Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(60)
*
By the time Miriam discovers the cabin empty, the snow has stopped. Her stomach is sour and her brain sluggish, but she manages a few clear thoughts. The child has merely disobeyed her. That is what teenagers do. She is testing boundaries. When Miriam peers out the front door, squinting against the brightness of the snow, only a single set of tracks runs from the porch into the woods, and Claire is tethered to the end of it. That’s what Miriam tells herself as she throws on a jacket and steps into her Sorels and snatches a Glock off the bureau and hurries outside, pausing briefly to puke between her boots, before running a sleeve across her mouth and continuing on.
The air has that special hushed quality, as if the world is holding its breath, waiting. The only sound is the snow creaking underfoot and thumping off branches and hissing across the ground in serpenty wisps. The tracks are gray with shadow and half-filled and Miriam wonders what she would have done if there were no tracks, if the snow kept falling and erased them completely. She puts the thought out of her mind. Best not to think about the worst that can happen.
But the worst has happened, she soon realizes, when she comes to that place in the trees where the tracks vanish into a messy crater of exploded snow. She stands still for a long time, breathing through her nose, and then she circles the crater, a muddle of prints, another set heading off deep into the woods. Claire’s tracks were the same size as her own—following them felt as if she were following herself. But these tracks, when Miriam sets her boot inside them, are twice the size of hers, swallowing hers up.
Magog is alive. After she fired through the roof, after she heard him fall heavily to the ground, she checked outside and found no body but enough blood to make death a possibility.
Now he has come for Claire. And though they are long gone, she can feel them—their smell and taste like a memory imprinted in the air. She kneels down and scoops a handful of snow brightened by a spot of blood and crushes it in her hand until it becomes a red ball of ice.
She sees something nearby, caught in a bush, white and flapping like a bird’s wing. A piece of paper. It makes a rasping noise when she pulls it out—and reads, in blocky handwriting, the boy’s name, Patrick.
Chapter 24
THE MOON IS FAT and aglow and seemingly balanced on the chimney of the house Patrick stands before. A few minutes ago, he parked his Jeep on the snowy shoulder of the road. Though he duct-taped the hole Claire tore in his roof, the cold still finds its way in, and he is shivering from the drive when he walks the unplowed tire-rutted driveway. The wind is at his back. He hopes the dogs will remember his scent.
They do. A few preliminary barks give way to mewling and whining and huffing, and he tells them shh and kneels down to face their slobbering tongues, flopping their ears and making their legs kick with his rough scratching. As he suspected, his mother’s car is parked nearby, glowing as white as the snowbound woods around him.
When he circles the house and crunches through the drifts and peers in the windows, the dogs trail him, nudging at his hand with their cold noses. In every room he expects to find his mother cowering on the floor with her hand held over a swollen eye, a bleeding mouth. She divorced his father more than fifteen years ago—she can see who she pleases; he understands that—but if this man is hurting her, then Patrick plans to hurt him back.
But the house is seemingly empty. He is surprised by what he sees, every room clean and sparely decorated with the kind of modern hard-edged bright-colored furniture on television shows that take place in fancy apartments in LA or New York. Not what he expected from a guy who owns twenty dogs and lives in an outlying neighborhood whose defining landmark is the city dump.
Then he hears a scream. Muffled as if filtered through a pillow. He pounds up the front porch and tries the door, the knob loose. He pushes inside. Vanilla candles burn on the kitchen counter. Soft jazz mumbles and hoots from the stereo. He hurries through the house, checking every room twice, not sure whether he should call out for his mother—and then he hears it again, almost a squeal, from behind a door in the kitchen.
He yanks it open and the floor falls away, a wooden staircase with rubber grips leading into the dimly lit basement. There is a terrible tang to the air—like the worst the zoo has to offer—that he barely registers when dropping down a few steps and leaning over the railing to take in the view.
His guts go cold, as if he has just gulped down an icy glass of water.
At first he isn’t sure what he’s looking at, the splatter of bones and blood, and then he spots the tufts of white fur and realizes it must be a goat. Perhaps. It’s difficult to tell. Hunched over it, with the posture of buzzards, are two naked figures. They are feeding. He remembers the cat his mother brought here the other day and wonders if it met a similar fate.
He cries out for his mother—and then, too late, brings a hand to his mouth. They both swing toward him at once. The white stripe of hair gives her away, though her face is otherwise unrecognizable, deformed and bloodied. The man is covered with a thick down of hair, everywhere but his head, which remains ridiculously bald. His mother rises and moves toward him, and her feet smear the concrete with tacky prints the color of molasses. Her mouth is moving—she is either gnashing the air or trying to speak—but he doesn’t wait to find out.
*
Claire is not sure how much time has passed. A day, maybe two. She has messed herself. She has not eaten or had anything to drink. She has slept some, but even when awake, she might as well be sleeping, the world dark and unavailable to her. Her hands are cuffed to her opposite ankles, making an X of steel chain that rattles when she moves and makes it impossible to pull the burlap sack off her head. She finally does so by rubbing her head against the stone wall and licking the sack upward with her tongue. When it peels away, she sees that she is at the end of a shadowy corridor. The floor is black sand. Along each wall hangs a strand of LED lights that give off a blue glow and lend to the air an underwater quality.