Бентли Литтл - The Disappearance

Yet

—but the sheriff had all but begged them to come up with any excuse to call for help and invite law enforcement to rescue them, and he thought it might be a good idea to have someone on the line, listening in as they tried to talk their way inside—just in case something went wrong.

Gary held the phone to his ear.

Nothing.

The call was blocked.

He asked Reyn and Brian to try their phones, but the result was the same. It made sense. Any organization that had the technical savvy to delete credit histories and bank accounts would have no trouble jamming phone signals.

Thank God they’d left Stacy in the car. Someone needed to be able to go for help.

The three of them looked at one another, putting away their phones.

Kept walking.

Finally, they reached the front entrance of the Home. Gary half expected someone to meet them, to either chase them away or force them inside, but they made it to the door without incident. The building was one story, but it looked bigger close up than it had in the photographs, and just knowing how many interconnected structures lay behind this initial facade made Gary realize how hard it was going to be to find Joan. She could be anywhere in there.

“What do we do now?” he wondered aloud. “Knock?”

Reyn did just that, pounding several times on the door with the side of his fist. The door was so thick, it barely made a sound, and Gary looked down the flat expanse of the building, trying to figure out if there was another way inside.

Then there was a rattle, a click, and the door was opened by an elderly man dressed in the type of peasant clothes that characterized all of the Homesteaders. He greeted them with a too-wide smile, though his eyes were flat. “Welcome to the Home. May I help you?”

“Joan Daniels! Where is she?” Gary hadn’t known what he was going to say until he said it, and his words were infused with anger, weighted with all of the emotion that had been roiling within him since Joan had been taken at Burning Man.

The Homesteader’s eyes widened. “Outsiders!”

Brian whipped out his knife and pressed it against the man’s throat.

“What are you doing?” Reyn yelled.

Gary’s heart leapt in his chest, pounding crazily. They were the ones who’d be going to jail, he thought. Brian had fucked everything up. He’d committed an honest-to-God crime, and even if they found something now, it wouldn’t stick.

But Brian wasn’t backing down. “Take us to Joan!” he demanded. “Now! Or I’ll slit your goddamn throat!”

Gary expected the two deputies who were keeping the compound under surveillance to run up, guns drawn, but no one arrived. No one came from inside the Home, either, and Brian moved slowly around to the back of the man, still pressing the tip of the knife to his throat. He shifted position, using his left arm to get the man in a headlock and pressing the knife against his back, hostage-style. “You have five seconds to start bringing us to Joan.”

“Father will—”

“One!”

“—not allow—”

“Two!”

“Okay!” The blankness in the man’s eyes had been replaced by fear. Gary looked over his shoulder toward the road, wondering if Stacy could see what was going on, wondering if she had called for help.

“Let’s go,” Brian ordered, pushing the man forward.

With a feeling of dread spreading outward from his stomach through his body, Gary followed the two of them into the Home.

Reyn hesitated for a second, then came in as well, closing the door behind him.

The coffins had been removed, but Joan was still in the same room.

It was the fact that they’d taken the coffins that preyed upon her mind. What had been done with her parents’ bodies? Had her mom and dad been given a proper burial? Had they been dumped in a ditch? Cremated? Plowed into one of the fields? Were they rotting in one of the basements? She did not know, and the lack of closure and confirmation was driving her crazy.

Which was probably the point.

The coffins had been removed several hours after she had been deposited in the room. She’d been held against the wall by two big-boned women, while two muscular young men had taken away first the caskets and then the sawhorses. She’d already screamed herself hoarse and cried more tears than she would have thought possible, though she had not been able to look again into those open boxes at her parents. Neither the men nor the women had spoken to her, though she’d demanded to know what they were doing, and after everything had been taken out, the women had pushed her down on the floor and left themselves, locking the door behind them.

That had been a long time ago, and in the interim she had slept on the floor and peed in a bedpan that had been left for her use. Overhead, the skylight slits had turned dark, then light, and she estimated that she’d been in the room for at least twenty-four hours when the door opened again.

“Eat or die,” said the middle-aged man who dropped a canvas sack of food in front of her, and it was clear from his voice that he didn’t care which one she did. He was not one of the Children, but she did not know where he stood in the Home, and she turned away from him, facing the wall, refusing to give him the satisfaction of interaction.

He left.

Without taking or emptying the bedpan.

After several minutes, Joan opened the sack, removing its contents. She sniffed the food that had been brought: a crusty piece of bread, a stick of celery, a cold baked potato and, to drink, a canteen of water. All of it smelled earthy, like fertile soil, and all of it smelled the same. She refused to eat anything, and in a gesture of defiance she picked up the potato and threw it at the wall. The bread and celery followed. The water she poured onto the floor.

The door to the room opened immediately, and two men strode in. One of them she recognized as Barnabas, a former friend of her dad’s. They’d obviously had her under surveillance and had been watching her as she threw the food and dumped the water. She expected them to lecture or chastise her, perhaps even force-feed her, but instead they merely walked in, Barnabas picked up the sack and they both turned around and left.

Joan stared after them, frowning, as the door closed, then locked. There was an odor in the air, as though someone wearing a heavy floral perfume had just left the room. The scent had not been there only seconds before, and almost immediately after noticing it, her head began to feel strange. It was the way she’d felt at Burning Man, just prior to being knocked out. That memory had not been part of her consciousness until this very moment, but she recognized its accuracy the instant it was recalled, and then…

… and then…

… the door opened and her dad walked in, carrying a tray of mushrooms that looked like little angry people. He was dead and wearing the same expression he’d had in the coffin, that terrible wide-eyed, openmouthed look of surprise, and he approached her on awkward feet, offering her one of the mushrooms. She turned away, and her mom was standing in the corner, screaming, though the sound that came out of her mouth was the chirping of crickets. Her hair was on fire, and the skin of her forehead was starting to melt from the heat and drip onto her eyelashes like pinkish peach rubber cement.

Joan wanted to run away but her feet were nailed to the floor.

There was a noise above her, a roaring, like the sound of a waterfall, and when she looked up, the ceiling was not the ceiling but a giant version of Father’s face. His mouth was open, and that was where the roaring noise was coming from. Father was breathing in, sucking all of the air out of the room, and even though her feet were nailed to the floor, Joan could feel the power of the suction. Then her mom and dad and everything around her were vacuumed up, her feet were yanked painfully from the floor, and she was sucked into the blackness of Father’s open mouth.