Sketched Page 8

  Kingston wasn’t listening. In a single, silent movement, he swung the back doors shut and slid the lock into place. The sound of the metal sliding into its catch caused the boy to turn around quickly. His eyes grew even wider. He looked from the closed back door to Kingston.

  “Dude, what are you doing? It’s hot in here.” In the bluish light coming from the skylight in the van, Kingston could see that the boy had become very pale. He looked around the shadowy cube he was now locked in. There were no boxes. The only thing in the van was a blanket in the back by the cab. There was something underneath but nothing about the shape suggested that it was anything close to a video game system.

  It was suddenly hard for him to breathe. The sugary tang of Epic Freeze burned in his throat and he felt panic explode in his chest.

  “There’s nothing in here. I told you not to fuck with me.”

  The boy’s lips, blue as if from a lack of oxygen began to shake. He began to shake. The slushes dropped from his hand and exploded onto the dirty metal floor. Blue ice splattered up onto the boy’s pale legs.

  “Stealing from your mother is really an awful thing. I’m guessing that she didn’t want you to dye your hair either.” Kingston spoke calmly. Anticipating the boy’s sudden leap for the doors, he stepped in front of the lock and caught Matthew’s small body as he lunged forward. Holding the struggling child in his arms, Kingston was reminded of the privilege of having such complete control over such a tiny little life.

  The boy was screaming now, a high pitched girlish shriek that filled the claustrophobic van quickly. Kingston growled at him to shut up, that his ears were starting to ring but the boy continued.

  He was the loudest so far. The rest had been too terrified to make much of a sound when he had first taken them. Of course, the quietest ones were usually the most enthusiastic when he really got to work. He’d have to silence this one quicker than the others.

  The sharp smell of urine suddenly emerged from the boy. His screams were crackling with sobs and those limbs of his were whirling helplessly in the air. Kingston wrapped one arm around his narrow chest and reached into the front pocket of his shirt. He needed to get the boy still. He was about to pull the needle from the blue checkered pocket when the boy’s legs finally made purchase. His shin exploded into a white-hot pain that ran up his body and into his throat. Kingston cried out in a mixture of pain and confusion. Before he could stop himself, he tossed the boy’s body across the truck and into the back wall.

  Practically weightless, the teenage ju-do master of Dixon City hurled through the air and slammed into the shelving. He made an unnaturally wet squeaking noise and fell gracelessly into the blanket covered pile.

  The boy began to gag instantly, his tumble having pulled the blanket half off the van’s additional cargo. The smell of sticky rot filled the van. It was a sour, slaughterhouse tang that once freed, seemed to race into every available space.

  Kingston pulled the hypodermic from his pocket and walked calmly to where the boy lay. He flicked the needle with his long fingers, watching the bubbles rise and burst out of the faintly purple liquid within.

  The boy seemed to have forgotten he was even there. Still gagging, mucus pouring out from his mouth and nose, he was pulling the blanket back from the lump he had landed on.

  “You see, she was a ‘fucking bitch’ too,” Kingston sighed. “However, if she’d been a bit just a little bit more supportive, she might have been around to tell you what a terrible thing is it to betray your mother’s trust like you did. But of course, she’s not.”

  Unable to scream, the boy made choking noises instead. He tried to scramble away from Brynn Entler’s corpse from his position beside her. He stared, wild-eyed, at Brynn’s bloated face where it turned toward him, rouge smeared across her cracking lips.

  “Still.” Kingston reached out and grabbed the boy’s hood. With one move, he twisted the cotton into his fist and yanked the boy to his feet. “There’s something to be said for a mother’s unconditional love. Despite everything, I still have this absolutely irrational need for her approval.”

  Helpless against the fabric pulled tight around his neck, it was easy to pull the boy closer to him.

  Kingston took a final look at the liquid in the needle. “This is the easy part. You might want to save some energy for later.” He let go of the hoodie and pulled the boy’s head back and to the side, exposing his thin neck. The ugly, overcast light shone down from the skylight, illuminating the rapid pulse of his carotid artery.

  Kingston neatly pierced his skin with the needle. His hand was trembling as he pushed the plunger down, but that was alright, wasn’t it?

  “This part, the part with the needle?” Even his voice was shaking as he whispered in the perfect pink shell of the child’s ear. “That part you’ll barely feel. In fact, you won’t even know what happened to you, let alone be able to do anything about. God knows I didn’t. You can thank Mother for that.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  * * *

  Kray County - New England

  Once again, the room fell into place piece by piece, as if someone were assembling her surroundings like a puzzle. First the back door came together, the white metal dented and dirty with scuff marks from countless pairs of boots. Then she became aware of the kitchen sink and the window that overlooked the back yard. She could make out the laundry line that served as a tether, allowing the poor dog a few feet of freedom to bore its paws into what remained of the lawn.

  The tiles now, then the dirty cupboards and then finally the cracked formica of the kitchen table. This was her Uncle’s kitchen.

  Piper’s awareness came into place the same time as her surroundings. She looked down at her hands, working to establish a stronger hold as the dream built itself around her. They were her hands but she had stopped wearing polish years ago. The nails she looked down at now were stubby and bitten to the quick, the old black polish flaked off from chewing.

  She knew where she was now.

  The gummy bracelets around her wrist, her mother’s grey sweater she had worn almost every day that year as if it might help bring her home.

  He would be sitting across from her.

  If she were to gather the courage to look up, she’d see Harrison, decades younger and sweating under the responsibility of his position, struggling to find the words to tell her they couldn’t find her mother.

  The dread that had begun as soon as Piper recognized her surroundings only grew. Her shoulders tensed, a tightness that crawled up her neck and into the top of her skull. She had to look. There was someone across from her and whoever it was, was waiting. Piper could feel them watching her, their hands clasped neatly as if in prayer only a few feet away from where she sat.

  Look up.

  Piper slowly raised her eyes past her uncle’s crushed cigarette packages and empty beer cans that crowded the table.

  The hands clasped across from her weren’t a man’s.

  This wasn’t Harrison across from her, but she knew that. She knew that in the deepest corners of her mind that was starting to beg her to wake up. Piper took a deep breath and looked directly at the figure across from her.

  It was her mother.

  She tilted her head to the side slightly, a small smile on her face. It was a weary, sad half smile that spoke more of regret than happiness. This wasn’t the mother whose picture had flashed across the Dixon news before joining the pile of forgotten other missing people. They only had a few days before their story stopped being interesting. There had been so many of them after all.

  The woman across from Piper was free of discount hair extensions, pointed acrylic tips and layers of lip gloss like peach jello. This was the mother who had once picked her up from preschool on her bike and doubled her home, who had sponge-bathed fevers away and shaped her pancakes into faces in the clean light of the kitchen.

  Piper could see she was wearing the necklace. It had been the only thing that her mother had left of her father. A
heart pendant of the most predictable kind, lined with cheap diamonds and available at most malls across the country, it had nevertheless meant a great deal to her. She had been inconsolable for almost a week after she lost it.

  When Piper, at the time no more than six, had awoken from a dream and drawn a map to its location her mother had thought that she had stolen it and planted it there. How she had screamed. Holding the cheap bobble in her palm, she had slapped her daughter with the same hand, leaving a heart-shaped impression on her cheek. Liars were terrible people, she had screeched. Liars always got what was coming to them.

  “Mom?” Piper asked. Her voice sounded far away, as if she were deep in her pond trying to yell up from her icy cocoon.

  Piper’s mom reached out beside her. There was a child sitting to her right. Why had she not noticed? Piper turned to look at him slowly, her heartbeat a steady but almost deafening rhythm.

  The boy couldn’t have been more than 14 years old. His greenish tinged hair was tucked behind his ears and his thin body trembled in his seat. He willingly slipped his hand into Piper’s mother’s but didn’t look away, his large eyes unblinking and dreadful.

  The boy’s face was like a mask, completely still and as lifeless as a wax work. The dread Piper had been battling surged again as she realized neither of them were breathing. Their shoulders, chest, arms, and legs were utterly still as if they had been positioned there years ago. Even her mother’s smile and the tilt of her head was strangely animated like a puppet in some stop-motion nightmare.

  Piper tried to push her chair back and stand but she was unable.

  “I need to go,” Piper said, her voice barely audible. She could feel the boy continuing to watch her, his lifeless eyes locked on to her with a terrible calmness. “Please let me go.”

  She tried again but her limbs refused to respond. It was as if they were no longer hers, stuck to the chair like dead weight.

  Piper was about to plead again when the kitchen suddenly erupted in a noise unlike anything she’d ever heard. A roar, not animal or mechanical but human, filled the room. Not from one throat, but seemingly from hundreds, the sickly cry seemed to come from all around her. The voices rumbled beneath her feet and poured from the cupboards around her. She was trapped.

  Her mother and the boy began to slowly open their mouths.

  Piper watched, helplessly as their mouths grew wider and wider, slowly stretching their dead skin.

  A thick fluid began to creep out of them like a shadow, as if someone was pushing the black out of their gaping mouths from within. Like some kind of hideous bubble, it shimmered as it bulged forward and out. It hovered before gravity forced it to begin to sag.

  Pushing back against her chair with all her strength, Piper watched as the black slipped down out of their mouths and onto the table.

  Like rivers of lava, the two streams joined and began to slowly encroach, swallowing the crumpled cigarette packs and cans as it went. It was pouring from their too wide mouths, their unblinking eyes still staring as thick waterfalls of blackness splattered across the cracked formica.

  Piper watched, her ears ringing from the screams that filled the air as the fluid started to congeal and rise into the air. It built upon its self, an endless stream rolling from their mouths. It writhed and shuddered between them. First four feet, then five, the shimmering tower undulated further until it stood on the table above them, a fully formed figure.

  She found she couldn’t even scream. All Piper could do was watch as the black continued to congeal. There were limbs now and shoulders, building steadily upward until the hideous roundness of a head appeared.

  Piper heard herself begin to whimper as features emerged from the pulsing mass that was becoming its skull. Like decomposition in reverse, Piper watched as lips were built and parted to reveal a tongue and teeth that gnashed at the air as if trying to devour the deafening screams that seemed to roar from every corner of the room.

  When it turned toward her, its eyes were open. It spoke, its voice coming from inside her rather than descending from the figure stooped above her. It pierced the panicked froth that her mind had become.

  “Pretty little bird,” the voice whispered, “Isn’t she?”

  Piper crashed into consciousness like she had careened from a high diving board. Her entire body screaming with adrenaline, her eyes flew open and she stared at her bedroom around her. Her head was aching; the muscles in her neck and shoulders knotted with tension. How long had she been sitting up? She could hear herself gasping for air as she tried to re-orientate herself back into reality.

  Pretty little bird, isn’t she?

  The creature’s voice still echoed around her blank brain, clinging to her consciousness like it was trying to drag her back in. Piper concentrated on slowing her breathing.

  Good air in. She plunged her brain for reminders of Adam’s teachings. Good air in and bad visions out. As she finally began to gather herself, she became aware that the fingers of her right hand were tingling. She held up her hand and was shocked to see that she was gripping a pencil so tight that her knuckles were white. She slowly opened her hand, seeing the blood rush back into her palm with a lurid glow.

  She had been sitting up the whole time…and drawing, apparently.

  Her heart had just begun to slow but as she looked down at the crumpled bedsheets around her, it started to thud rapidly again.

  There were at least four pieces of paper in her lap, each torn carelessly from the sketch book she kept by her bed. Each paper looked as if she had completed whatever drawing she was unconsciously scribbling and then crumpled it up in frustration. Her rational mind scrambling for some kind of explanation, Piper slowly took the nearest ball of paper and flattened it out in her lap.

  Her hand, still throbbing from where she had been gripping her pencil, flew to her mouth in shock. Piper tried to stop her other hand from shaking as she examined the portrait she had unknowingly drawn of her mother.

  It was photograph perfect. For having done this drawing in her sleep, it was completed with a startling level of skill. Even though she hadn’t seen her mother in photographs or otherwise for more than a decade, the face on the wrinkled paper in front of her was exactly as she remembered her. It was exactly as it had been in her dream. Her unconscious self had perfectly captured her mother’s eyes; pained with loss and regret, as well as the pouty overbite that Piper had inherited. The shading was immaculate. Even the hair was so life like it seemed to move on the page, slipping down over her mother’s shoulders to her clavicle where the necklace lay; the gold-plated heart warmed by the hollow of the missing woman’s throat.

  Piper was surprised when a tear slipped off her cheek and landed on the page. The paper absorbed it hungrily. Pull yourself together, she scolded herself, remember what Adam said. These were images from her subconscious and nothing else.

  But you know better, don’t you Piper? A hard voice, the coldest part of herself, spoke again. Past all the bruising and lodged bullets, it stated the cold truth that she didn’t want to hear. You’ve never ‘seen’ your mother before. She’s been missing for ten years and there’s been nothing, not a peep. These are messages, pure and simple. And you can’t ignore them this time. They’re not going to be stuffed in a shoe box under your bed, not these ones.

  Her hand faltered when she reached for the second crumpled paper.

  She dug it from where the duvet had half swallowed it and took a breath before opening it. What was just a slight tremble in her hand before quickly grew to a visible tremor.

  It was the boy.

  Just as detailed and lifelike as the last, the image of the child from her dreams seemed to shiver with life in front of her. She had captured the pointy shape of his face perfectly; the swerve of his long bangs, the bored tightness of his soft mouth. Most striking of all was the boy’s eyes. They were lushly rimmed with dark lashes and glared out at her with the same look of stubborn defiance that she had seen moments ago.

  B
ut that was the only time she had ever seen him.

  This was not the face of a relative, or a friend. This was the face of a stranger.

  Barely breathing, Piper lay the picture down in her lap gently. There was one more crumpled paper to her left and from the stained and ragged look of it, she had a pretty good idea what portrait this would be.

  Pretty Little Bird.

  That voice again, echoing down through the jumbled hallways of her mind. She had to stop and steady herself before picking it up.

  The paper was polluted with pencil lead. Unlike the other two, the back of the torn page was smeared with her fingerprints and wadded in on itself so tightly that it took effort for Piper to unravel it. Willing her fingers to function properly, she picked it apart until the image emerged.