The voices told her to leave. They instructed her to get up and get out. They said she was not safe. Problem was, Cassie couldn’t see anything. She had no idea where she was. The musty smell stifled her lungs. She blinked in the darkness, shedding fragments of uncertainty, revealing memories that she started piecing together.
The time she spent with Mitch lingered like champagne on the tip of her tongue. Warmth filled her, but only for a moment. The memory passed and then she was back at the girls’ house. The bodies strewn about, discarded as though they were refuse. The weight of what had happened to them pressed firmly on her chest, strangling her heart and lungs.
She kept her eyes clenched shut to avoid the spirits. There was no escaping them, though. They remained close, whispering to her, pleading with her to leave. That was not an option at the moment. She tuned them out as best she could. A banging from somewhere within the room grabbed her attention. She opened her eyes again, surprised to see an overhead light had switched on to a low setting. The thin filament burned light orange, clear in the round tube. Slowly a warm halo of light began to spread around her.
Cassie attempted to push off the bed, but discovered her wrists and ankles were bound. She lifted her head and saw the restraints were tied to four short posts that rose from the frame like skeletal fingers about to close in on her. She laid in the palm. The thumb hovered behind, ready to smother her face.
A shadow moved in the corner of the room. She turned toward it, but it was gone. Something smacked against the wall from the other side. The sound was muted and hollow. Her breath caught in her throat. Tingling raced down her arms. Her abdominal muscles began clenching, cramping.
“Slow down,” she whispered to herself. She breathed in through her nose, held it for five seconds, then expelled hot air out through her mouth. She caught a whiff of her metallic breath and squinted against it. There was hardly enough saliva available to swallow the taste away.
Light flooded the room in a growing cone as the door cracked open, groaning on rusted hinges. A howl of wind blew in and swept over her sweat-soaked body. She looked down and saw only a sheer nightgown, which offered little protection and revealed everything. Where had it come from? Where were her clothes? She stifled the disgust overtaking her that someone had stripped her down and put her in the lingerie.
He appeared in the entryway, bright light silhouetting him. The dim room cast shadows over his face. Fine. Cassie didn’t want to look at his features anyway. She struggled against her restraints but gave up as he shook his head. There was no way out.
Not yet.
The activity in the room died down as he stepped foot inside. The spirits ran from him. Even in death they feared his touch. Cassie couldn’t blame them. She had spent countless nights agonizing over what had happened to her at his hand, reliving every horrible detail in slow motion. She could still feel the rain washing over her, stealing her life.
Why was he standing there? He hadn’t advanced more than two feet into the room. She swore he was smiling, even if she couldn’t see his lips peeled back, revealing the whites of his teeth. It was a game. Who could go the longest without speaking? Cassie clenched her eyelids shut. For the first time since she’d awoken, she pleaded for the voices to return. Anything to pull her focus away from the deranged asshole staring at her from the doorway.
The ticking of a clock echoed around the room. Tick-tock. Click-clack. It wasn’t a timepiece making the noise. He was doing it. A plan to add to the madness of the moment? Perhaps so. And it was working.
“What do you want?” she screamed.
He chuckled softly. She couldn’t help but think it sounded like a child laughing at a joke he didn’t get only because his parents found it amusing. But she knew that was not the case. He’d won, and he knew it. She gave him the in, and now he could say whatever he wanted. “You look beautiful in that dress.”
“Piss off,” she said. “This isn’t any dress I’d ever wear for you.”
As he glided through the entryway, the overhead light burst into a strong glow. No longer was the filament visible. Cassie blinked against the brightness until the pain in her eyes subsided. The bed dipped and bounced a couple of times. She lifted her head on the thin pillow. He’d joined her on the mattress. He sat with his left leg pulled under his right, facing the door, which remained open. She strained to see what lay beyond but couldn’t make anything out other than part of a table.
Several seconds passed. Now what? Was he going to stay there until she said something else? What would his next move be if she said the wrong thing?
She opted for something a little more subtle.
“Where am I?”
His right hand drifted backward, fingertips skating along the top of the blue fitted sheet. Inch by inch they drew nearer to her. He was on a collision course with her bare flesh near the spot the nightgown met her thigh. Cassie arched her back and lifted her buttocks off the mattress, sliding over as far as she could. It was only a few inches, but at least it would take that much longer for his repulsive touch to reach her.
He turned his head far enough to see her out of the corner of his eye. He’d shaved since they’d arrived. The corner of his mouth twitched. “You’ll come to appreciate what I can offer you, my dear.”
“Only if that means you’ll finish the job you started in that graveyard,” she said through her clenched teeth.
He pulled his leg out from under the other, then turned and leaned over her, one arm on either side of her torso, leaving them face to face. “What makes you think I’ll do that?”
Cassie matched his intense stare with one of her own. She didn’t have to pretend. All fear had left her body. All that remained was rage.
“Why else bring me here?” she said, knowing she couldn’t believe any response he could muster. “You can kill and dispose of me here and no one would ever know, right? I mean, if they knew, they’d already have broken down the doors to rescue me.”
“I do not have any plans to kill you, my dear Cassie.” He lowered his gaze to her breasts. Her nipples showed through the sheer material. His eyes settled in on them. “That is precisely why I brought you here.”
She looked down her body. “For my breasts?”
He smiled, his gaze returning to meet hers. “To not kill you.” His mouth hung open as though the words still needed time to escape his brain. He leaned in closer. Their lips were inches apart. “I tell you, though, that is entirely up to you. Cooperate with me and you live.”
“Kind of hard to do otherwise when I’m tied up like this.” She pulled hard with both arms toward him, fingers clutched like talons. They barely made it past her elbows, but she felt the bedposts give a little, like maybe they weren’t as secure as they should’ve been to hold an adult.
His stare diverted to the corner of the bed. He’d noticed the posts moving, too. How long until he took care of it? The calm look on his face dissipated in the blink of an eye. She hardly noticed him lift up and draw his right hand back across his chest.
She sure as hell felt it when he backhanded her across the face.
Cassie’s head snapped back into the thin pillow. The initial flash of pain dulled and then spread across her face. She felt a warm trickle from her nose. It settled into her upper lip and slid around the corner of her mouth and down her cheek.
He hopped off the bed and made it to the door in three steps, stopping there and looking back at her. “That, my dear, is precisely how you will wind up dead.”
With a flick of his wrist he shut off the overhead light. The soft glow from outside the room offered a glimpse of the table in the outer room, but it didn’t last long enough to make sense of anything else. He slammed the door shut, and Cassie once again descended into the darkness.