Chapter 44
Rowan’s chest was patterned with slices and gouges. Half of his face peeled away, opening up his skull and spilling gore onto the sheepskin rug.
I’ll never get that out of the wool, I thought stupidly.
He sputtered and shook, a marionette whose strings were snagged and caught, as a dark froth foamed up from his bisected mouth.
My eyes widened. This time there was no brief flash of gore, no face disappearing into the darkened doorway.
The bloody horror was lying in front of me, inescapable, unrelenting.
You’ll never learn, will you?
My body trembled. I thought I could hear sirens. The front door lay open behind me.
Hurting and hurting, round and round.
Maybe it really was Rowan. Did I want to wait and find out? They’ll lock me up for good this time. If I ran now, I could escape to town. Why did it have to be Rowan? The one person who was nice to me. I tried to push what I’d done away.
Your very own circle of hell, spinning like a hamster wheel.
I stumbled toward the front door, hurrying in the direction of the night air, thinking of places I could hide.
Then I stopped. I leant against the door jamb, looking out onto the driveway. My car sat there with its broken windshield. A cool breeze, fresh and inviting, pulled around my sweat-sodden clothes, and I found myself aching to be outside, to be anywhere but this house of horrors.
Callie-Ann’s words came to me on the breeze, suddenly cold and hard.
“Stay in the house. Find the breach.”
I inhaled a deep breath of that sweet, night air, let it cool the sweat on my arms and brow, then I turned around and went back into the house, back past the twitching body on the living room floor, back to the door under the stairs, and headed down into the basement. Down inside the hill.