saw there was already a chain looped around the circumference of the trunk.
“No, no, please.”
A fresh spurt of panic shot through her. She pulled away, but he yanked her back in. He fished the key out of his jacket pocket again and this time applied the key to the lock on her wrists. He unhooked the chain for only a fraction of a second—long enough to loop the chain joining her wrists to the chain around the tree trunk—before snapping the lock into place.
Cass yanked on the chain.
“Help!” she screamed, suddenly certain this would be the place she’d die. “Someone help me! Please!”
“Shut up. There’s no one around here. Not for fifty miles or more. No one is going to hear your pathetic screams and come to help you. All you’re doing right now is giving me a headache, and I get really pissed when I have a headache.”
It was crazy that he’d think she’d give a damn about how he was feeling when he’d already hit her twice in the face, had drugged her, and now had chained her to a tree. But she guessed that was who he was—the type of man who thought the world only existed to please him. That everyone owed him something, and probably thought he should automatically be respected, even though he’d done nothing to earn that respect.
But he was right when he said no one was going to hear her screams, so she fell quiet and tried to think. If there was no one else around, she only had herself to rely on to get her out of this situation. Though her instinct was to scream and cry, it wasn’t helping her.
She sucked in a breath.
She tried again. “Where are the other women?”
He’d said he was taking her to them. She’d expected to see them chained up, like she was, or locked in a room somewhere or even in a cage.
He gestured around. “What are you talking about? They’re right here.”
His words jolted a shock to her heart. “What?”
Oh, God, he was completely insane. Did he really think they were here?
He flapped a hand. “I mean, they’re not alive or anything, but they’re all still here. At least, their bodies are. He took several steps to her left and gestured to a spot. Now she was focusing on it, she could see the ground was slightly different than the rest of the area. It had been recently disturbed, and the earth was raised in a hump, with new shoots of plants growing from it.
“Here lies Sonja Holland. She was my first, and my messiest. I wasn’t so sure what to expect, and she was a fighter,” he shot her a glance from the corner of his eye, “like you. She had the silkiest, jet black hair I’ve ever run my fingers through, and her skin was pale. She was beautiful. It was a shame to have to bury her.”
Her eyes filled with tears of fear and sorrow for those who’d come before her. He must have brought them here, just as he had done to her, and then killed them and buried them here. She was no longer aware of the constant drone of insects, or the twittering of birds in the treetops. Her world had narrowed down to herself, him, and the possibility she was surrounded in bodies.
He took about ten paces forward and paused again at another spot where the earth had been disturbed.
“This is Becky Dawson. She was a high school cheerleader and prom queen. One of those all-round rich bitches who think she’s better than everyone else. I showed her, though, didn’t I? You should have seen her at the end. She pissed herself and begged and cried, just like everyone else.”
The way he spoke was strange. Even though she imagined killing someone and recounting their last moments would be highly emotive, his voice was dead and flat, as though he was reading from a sheet of paper and had no connection to the words. Perhaps that was how he was able to do what he did—he cut himself off emotionally.
Cass pressed her lips together, her nostrils flaring as she shook her head. She didn’t want to hear this. Didn’t want to know. Because the next time he brought a woman out here to kill, her name would be joining the list. What would he say about her and the way she died? Would he tell the next woman that she’d screamed and fought, or would he say she’d begged and wet her pants, just like poor Becky?
He moved on, nodding down at the third pile of dirt. “And this is—”
“Please, stop,” she interrupted. “I don’t want to hear any more.”
“But this isn’t about what you want, is it? None of this is. You will hear my story, and then, after I’ve taken what pleasure I can out of you, I will kill you.”
He didn’t have anyone else he could boast about his conquests to. That was why he insisted on telling her. He probably wanted to tell every person he came across on a daily basis who he really was. Wanted to lean across the till at Walmart and hiss into the face of the woman on checkout that he was a murderer and had killed seven, soon to be eight, women. If someone cut him off in traffic, he must have wanted to scream about how he’d killed and would do it again. He wanted others to know his power, but by telling them, he would destroy everything for himself. It must have been his biggest frustration to not be able to own who he truly was, and have everyone fear him.
He ignored her pleas for him to stop.
“The third girl was called Susie Banks. She was older, like you are, but not so old that she’d lost that innocence. That naivety where you think you’re invincible and going to live forever. She was doing a law degree, which I thought was ironic. Perhaps she dreamed of putting people like me into prison for a very long time. She used her knowledge before she died. Tried to convince me that by letting her go, and confessing and telling the police where the other bodies were, that they’d give me a lighter sentence. Of course, I never had any intention of doing any of those things, but I enjoyed watching her trying to talk her way out of her situation. That’s what they like to do, isn’t it? Lawyers, I mean? They like to talk. Unfortunately, she couldn’t talk her way out of this one.”
Cass stared around in horror at the mounds of earth that were now easily distinguishable from the rest of the forest floor. How had she not seen it before? They were all here, each of the girls he’d made ‘vanish,’ all buried in shallow graves after, she assumed, dying right in the spot she was in now. Russet streaks marked the tree trunk—layers of blood from seven different women, soon to be eight. The top layer of bark had been worn away in grooves, revealing lighter wood beneath, where the girls had clearly tried to get away, yanking on the chain in the desperate hope it would give.
Oh, God.
He was going to tell her the stories of each of the women he’d murdered, and then he was going to kill her. She didn’t want to hear the details of how they’d died, but if he was talking, it meant he wasn’t killing her. Perhaps she should encourage him and get him to tell her more.
It was too much, bile rising up the back of her throat.
She swallowed it back down, not wanting to throw up. It was stupid, but she didn’t want that to be her story. She didn’t want this monster telling the next girl that Cassandra Draper had been so frightened she’d thrown up everywhere. She knew her vanity was pointless. What would she care when she was dead? But she discovered her pride still meant something, and besides, she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing her fear, knowing he would derive pleasure from it.
The Magician wasn’t done with his stories.
“Number four was a screamer. A crier, too.” He gave a small wistful laugh, as though in his head, he was going right back to the time with her. “If there was anyone around to hear you girls, she’d have certainly been the one to bring another person here investigating. Oh, I didn’t tell you her name, did I? It was Meaghan Brunner. She had beautiful skin, so soft and smooth. Her blood looked incredible against it.”
Cass squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head, not wanting to look at the mound he squatted beside. How long had they been dead? Months? What would their bodies look like now beneath the dirt? Though she didn’t want to think of these things, she couldn’t help it, imagining rotten corpses filled with maggots and worms.
She recognized some of the girls’ names. Perhaps she’d caught them on a news channel, or seen them on the internet. She wished she’d paid more attention now. They hadn’t seemed real to her at the time. So much horror occurred in the world, day after day. School shootings, child abuse, atrocities occurring in far off countries. It was difficult not to become callous toward it all. If she let it all into her heart, she wouldn’t be able to function.
He allowed his bag to slip from his shoulder, and he dropped it to the ground a few feet away from her. He was standing in the middle of the circle of graves, with the tree she was chained to like a sacrificial altar at its head. Reaching into the bag, he pulled out items he’d clearly brought for a reason. A small, slender knife that looked wickedly sharp, and a larger butcher’s knife. The metal caught the dappled sunlight filtering through the trees, flashing bright and white.
She wasn’t ashamed to admit she was frightened of the pain. Even the idea of pain scared her. When, as a teenager, others had gone to get piercings and tattoos, she’d made jokes about not wanting to ruin an already perfect body. Needles scared her. Having to get blood taken or get a shot made her lightheaded.
From the array of tools he’d brought, she guessed he intended to take his time killing her, and would enjoy every moment.
This was going to hurt. A lot.