Bone White Read online

  My rational brain was sold on this explanation. In love with it, in fact. Passionately. It never wanted to part from it. But the rest of me wasn’t convinced the relationship was a good one. But then I thought about Garrett. He would accept that explanation and give us both a good natured ribbing for ever thinking anything else. I needed to get a grip and move on. Either that or I would drive myself crazy.

  A tall set of wooden shelves lined an adjacent wall where rows of dusty glass jars took up space. Some jars were empty, while others were filled with the usual assortment of nails, screws and various odds and ends. Similar to the jars in my dad’s garage, there were probably twenty-year-old artifacts inside that were being held onto in case maybe, just maybe, they’d be needed someday. Except, for these jars, “someday” never came.

  With my head much clearer, and with the exception of the illegal bones stolen from the old graves, the basement was proving to be pretty run of the mill. It was time to stop investigating every little thing I saw and find a way out. Once I got away, I would point the cops in this direction where they could come and investigate to their hearts’ content.

  An old workbench that looked equally unthreatening and comfortable in its surroundings angled from the foot of the stairs. The only thing that stood out about it was its sheer size. It was huge and looked so solid, it had to have been built here rather than carried down. I couldn’t be sure of the length, because the bench stretched along the better part of the back wall until disappearing into the shadows. Hell, you could probably take a small car to it and the car would be the one to lose. If there was a window anywhere along the wall, the bench would make it much easier to reach. My fingers were crossed.

  A dozen white papier-mâché containers, about the size of Chinese takeout boxes, were stacked neatly on this end of the workbench. Small holes pocked their lids and the word “live” was stamped on their side like the containers our fishing worms came in. I wondered if the guy was a fisherman. Although the dull ache on the back of my head reminded me he wasn’t someone I’d be trading fish stories with anytime soon.

  A large rusted vise, that looked like it may have been painted grey at one time, was mounted to the front of the workbench, just beside the bait boxes. Thick, white grease covered the screw and it came off easily on my finger. Fresh, I’d say, wiping the oily substance across my shorts.

  It’s his work.

  A shudder ran through me at the thought of someone working here, taking apart decomposed, hundred-year-old corpses in an effort to claim their bones. Hammering the idea home, beside the vise sat a pair of gloves and what looked to be a lawn mower blade with thick, shredded rags wrapped around one end. Both items were covered in reddish-brown stains. An eerie feeling crept over me as I stood there with my mouth hanging open wide enough to catch flies. I had seen enough crime shows on television to know what dried blood looked like. But, this was not television, and this was not one-hundred-year-old blood. Was I mistaking dirt and mud for blood now? I very consciously reached my hand around to make sure the pliers were ready and waiting in my back pocket. Feeling their smooth rubber handles comforted me, although I would have gladly traded them for a big knife at that point. Or that loaded shotgun I was hoping to find earlier.

  When I was finally able to pull my attention away from the gloves and scan my cell farther down the workbench, the stained work gloves became insignificant. Everything I’d seen in the church up to that point was forgotten. On top of the workbench, body parts, thrown haphazardly in a pile, were the centerpiece of a visceral and nauseating mess.

  Bone and flesh.

  Flesh and bone.

  And blood. So much blood. Thick and glistening, it seeped into the wood of the workbench’s surface, painting it an angry red. Blood so plentiful, it hadn’t yet had a chance to dry, and was finding its way onto the floor. The puddle was the size of a trash can lid. A hot ball of lead formed in the pit of my stomach, and I would have thrown it up if it hadn’t been lodged in there so tight. It wasn’t rainwater I’d heard dripping from the moment I entered the basement. And these weren’t hundred-year-old body parts. They were fresh.

  He always uses girls.

  My legs started to tremble, and I took an involuntary step back, unable to take my eyes off of the selection of body parts. They were piled on the bench like a blood-drenched, disassembled mannequin without its clothes. Then I remembered the piles of clothing in the coffin and the maroon NPHS cheerleading t-shirt the girl had been wearing. They weren’t from the dead, or at least, not the long dead. A cold shiver ran the length of my body again, like someone had just walked across my grave. I fought back the vomit rising up. Only this time it came up farther than it had before, and vile stomach acid burned the back of my throat. My face grew flush and sweat broke out on my forehead.

  Sometimes, it turns out the calm, rational answer isn’t the right one, and those seeping body parts screamed this was one of those times. I needed to get the hell out. This man was no mere dealer in a morbid commodity. He was a madman. And a murderer, and the longer I stayed, the more likely I was to be his next victim.

  As I stepped over the pool of red on the floor, I flashed my phone along the rest of the workbench and wall above it. There had to be a window somewhere. But what I found wasn’t a way out. A plastic blue tub sat on the very end of the workbench with a sheet of glass across the top like some makeshift terrarium. I couldn’t imagine what was in it, and didn’t bother with a guess. My feet shuffled in that direction, my chest aching from the abusive pounding it was taking. I pleaded with myself to stop, to turn back. And I wished I would’ve listened. As the gap between the tub and me narrowed, the sicker to my stomach I felt. When I finally reached it, some force beyond reason guided my eyes down into the depths of the blue plastic.

  I immediately cursed myself for doing so.

  It was the dome of the off-white skull that came into view first. The bugs came second, crawling in and out of the empty eye sockets like they were doorways. There were hundreds of them. Tiny black and brown beetles were crawling over, around and through what appeared to be a human skull. They milled around, devouring, scavenging just as they were put on the Earth to do. Instantly, I knew my initial assessment had been wrong. There weren’t hundreds, there were thousands of them, and I was thankful for the piece of glass separating us.

  I found I couldn’t turn away from the macabre scene and my attention was rewarded with a vulgar display of nature be nature. One of the beetles stopped at the corner of the jaw and began munching on one of the few bits of remaining flesh. Two more emerged through the gap between the teeth carrying a grey chunk of what might have been brain matter.

  A whimper came from over my shoulder, the sound of pure and utter despair, and it took me a moment to realize it hadn’t come from me. Once I was sure it hadn’t, my heart seized in my chest and the whimper became the only thing that could pull my attention away from the beetles’ buffet of human tissue. I spun around and raised my cell phone into the air, trying to shed some light into the abysmal corner from which it had come.

  “Jesus.” The swear I never used followed, leaving my lips in a whisper, but it was definitely a swear. And if there was ever a need for it, this was it.

  Hanging by her wrists from a hook in the ceiling, was a young woman, naked except for a pair of soiled white panties. She was dirty and pale, her skin glistening with sweat despite the cold of the room. She whimpered again, this time louder, and I could see that she was looking right at me. The whites of her eyes caught the light, and I could tell they were open wide.

  “Help. Please.” The words were murmured more than spoken, and my first instinct was to go to her. My second instinct was to run back up the stairs and jump the fuck out of a window, splinters and shards of glass be damned. Instead, I took a step toward her, still staring. As I got closer, recognition seeped in, leaving me both relieved and terrified.

  Becca Lewis was no longer missing.

  Chapter 34

&n
bsp; My jacket was still damp from my walk in the lake, but I wrapped it around Becca’s naked body before I did anything else. I was fully clothed, with a jacket, and still shivering. I couldn’t imagine how cold Becca was or how she was dealing with her time in the basement. But considering the fact that she was shivering while covered in a sheen of sweat, my guess was that she had a fever.

  I set my phone, face up, next to the toes of Becca’s outstretched feet that barely reached the floor. Holding the jacket around her with one arm, I tried lifting her with the other but, small as Becca was, she was still too heavy for me to lift with just one arm. I couldn’t quite get her high enough for the rope around her extended wrists to clear the long tip of the hook. I silently asked Becca’s forgiveness, and was about to let the jacket drop in order to use both arms to lift when she spoke.

  “Where is he?” The quivering words came so hushed and full of fear, my heart broke in that instant.

  “I don’t know,” I said, after standing up and looking straight into her frightened eyes. “I haven’t seen him since he knocked me out and locked me in a coffin. Technically, I never actually saw him, I guess, but we’ve definitely met.”

  I’d avoided looking directly at Becca out of a sense of modesty, pretending not to even notice her nakedness in the pale blue light. But, as I spoke to her, I took in her face up close for the first time, and what I saw turned my heartbreak to outrage. Some kind of paint stained the soft, innocent skin of Becca’s tear-streaked face. Finger paint, maybe. But, upon closer inspection, it became clear that it was make up. Not only had someone practiced their makeup skills on her, blushing cheeks and all, but whoever it was had done an insanely pathetic job of it. The makeup was preposterous with dark circles painted around her eyes in blue and green, and a grotesquely exaggerated smile in thick red lipstick that nearly stretched from ear to ear. The pink in her cheeks was too profuse, too splotchy and too dark for even the most desperate of men to find attractive.

  But that wasn’t the intent.

  Becca had been turned into a doll.

  It had been his daughter. That twisted little bitch, the same one who had hummed a lullaby as I lay locked in a coffin. She’d had her fun with Becca, playing makeup with the frightened girl as she hung by her wrists in this dungeon of horror, just waiting to be cut up and fed to the bugs. My mind immediately went to the lawnmower blade, the bloody gloves and the pile of human limbs on the workbench, and I couldn’t imagine the abominations Becca had witnessed down here. The images I conjured alone made me shudder, and I was pretty certain they paled in comparison to the real thing.

  Any fear I had was now officially gone, having turned completely to anger. The roller coaster ride continued. Part of me wanted to see the man or his screwed up daughter again. I wanted to vent my newfound anger on the both of them. Give an outlet to the violence growing inside me. Beat the shit out of the both of them, cut them into pieces with the lawnmower blade and feed them to the bugs in the blue tub. See how they fuckin’ like it.

  But, I knew better, and the smarter side of me hoped like hell I never saw either one of them again.

  Still holding the jacket around Becca with one arm, I grabbed the pliers from my back pocket and used them to start pulling at the braid of rope snaking in and around her wrists. While I worked, I was cautious not to slip and scrape any skin. The last thing I wanted was to add to Becca’s pain.

  But the knots were too tight, and this wasn’t exactly the job for which the pliers were intended. For this task, I needed something with a knife-edge to cut the fibers. Maybe something serrated, like a handsaw.

  My eyes immediately went to the darkened workbench where the very tool I needed sat waiting. Moments ago, I’d wanted to heave at the sight of the lawnmower blade and the bloody rags wrapping it, but now I’d reached that place, down deep, that you don’t often see but know exists, and I knew I could do it. I looked at Becca, standing on her tiptoes with her arms stretched high over her head, and realized it wasn’t even about whether I could or not. It was something I had to do.

  I held Becca’s gaze for a moment, drawing strength from her pain. Then, as if she was reading my mind, she nodded just slightly.

  “Go.”

  Hesitating only briefly, I told her I’d be right back and picked my cell phone up off the floor. I made my way over to the workbench, sidestepping the bloody slick on the floor. The lawnmower blade sat waiting, its one edge curved slightly upward in an evil grin, like it knew I’d be back. After swallowing a large knot of my own, I took the ragged handle in hand and hurried back over to Becca, but not before shooting a momentary glance to the top of the stairs. All was still quiet. Still dark.

  I rushed back to Becca. Seeing her stretched between the floor and the ceiling made me wonder just how long she’d been hanging there. It looked like her arms were about to rip from their sockets at any moment. I shuddered as I imagined her pain, and was encouraged to work fast.

  “Hold still,” I said, and raised the lawnmower blade up to the rope where it looped over the hook. The rags around the blade were stiff and rough in my hand as I drew the sharpened end back and forth across the rope. There wasn’t much room between the tough, fibrous rope and Becca’s delicate skin, and I had to stretch up on my toes to angle the blade away from her.

  My progress was slow. Too slow. The blade wasn’t cutting through the brown rope very well at all. It was almost like it didn’t want to. Then it dawned on me, sending a shiver through my entire body. It wasn’t a saw, and wasn’t used for that purpose. The man didn’t use the lawnmower blade to slice through people’s limbs. He hacked them off. Like an ax.

  “How you doin’?” I asked, trying to get a sense of her condition, and giving my arm a chance to hang by my side for a moment. My shoulder was getting sore, and all the blood draining out of my arm was making my hand tingle. Even as I did it, I felt weak and ashamed considering the fact that Becca’s arms had been raised for much longer than the short time mine had been.

  “I’m okay,” she said, and tried to offer a feeble smile. But, that’s all I got. An “okay” and a feeble smile. It didn’t tell me much, but I had an imagination, and I knew she was certainly not “okay.”

  I raised my cell phone to see where I’d been cutting the rope and realized I had barely made a notch, frayed only a few strands. I had to work faster. Positioning the blade back into the notch I’d made, I started running it back and forth with more vigor than I had previously. Putting more pressure, and really getting after it. And it seemed to work. Suddenly, I could hear the fibers shearing as the steel severed each one.

  I hung my head down and ignored the ache growing in my shoulder as I worked. I was getting there. My jaw clenched. Back and forth, I sawed at the rope, listening to the wonderful sound of the blade cutting through each braid one by one, and knowing there were fewer to go through with each one severed. But something wasn’t right. My hand soon felt wet and the rags around the blade were growing spongy under my grip.

  I raised my cell phone a second time and looked up. The horror of what I saw nearly crippled my resolve. Both the rope and the lawnmower blade were slick with blood, shiny, gleaming blood, fresh and bright red. Anxiously, I pulled the blade away and saw that in my frenzy to get through the ropes, I hadn’t merely cut Becca, I’d nearly sawed halfway through one of her wrists.

  “Holy shit!” I said, then looked at the girl who I had just injured further. The guilt was mounting faster than the words could come out, and I ached like I was the wounded one. “Becca, I’m so sorry.”

  As I searched her eyes, she looked back at me puzzled.

  “What is it?”

  “What is it?” I echoed, not believing the question. “I was cutting you. Badly. Why didn’t you say something?”

  She shook her head, eyes weary. “I didn’t feel anything.”

  And that’s when I realized just how bad off she was. I could only stare at her in disbelief, my guilt turning to unforgivable shame as a thin trail
of blood dripped down onto her cheek from above. My eyes shot upward, and even without the light from the cellphone, I could see dark lines running the length of her pale arm. The sight was horrific, made more so because I was the one who had caused it.

  I looked back into Becca’s eyes, not knowing what to say or what to do for her.

  “Just get it done,” she said, relieving me from having to stare at her sad eyes any longer.

  I raised the lawnmower blade back up and, altering the angle so I would miss Becca’s skin, began sawing at the rope once more. When the last fiber finally let go, I let out a breath I didn’t even realize I’d been holding.

  I couldn’t support her weight with one arm, and Becca collapsed in a heap on the cement floor. I dropped the lawnmower blade like its very existence disgusted me and knelt beside her. She would probably bruise from the fall, but that was certainly the least of her worries. Or mine. I would have to take care of her wrist before we did anything else. By the way her arm was covered with blood, it was apparent she was losing a lot of it.

  After draping the jacket over her shoulders, I worked on the knot that still held the fibrous rope to her wrist. Without the weight of her body holding tension on it, the knot actually proved fairly easy to loosen. Over the years, Garrett had shown me how to tie and untie some of the most difficult of marine knots making this one no match for my skills.

  Or Garrett’s.

  My thoughts went to my friend again, and my stomach churned. For the first time, I found myself skeptical of him having made it out. Between Becca and me, one of us had been tied up and hung from a hook in a cold, damp basement, while the other had been locked in a wooden coffin. So I couldn’t even begin to imagine what hell the psycho had inflicted on Garrett. Best-case scenario, Garret had escaped and was busy putting distance between himself and this God-forsaken place. Worst case? I couldn’t think about the worst-case. Too much of it had already come true.