“And you’ll kill me?” The challenge in her squared shoulders makes my pants tighten.
I swear, she is either stirring a deviant fiend within me, or this woman is infecting my cracked brain. Maybe a bit of both.
I anchor my hands to hers and, with a firm tug, remove her clenched fingers from my shirt. “There are things worse than death.”
She gives her head a hard toss, clearing hair from her face. “Like locking a woman in a cellar?”
A mocking breath slips free. “Maybe you shouldn’t consider it as being held against your will. What if it’s for your own safety?”
Her gaze narrows. She tugs her towel higher, gripping it securely. “At least Little Red Riding Hood got to see the wolf trying to eat her. Don’t try to fuck with my head. There’s no way you can justify what you’re doing to me.”
I grab the bandage and shove it in my pocket. “I’m the big bad wolf,” I say. “That’s for damn sure. But there are bigger, badder wolves in the forest, Mak. And you let them catch your scent.”
11
Ghosts
Makenna
When I was a kid, I watched my mother spiral out of control. She was a heroin addict. She called her sleeping spells—where she slept for days at a time, when she had enough supply—slipping into her other world.
Other world.
I used to lay beside her wherever she passed out. I’d pile all my toys around us and make our own little world, sheltering her from the bad things that might find us in the night. I would stare at her and imagine the other world she was inside—the one where I couldn’t follow. Because I was in the real world. Scared and alone and hungry.
I would imagine a beautiful, foreign realm that was so tranquil and unearthly I couldn’t grasp its beauty. An underwater haven full of mermaids, or a sky palace with ethereal princesses.
Then there was the other world I feared. The one that my mother never came back from. The dark void of nothing. As I got older, I imagined my mother there more and more. Resenting her for abandoning me—for being selfish. That dark world haunted my nightmares.
That’s how I see Easton’s endless cellar dungeon.
The cave stretches on and on…a hellish dimension, a dark void carved into the earth, where no life exists. It’s the absolute aloneness I feel down here that steals my breath, that makes my heart feel as if its about to explode—the hollowness consuming.
I stand perched on a spiral staircase, my hand clenched around the iron rail. Unable to move. My whole body one solid vein of ice.
His back is to me, and I think if he speaks, his voice will break the hold, the dark spell he so obviously wanted this place to cast on me. So when his voice comes, it startles me.
“It’s my work,” he says.
This is not work. This is…obsession. Easton’s whole cellar is a welded maze of demons and dark visions from his mind. Cement sculptures of decapitation and disembowelment…like some shrine to medieval torture. Blown glass ornaments swirl with dark colors, orbs that hang from the rafters to showcase his work.
Along the completed walls, inlaid shelving houses other glass figurines. Demons and devils with snake tongues and bone antlers. Skulls. Lots of blown glass skulls.
“This is hell,” I finally say.
He turns to look at me, bracing his hands on the railing. “It’s my hell.”
“Why?”
He doesn’t answer right away, and I mentally fill in the silence: he’s ill. Mentally ill. He has to be—because what kind of mind envisions this level of torture, and then acts on it, murdering people in the middle of a ravine?
How long has he been building this cellar?
How many people has he killed?
“I have to keep adding to it until it’s done.” He drives a hand through his dark hair, and I glimpse the white scars on his face in the black light. “But, revenge is an expensive lifestyle.” He tries for a sardonic smile that fails. “It’s art, Makenna. People still buy art. Don’t read too much into it.”
I shake my head. This is so much more than just his art. This is the product of his sickness, his tormented mind. “Will it ever be done?”