Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

He would be scolded in any event. Scolded and perhaps spanked, too. It was not the pain he feared, but the humiliation. “I’ll have to go back here,” he whispered to himself. “Even if they don’t spank me, I’ll have to go back.”

“You could walk away . . .” A girl’s voice, very faint. From the ceiling? No, Robbie decided, from the side toward the door.

“No,” he said. “They’d be mad.”

“You’ll die . . .”

“Like us . . .”

Robbie sat up, shaking.

Outside, the horror writer was hiking toward the old, rented truck he had parked more than a mile away. The ground was soft after yesterday’s storm, and it was essential – absolutely essential – that there be tracks left by a strange vehicle.

A turn onto a side road, a walk of a hundred yards, and the beam of his big electric lantern picked out the truck among the trees. When he could set the lantern on its hood, he put on latex gloves. Soon, very soon, the clock would strike the children’s hour and Edith with the golden hair would be his. Beautiful Kiara would be his. As for laughing Allegra, he neither knew nor cared who she might be.

“Wa’ ish?” Kiara’s voice was thick with vodka and sleep.

“It’s only me,” Robbie told her, and slipped under the covers. “I’m scared.”

She put a protective arm around him.

“There are other kids in here. There are! They’re gone when you turn on the light, but they come back. They do!”

“Uh huh.” She hugged him tighter and went back to sleep.

In Scales Mound, the horror writer parked the truck and walked three blocks to his car. He had paid two weeks rent on the truck, he reminded himself. Had paid that rent only three days ago. It would be eleven days at least before the rental agency began to worry about it, and he could return it or send another check before then.

His gun, the only gun he owned, had been concealed in a piece of nondescript luggage and locked in the car. He took it out and made sure the safety was on before starting the engine. It was only a long-barreled twenty-two; but it looked sinister, and should be sufficient to make Kiara obey if the threat of force were needed.

Once she was down there . . . Once she was down there, she might scream all she liked. It would not matter. As he drove back to the house, he tried to decide whether he should hold it or put it into one of the big side pockets of his barn coat.

Robbie, having escaped Kiara’s warm embrace, decided that her room was cooler than his. For one thing, she had two windows. For another, both were open wider than his one window had been. Besides, it was just cooler. He pulled the sheet up, hoping she would not mind.

“Run . . .” whispered the faint, thin voices.

“Run . . . Run . . .”

“Get away while you can . . .”

“Go . . .”

Robbie shook his head and shut his eyes.

Outside Kiara’s bedroom, the horror writer patted the long-barreled pistol he had pushed into his belt. His coat pockets held rags, two short lengths of quarter-inch rope, a small roll of duct tape, and a large folding knife. He hoped to need none of them.

There was no provision for locking Kiara’s door. He had been careful to see to that. No key for the quaint old lock, no interior bolt; and yet she might have blocked it with a chair. He opened it slowly, finding no obstruction.

The old oak doors were thick and solid, the old walls thicker and solider still. If Dan and his wife were sleeping soundly, it would take a great deal of commotion in here to wake them.

Behind him, the door swung shut on well-oiled hinges. The click of the latch was the only sound.

Moonlight coming through the windows rendered the penlight in his shirt pocket unnecessary. She was there, lying on her side and sound asleep, her lovely face turned toward him.

As he moved toward her, Robbie sat up, his mouth a dark circle, his pale face a mask of terror. The horror writer pushed him down again.

The muzzle of his pistol was tight against Robbie’s head; this though the horror writer could not have said how it came to be there. His index finger squeezed even as he realized it was on the trigger.

There was a muffled bang, like the sound of a large book dropped. Something jerked under the horror writer’s hand, and he whispered, “Die like my father. Like Alice and June. Die like me.” He whispered it, but did not understand what he intended by it.

Kiara’s eye were open. He struck her with the barrel, reversed the pistol and struck her again and again with the butt, stopping only when he realized he did not know how many times he had hit her already or where his blows had landed.

After pushing up the safety, he put the pistol back into his belt and stood listening. The room next to that in which he stood had been Robbie’s. Presumably, there was no one there to hear.

The room beyond that one – the room nearest the front stair – was Dan’s and Charity’s. He would stand behind the door if they came in, shoot them both, run. Mexico. South America.

They did not.

The house was silent save for his own rapid breathing and Kiara’s slow, labored breaths; beyond the open windows, the night-wind sobbed in the trees. Any other sound would have come, almost, as a relief.

There was none.

He had broken the cellar window, left tracks with the worn old shoes he had gotten from a recycle store, left tire tracks with the old truck. He smiled faintly when he recalled its mismatched tires. Let them work on that one.

He picked up Kiara and slung her over his shoulder, finding her soft, warm, and heavier than he had expected.

The back stairs were narrow and in poor repair; they creaked beneath his feet, but they were farther – much farther – from the room in which Dan and Charity slept. He descended them slowly, holding Kiara with his right arm while his left hand grasped the rail.

She stirred and moaned. He wondered whether he would have to hit her again, and decided he would not unless she screamed. If she screamed, he would drop her and do what had to be done.

She did not.

The grounds were extensive, and included a wood from which (long ago) firewood had been cut. It had grown back now, a tangle of larches and alders, firs and red cedars. Toward the back, not far from the property line, he had by merest chance stumbled upon the old well. There had been a cabin there once. No doubt it had burned. A cow or a child might have fallen into the abandoned well, and so some prudent person had covered it with a slab of limestone. Leaves and twigs on that stone had turned, in time, to soil. He had moved the stone away, leaving the soil on it largely undisturbed.

When he reached the abandoned well at last, panting and sweating, he laid Kiara down. His penlight showed that her eyes were open. Her bloodstained face seemed to him a mask of fear; seeing it, he felt himself stand straighter and grow stronger.

“You may listen to me or not,” he told her. “What you do really doesn’t matter, but I thought I ought to do you the kindness of explaining just what has happened and what will happen. What I plan, and your place in my plans.”

She made an inarticulate sound that might have been a word or a moan.

“You’re listening. Good. There’s an old well here. Only I know that it exists. At the bottom – shall we say twelve feet down? At the bottom there’s mud and a little water. You’ll get dirty, in other words, but you won’t die of thirst. There you will wait for me for as long as the police actively investigate. From time to time I may, or may not, come here and toss down a sandwich.”

He smiled. “It won’t hurt you in the least, my dear, to lose a little weight. When things have quieted down, I’ll come and pull you out. You’ll be grateful – oh, very grateful – for your rescue. Soiled and starved, but very grateful. Together we’ll walk back to my home. You may need help, and if you do I’ll provide it.”