Vincent Zandri - The remains

My drenched body shivered.

I shined the light upstream. Through the trees and the thick brush, I could make out the clapboard farmhouse. A dull beam of flashlight lit up the exterior wall. Just ahead of me was a narrow trail. I burst into an all out sprint along that trail in the direction of the house

Body tingled, head buzzed, lungs filled with oxygen. My feet moved rapidly beneath me, the pain in my legs having all but disappeared. Not ten feet of trail separated me from the house in the woods when a hand reached out, grabbing hold of my long blonde hair.

He’s right behind us. The mad man is following us the entire time. He grabs Molly’s hair, pulls it back.

She screams. He laughs.

“ Cry, cry, cry,” he spits.

He pulls mine. I begin to weep. I fall, bringing Molly down with me.

There’s a pistol barrel in our faces. He is holding the pistol that he now tucks into his pant waist. Bending, he grabs my left foot and Molly’s right, starts dragging us back across the narrow foot trail to the house.

“ Little kittens lost their mittens. Cry, cry, cry, little kittens.”

When he gets us to the porch, he pulls out a long silver knife from the sheath on his belt, cuts the tape that binds our wrists. I lie still on the ground while Molly jumps up, tries to run. But he is too quick for her. He grabs hold of her T-shirt, drags her back down and once more whips her over the head with the pistol grip.

Molly goes to sleep again.

That’s when the devil grabs hold of me. The devil drags me up the porch steps, in through the open front door, across the floor, through a door that leads to a black, rank basement.

He pulls me down the basement stairs by my hair. My spine pounds against the wood treads. At the bottom of the stairs he pulls me across the cold dirt floor. He handcuffs me to something. It’s pitch dark. The place smells of must, urine and death. I’m shivering with fear and disbelief.

An overhead light is turned on.

I can see that I’m chained to this iron pipe in the middle of a square-shaped room. It’s a basement room constructed of stone, concrete, narrow windows located at the very top of the walls. Heavy gauge wires hang from the exposed rafters. Besides the wires are big hooks. They look like the hooks the farmers use to hang their freshly butchered meat. From where I sit, I can see that the hooks are stained with blood.

For a time the beast just stares down at me. He’s breathing hard.

“ What are you going to do to me?” I beg, the handcuffs tight and cutting into my wrists.

“ Cry, cry, cry, little kitten,” he sings.

I scream.

But only the devil can hear me.

Whalen Let Go Of my hair and pressed the pistol barrel against the small of my back.

“Walk little kitten. Walk away.”

I did it, without a word of protest. I wasn’t frightened anymore. I felt resolved somehow. I knew what was coming, where I was going. I’d known for a while now where I was going. I’d been there before. In a strange way I wanted to go back down there. The situation reeked of inevitability, as if I’d been waiting for this moment for thirty years; as if what happened to Molly and I when we were twelve was merely a prologue to this very moment in time. I wanted to go back down there if only to be with Michael; to finish this thing while holding him tightly.

We entered the house.

Whalen used his own flashlight to light the way across a floor that over three decades had become even more warped and rotted. When we came to the door that led into the basement, I could see that an electric light was already on.

When he gave me a shove, I resisted. But when he pushed me I lost my footing and fell.

I slid down the wooden stairs, my body slamming against each wood tread. By the time I landed, I thought I’d pass out from the pain. My vision was distorted, going in and out of focus.

He descended the stairs, the soles of his leather boots stamping the wood treads one by one. I could already smell him. When he made it to the landing, he tucked his pistol into the waist of his filthy dungarees. He slipped his hands under my arms, dragging me across the dirt floor. My head hung so that I was staring up at the exposed beams, at the wires and meat hooks that still descended from them.

He reached down and touched my lips with his fingers. But when I bit his hand, I tasted blood.

He reared back with his hand, slapped my face.

As he straightened up, I laid my head back. The figure caught my eye. The figure of a man. Arms, legs and torso hanging upside down from the ceiling. Bare feet chained to the rafters.

Michael.

Whalen had hung him upside down like a slaughtered animal. My eyes filled with the sight of his lifeless body. I screamed without making a sound. I sobbed without shedding a tear. I died but with a beating heart.

I am nearly delirious with fear by the time he drags Molly down into the basement and lays her out beside me. I can see that she’s awake, her eyes going from me to him to me again. He looks at her with a calm confident smile.

I sense that Molly is about to scream, cry.

But she doesn’t. She grits her teeth, stares the devil in the eye and spits in his face.

He reaches out, slaps her.

“ Don’t struggle against him, Bec,” she insists. “Promise me you won’t struggle.”

I look away.

I came to.

How long had I been passed out?

Long enough for him to dig a good sized trench in the dirt floor. For a time I just locked my eyes onto him; watched him working, a lit cigarette dangling from his lips. That wiry body soaked with sweat, plastered with dirt and filth, reeking of tobacco. Tiny, yellow teeth ground against one another while he worked, shoveling one spade full of dirt at a time.

Then he caught sight of me.

He saw that I was conscious and he smiled.

“Hello little kitten,” he said, softly. “Cry, cry, cry, little kitten.”

I knew then that what he had in store had nothing to do with his old motivation-his taste for young girls. There would be no touching here. No violations.

There would only be death.

He reached for me. I had no strength left in me to resist. He dragged me the few feet to the trench. He dumped me in. I did a complete roll, landing on my back. I heard him laugh. At least, I thought it was a laugh. It might just as easily have been a sob. He was standing above me, the little monster of a man looking almost huge now. God like.

He had that shovel in his hand.

He stabbed at the dirt pile, retrieved a shovelful of earth, held it over my prone body, and tossed it into the trench. The dirt smacked my body, sprayed into my face. It invaded my mouth, nostrils and blocked my air supply.

There was something inside the dirt. Something other than rock and gravel and clay. The black and white-colored shards of bone. The very old bones covered me. A jaw bone, the teeth still embedded in the broken jaw. A small portion of skull cap. A leg bone. Here finally were the remains of the victims of Whalen’s torture. At long last, the bodies had been found.

Another shovelful of bone-filled dirt fell onto me, this one down by my feet.

He was burying me alive, adding me to his basement cemetery.

Yet another shovel of dirt slapped my face. I coughed, choked as a worm wiggled in my mouth. I tried to wipe the dirt from my eyes, but all strength was bled out. I was already dead. I could still see him, but only through a cloud of dirt and pain.

The bone shards and dirt kept coming, filling the trench, filling my mouth and nostrils. With each shovelful, another bit of life emptied out of me.