Sketched Page 12
He avoided the paintings, looking over Piper’s shoulders as waves of tears rolled over her weakened body.
“You really need to get cleaned up though.” His comforting drone sounded hollow to him. “You haven’t slept and god knows how much you’ve had to drink. We’ll sort all of this nonsense out in the morning. Up we go.”
Adam could’ve let her cry longer, but the paintings, he felt them watching the two of them like an impatient audience. Eight pairs of eyes reaching out from some hidden layer of life that he had worked so hard for so long to ignore.
Her sobbing calmed but still unsteady, Piper clung to him as he moved to the wall.
“I’m starving,” she sniffled.
“I bet you are.” Adam frowned, kicking away a few empty wine bottles as he made his way to the main light switch by the stairs.
“Lights out folks,” he murmured. He switched on the downstairs light and shut off the fixtures in the loft around them. He thought he might feel some relief without the spotlight on the paintings’ faces, but the darkness only made the creeping insecurity worse. They were still watching.
“Do we have toast? I’d love toast.”
He maneuvered her down the stairs, grateful for each step out of the loft and away from the gazes behind them.
“We do, but tell you what, I’d love you to have a shower more.”
Piper raised her arm and smelled herself. She grimaced.
“Three days?” she said, disbelief still in her voice.
“Three days.”
They walked out into the night. The air was fresh, a slight wind ruffling through the trees and across the pond. Piper looked up at the farmhouse, the warm lights from the windows streaming out on the lawn. Now outside the studio, it was like a spell had been lifted off. Her legs felt shaky and a gnawing pain in her stomach made her throat burn. How long would she have stayed in there if Adam hadn’t practically broken the door down? How long would they have made her? She fought the urge to turn around and lock the studio, to board it up and never go back. She was a successful illustrator, she could spend the rest of her life in her cozy farmhouse making amusing cartoons for the New Yorker and floating in her pond. There was no reason to ever go back to the studio. Or Dixon.
Adam led her up the stairs. She could still feel the warmth of the day trapped in the old wood on the patio. She stopped under the porch light, moths bouncing their hapless bodies against it.
“Harrison wants me to go back. He needs me,” she said, “but I don’t want to. I don't know if I can.”
Adam held the screen door open, leading her gently into their sweet-smelling kitchen.
“You don’t have to,” Adam said as she passed, still wobbling like a newborn colt. “The only thing you have to do is look after yourself. Let’s let the ghosts look after themselves.”
Piper shuddered. She looked back at the studio across the lawn, the white paint almost luminescent in the dark.
CHAPTER TWELVE
* * *
Kray County - New England
She ascended toward the surface, the numbing water wrapping itself around her legs like a desperate lover. Kicking determinedly, she focused upwards at the light that seemed to grow dimmer as she approached. The comforting yellow and greens she was used to were gone, replaced with a grey dullness that wasn’t much brighter than the dark water that surrounded her.
A distressing thought occurred to Piper. What if she finally surfaced only to find herself still submerged? She kicked harder. As she neared the light, she found the coldness of the depths had only followed her. In fact, it seemed to have overtaken her. Her arms ached and the rigid cold that usually only toyed with her seemed to have settled into her body. Only a few feet away and she could feel her strength starting to fade. She would have to breathe soon. Her animal instincts were on the verge of betraying her. Soon that viscous, frigid water would pour into her lungs and snuff her out like a candle.
There was a glint of gold above her.
It shot across Piper’s fading vision like a shooting star. She found herself reaching for it as it seemed to grow nearer, dangling and shimmering. Her mother’s necklace. Piper, her lungs so full with stale air they felt as if they’d burst, reached up toward the sparkling pendant.
Just two more strokes. Just two more kicks.
Suddenly a hand broke through the surface. Lean and feminine, it plunged through the water and wrapped itself around hers. A riot of bubbles surrounded the arm that with unnatural strength, yanked Piper’s body upward and out.
She was on her knees then, gulping air into her burning lungs. Her mind reeling, she tried to place the stiff, itchy texture that was pressing against her palms and knees. She was nowhere near the pond. This wasn’t even outside.
She blinked, her eyes adjusting to the twilight of a living room she had never seen before.
Streetlights glowed through the closed sheer curtains, illuminating a collection of furniture that looked like an eight-year-old girl had designed a French court. For a split second, Piper even wondered if she was on the set of some soap opera somewhere. She sat back on her knees, looking down at the thick wool throw rug that she had somehow been tossed upon.
Someone had pulled her out but where had they gone?
No, not someone, her mother.
Piper looked around the room, half expecting to see her. She held her breath, searching for a telltale shadow somewhere across the chaise lounge or next to the curved staircase that encompassed the entrance foyer. There was nothing. Straining her ears, she could only make out a sleepy silence highlighted by the gentle ticking of a clock somewhere in the house.
Her palms were itching where they had dug into the wool and she looked down at pockmarked indentations in her hands. Only they weren’t her hands.
Come to think of it, they weren’t her knees either.
Piper’s head felt light and she stood up. She ran the large, masculine hands that didn’t belong to her over her body. Not only was she completely dry, but she wasn’t her at all. The body she was in was wearing a pair of expensive black pants that hung off of hips that were almost impossibly thin. The white dress shirt she wore was tucked in but it still billowed over her concave stomach.
No breasts, no waist…
There was a large mirror by the staircase. Her legs weightless, she moved toward it, half in dread and the other half in wonder. She walked quietly under the overlarge chandelier and that hung like a filigreed pinecone from the ceiling. Closer to the stairs now she could hear the sound of snoring from the landing above.
Her breath caught in her throat, Piper neared the mirror.
The shock that gripped her was colder and blacker than the water that had threatened to kill her only moments earlier.
She pulled at the face in the mirror with the carefully groomed hands of a stranger. His eyes, shallow and soulless, registered nothing of the terror she felt. Instead, they looked perfectly calm. His skin was pulled like latex fetish gear over cheekbones and a jawline that might have been beautiful had it not been so skeletal. This was emaciation beyond vanity, this was a state of delirious near death.
Piper felt a mixture of shock and recognition rush through her like she’d touched an electric fence. This was the man in her drawings. She had seen it five years ago in the interrogation room and the same eyes she had sketched then were looking right through her now.
There was a grunt from upstairs. A man, coughing through sleep apnea, was groaning and choking in his sleep. Piper was alarmed when the body she was in moved without her consent away from the mirror and up the stairs.
She could do nothing. It was as if she were simply along for the ride, locked in a part of this man’s brain that even he was unaware of.
For someone so gaunt, she was surprised to feel his vigor as he moved up the marble staircase. The steps were effortless, his movements graceful and completely silent. Piper imagined a tiger climbing the stairs, his eyes like malicious green orbs in the dark.
He continued.
Now on the landing, she was helpless but to watch from the inside as he made his way past the single nightlight toward the master bedroom. The snores became louder and she felt his heartbeat begin to speed up. Noiselessly, he stepped into the room and made his way to the foot of the bed.
Just as unnecessarily regal as the rest of the furniture, the king-sized bed frame was canopied and carved with curls and meaningless emblems. The piles of duvets and pillows on the bed were just as elaborate and so plentiful that Piper had a problem making out where the snoring was coming from. Slowly the man moved to the right of the bed, trailing his fingertips along the soft fabric of the tapestry pillows and satin blankets.
The man she was trapped in was excited. Piper could feel the heat growing in his pelvis, radiating up into the pit of his stomach with a maliciousness that was too familiar. She could feel it, the same glossy, tarry muck that she had seen in her vision a few nights ago. Like cancerous flesh, rotted and diseased, it crept up from the throbbing between his legs and slowly began to fill his stomach.
If this was another dream, there was nothing she wanted more than to wake up.
He pulled the duvet back gently. A woman, her lips slack and folded into her pillow, slept beneath them. She was obviously middle-aged, but the amount of surgery she’d had gave her face a tense, unnatural look even in sleep. Piper could smell the sticky floral odor of her night cream.
Piper watched as his fingers, long and elegant like a praying mantis, hovered above her neck. The steady pulse of the woman’s heartbeat throbbed against the skin.
Wake up Wake up Wake UP.
He was walking again, every step amplifying the pulse of his sexual excitement and the growing darkness within him. His hands were numb. His breath was shallow. He walked deeper into the house, past a cluster of photos showing the woman in various glamour shots, both professionally done and amateur. She was behind a giant ribbon with all of society’s elite, a pair of oversized scissors in one hand and Royal Entler’s hand in the other. There were only two photos of a young girl that looked like they dated back to the eighties and none of the man whose snoring rattled through the hallways.
When he walked into the second bedroom, Piper was immediately hit by a rancid odor. The man’s excitement ignited further at the scent, the pulsing becoming almost unbearable. It grew worse as he crept further into the room, stepping past empty biscuit boxes, chip bags and a two liter of pop that had spilled all over a fuzzy red heart shaped rug.
It was a teenager’s room, filled with inspirational posters and badly hung pictures of boy bands. There were strings of fairy lights above the bed that illuminated the large body of a girl, snoring almost as loudly as her father.
Piper was horrified when he crouched down, hovering like a vampire above the sleeping teenager’s face. There was vomit caked at the sides of her mouth. A trail led to her hand and then down to a stainless-steel bowl beside the bed. That was the smell, the sweet, bile sharp smell of vomit. Piper concentrated, trying uselessly to either wake up or will the man to turn away.
He didn’t.
He reached with his trembling fingers and gently touched the mixture of chocolate and taco chips that stained the girl’s heavy chin. He pulled his finger back and rubbed the vomit gently between two pads. With this other hand, he reached into the pocket of his pants.
The black that had been crawling up through his body was at his throat now. Unstoppable and corrupt, it was choking him with its urgency. He wrapped his hands around something cold and delicate and pulled it from his pants pocket carefully.
A syringe. In the cheerful collection of lights above the bed, the liquid inside shone a dirty violet color. He flicked it with his vomit coated fingers, his breath ragged in his throat. The soft ping of glass did nothing to wake up the sleeping girl, too sedated from her binge and purge session to notice.
Piper tried to will the teenager awake too. She screamed inside the man’s head, helpless to do anything but watch.
She was still trying, still screaming silently, when the man positioned the needle at the side of her throat and pushed the tip deep into her soft flesh.
Piper roared into consciousness. Her entire body aching, she pushed herself up to sitting, her heartbeat loud in her ears and pulsing through every vein. She lurched backward, almost losing her balance as her hands slipped on paper that surrounded her.
It was her bedroom floor.
As soon as she recognized the pattern of her own rug and the familiar shape of her bedroom, the rush of adrenaline began to weaken. She looked down at her body, running her hands over the roundness of her thighs and up to the swell of her breasts.
“Oh, thank god.” She practically sobbed with relief. It was over. Whatever that was, she had managed to pull herself out of it in time. She was back from wherever she had gone, conscious and safe but with cold sweat drying all over her body and a painful thudding behind her eyes.
But last night? She placed her head in her hands, pressing her fingers against her eye sockets where three days of drinking were finally settling the tab. Her stomach was sour and the taste of alcohol in the back of her dry throat seemed to rise like heat waves in the desert.
She couldn’t remember much. Piper searched the black behind her eyes for memories to piece together what had happened since Harrison had arrived. She remembered him of course, his ferrety face so lost and hopeful. There was something else too. She remembered hoping to figure it out while she was painting but as soon as that first bottle of wine was gone the free fall into herself was swift and all encompassing.
Adam. She had a flash of the gentle way he had slipped her into a clean t-shirt and the warm water he had used to wash the paint off her face and hands. He had clucked like a chicken the whole time, admonishing her in a loving way she really didn’t deserve.
Why were her hands still sticky with paint, then? Frowning, she pulled them away from her face. Her eyes aching with every movement, she looked down and was shocked to see them coated with shimmering lead.
“Oh god, no.” Her stomach, empty and cracked with wine induced ulcers, tightened as she looked around where she sat. It was a sea of crumpled papers. Covered in abandoned sketches and black swirls, they practically tiled the floor around her. Her hand shaking with both the severity of her hangover and nerves, she reached out to what looked like a pile of three completed sketches directly in front of her. She began to turn them over.
It had happened again.
They looked out at her, trapped in their portraits like flies in amber. The first she recognized instantly as the older woman from her dream and the second was the ungainly daughter. Everything she had seen when she was locked in the man’s head was copied exactly; from the chunks of vomit at the corner of the girl’s mouth to the woman’s neck, crepe like and honest in comparison to the rest of her face. She might as well have been staring at photographs. Piper didn’t like where this was heading.
Her entire body stiff and sore, she turned the final paper around. Her gasp was so loud it hurt her own ears.
It was him.
It was the face that had stared back at her from the mirror, the man she had drawn all those years ago before she had been shot. Piper’s mouth dropped open as her exhausted brain began to mercilessly slide the pieces into place. It was clear now. His was the face that had emerged from the black mass in her vision of her mother and the boy.
Another sudden realization caused Piper to bring her hand to her mouth, cupping her shaking fingers over her lips to stifle a moan. Of course. It was so clear to her now that she felt a wave of shame almost as big as her shock. Why hadn’t she seen this before?
The Dixon Demon.
He was going to kill the two other women she had sketched, if he hadn’t done so already. Just as he
had killed Megan Coogan. Just as he had the killed the boy. Just as he had killed the others, their lost souls waiting so patiently for recognition up in her studio loft. She might have a chance of stopping it this time.
Despite the nausea that tore through her, Piper struggled to her feet, a fresh bloom of sweat erupting all over her body. The clock beside her bed read 5:25 am. If she hurried, she could make it to Dixon by night.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
* * *
Entler’s Department Store - Dixon City
When the back of their heads hit the rear bumper, it made a delightfully moist sound. It was the kind of sound that made him concerned that they perhaps wouldn’t be up to it when he was finally really ready to enjoy their company. Although, he couldn’t say he didn’t enjoy the sound. There was a delicious wetness to it, a pulpy thump that pleasured him to the core of his soul.