Chapter 8
Chapter 8
H e flies directly onto me, slamming me to the ground. I can’t catch myself, I scrape across the stones. Every bone in my body seems to break. For a second, all I see are stars and a bright light. He’s on top of me, screaming random words I can’t make sense of, squeezing my arms down hard against my sides, gripping my neck with one hand.
“I said no escaping ,” he growls, yanking my head up. “I said no leaving me! Don’t. Leave. Me.” He squeezes more tightly with each word.
I try to yank my arms free, try to fight him off, but it’s like fighting a steel wall. I can’t move a muscle. I want to say something to calm him down, but I can’t get a sound out—his weight is pressing the air from my lungs. For several terrifying seconds, I’m sure he’s going to snap my neck, but then he abruptly releases it and yanks me to my feet instead.
Through the fog, I’m dimly aware that he’s dragging me back to the camper. I kick his shins, scratch him wherever I can manage to make contact, ram an elbow between his legs, gasping and screaming, but his grip only tightens.
When we reach the side door, he stops, wraps his arms mercilessly around me from behind: my back against his torso, his arms crossed around my chest. His breaths are like slaps against the back of my neck. I hear him gasping for air now, though I’m completely still myself.
“Goddammit, Lou, do you want to get yourself killed?” he whispers, which is infinitely more terrifying.
For several seconds, he stays there completely motionless, almost like he doesn’t trust himself. Like he has to stop himself from hurting me.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” The words come bubbling out of me like water from a spring. “I got scared... the clothes... I’m so sorry... please...”
He’s saying something over and over again, so softly that I can’t hear it. It sounds like the murmuring of a priest. He’s still squeezing me the way he did when he first chloroformed me. He keeps on talking, getting gradually louder, until finally I can hear him.
“I have to keep you safe. I have to...” Abruptly, he breaks off and lifts me to carry me up the steps inside. I don’t even fight him anymore—I’m too scared he’ll flip out completely. His grip on my forearms is so tight that I’m whimpering behind closed lips. When we get to the hallway, he stops again and lets out a dreadful sigh. “You have to get away... away from me...”
He yanks me toward an overhead cabinet, flings it open, and starts rummaging around frantically inside. Several pieces of paper sail to the floor. Suddenly, he stops short and makes a relieved noise. He withdraws another iron chain, then attaches handcuffs at each end.
“I was scared, Brendan.” I have to try again. My heart is racing. He’s only holding me by the arm now. He seems almost absent, like his mind is somewhere else entirely.
Without a word, he pulls me back outside and takes a quick glance around. “Safe,” he murmurs and leads me around the side of the camper. “Stop... okay, on the ground.” He presses my shoulders firmly, and I sink to my knees beside the RV.
“Bren...” I can’t make myself meet his eyes, so I stare at the pockets of his cargo pants.
“You shouldn’t have run...” He bends down, takes the wrist with the handcuff on it, and attaches the loose cuff to the underside of the vehicle.
“Brendan...”
“Too late!” he snaps in a choked voice tinged with horror. “Getting dark... it’s getting dark...”
Now I’m positive he’s going to kill me. Tears stream down my face. I don’t want to die. I cross my other arm over my head protectively, hunching over to make myself as small as possible, and squeeze my eyes shut. I hear my own rapid breathing. Thunder nearby. Footfalls, moving away from me. A clinking sound somewhere to my left.
I open my eyes again, blinking, and wipe them on my blouse to clear my vision. Cautiously, I turn to look in the direction of the clinking noise, and discover Brendan about twenty feet away.
He’s got that chain wrapped around the trunk of a spruce tree.
Now I see that he’s completely soaked with sweat. His pants, his shirt, his hair. His face is ashen.
I scoot closer to the camper without taking my eyes off Brendan. He picks up the handcuffs at each end of the chain and clicks one onto each of his wrists. The chain is still encircling the tree behind him, so he’s trapped. A brief smile appears on his face, and for a moment he looks like the Brendan I saw in the visitors’ center, the one I was so fascinated by.
“Louisa.” His voice cracks on the last syllable. Rivulets of sweat run down his face. “Whatever happens, don’t be scared, nothing bad can happen to you.” He tugs on the handcuffs. “See?”
“Yeah,” I wheeze, high and helpless. What can possibly be so bad that he’s got himself in chains?
“Everything’s dark.” He starts moving toward me, but then the chain digs into the tree trunk, jerking him back.
“No, it isn’t.” My whole body is shivering. “There’s a thunderstorm coming, that’s all.”
“Lou.”
This time I’m weirdly happy to hear him call me by my nickname.
He’s staring in my direction, but blindly, like he’s not really looking at me. “Lou... Promise me something.”
“O-okay,” I stammer.
“But first, take this.” He holds up a tiny key. He’s shaking so hard that he can barely keep a grip on it. “You have to take it.”
“How?”
Brendan leans in as close as the chain will allow, and then tosses the key in my direction. It lands right between my knees. It’s on a metal ring with a black marble-sized sphere on it.
“Keep it safe.”
I fumble the key ring into my pocket, shoving it down as far as I can.
“Now listen! The key only unlocks my handcuffs, not yours. I want you to—” He breaks off, gasping, and flails in his restraints like he’s being slapped. His face contorts in a grimace of pain.
“What’s wrong?” I’m trying to hide my terror, but I’m pretty sure my voice gives it away.
Brendan leans forward, propping his hands against his thighs. “To hide underneath the camper,” he finally finishes. “You... should be able to do that with the handcuff on.”
I shake my head. “Why should I hide?”
“Just do it,” he says in a tight voice. The veins in his temples are so swollen, they look like they might burst at any second.
I turn away. In the distance, the first flashes of lightning dance in the sky, pale spirits with hundreds of spindly arms. The clouds overhead are thick and grey; only their edges gleam metallic violet.
“You can throw the key back to me in the morning, got it? Tomorrow morning, not before!”
“Why? Brendan? What’s wrong?”
“It’s getting dark... and when it gets dark, death comes.” He sounds like a small child in a horror movie. A chill runs through me. He walks backward, slowly, step by step. “Keep the key safe. Otherwise, we’ll never get out of here.” With that, he starts circling the tree in a wide arc. His hands are balled into fists, his shoulders rounded, like he’s getting ready for a fight. He disappears behind the spruce and into the thicket.
Oh, God, what’s he doing?
I listen, but hear only frightening stillness. I start to wonder whether this is all some kind of sick game. At the next thunderclap, he’s going to jump from behind the tree and strangle me with the chain. Maybe he’s got a spare key.
Suddenly I remember what he said about hiding. I get down flat on my stomach and worm my way under the camper—slowly, so that I won’t put too much pressure on my shackled wrist. The other cuff is attached to a steel eye that there’s no way I’ll ever break loose. The tips of my fingers throb. The metal cuff digs into my wrist. I can’t stay on my stomach without cutting off my circulation, so I roll onto my back, clenching and unclenching my hand to get the blood flowing again. After that, I look over at the tree again, but I still don’t see Brendan.
I wriggle out a few inches, just enough that my left side is peeking out from under the camper. A low-flying swarm of mosquitoes buzzes around my nose, and several of them land on my upper arm. I couldn’t care less. They can suck me dry as long as I live through tonight somehow.
“Brendan?” I call, but in a muted voice. “Where are you?”
Silence.
Lightning creases the sky, and the lead-grey clouds light up in a sea of white for several seconds, which makes everything seem much darker afterward.
It’s getting dark.
What did he mean by that?
“Brendan? Say something!”
The underbrush crackles somewhere between Brendan and the alpine rose bush, to the right of the spruce tree.
A shadow races out of the forest toward me. I scream, but it’s just an ermine, zigzagging through the small cove Brendan’s parked in, its tail fluttering behind it like a feather boa. With an elegant leap, it dives back into the cover of the trees. I exhale in relief, but then thunder fills the air.
Brendan isn’t the only problem here. I slide further back beneath the RV, which hopefully will protect me from lightning. Hopefully. But what if Brendan gets hit by lightning? I’ll starve to death under here. Months or years from now, some lonely hiker will find me here—a decomposed corpse whose bony hand has slipped out of the handcuff. Or maybe I’ll get so thin that I can slide my own wrist through the ring and save myself?
Another burst of lightning illuminates the sky again, but I only see the tail end this time. The air is so heavy with the coming rain that I can taste it. The thunder follows soon after. There’s still no sign of Brendan.
A ghostly veil of grey settles over the clearing. Finally, the pattering overhead begins, like fingers drumming on a table, faster and faster. And then from one second to the next, the clouds burst so violently, it’s like someone’s pouring pails of water onto us. I slide completely under the camper, but keep close enough to the edge that I can still peek out—not that I would be able to move much further with the handcuff anyway.
The sky above me is a raging battle between ghostly white light and raven-black darkness, between rain and wind. The echoing thunder makes the cove seem endless. Rivulets of rainwater run down the sides of the camper; a few droplets follow the pipes and drip onto me from the undercarriage.
It’s like the ground has opened up and swallowed Brendan.
To keep my mind occupied, I count the seconds between lightning and thunder.
Twenty-one... twenty-two... twenty-three…
An ear-splitting howl shatters the night into a thousand pieces. I jerk upright and smack my head on a pipe. The screams sound neither human nor animal—more like a mix between the two. A dying animal and a man being beaten to death.
Shuddering, I peer into the thicket. It takes a moment for the fragments of night, howling, rain, and tree trunks to fit together like puzzle pieces.
There’s a shape near the spruce tree Brendan has himself chained to, a horrible shadow dancing back and forth, like a boxer who keeps taking hard left hooks to the face and then winding up to strike back. The shrieking is so loud that it drowns out the thunder. I plug my ears as best I can, but it doesn’t help. The sound penetrates into my bones like it’s trying to tear me apart.
Abruptly, the horrifying noise stops. In the empty space left behind where the wild howling was, the rain is even eerier, like there’s a hole in the night itself. I stare at the spruce, transfixed.
When the next burst of lightning hits, I recognize Brendan, standing there as though turned to stone. In the darkness, his face shines as pale as the moon; his eyes seem hollowed out. He’s looking at me. I think he is, anyway. He’s staring at me without seeing me.
“I’ll kill you!” he suddenly thunders in a voice that seems to shake the air around him. “Do that again and I’ll kill you!” He runs toward me.
I clamp my hand over my mouth to keep myself from screaming. The chain stops him, though, just feet from the camper. He jerks on the metal handcuffs like a madman; blood and rain are streaming down his palms, but he doesn’t stop. He pulls against his restraints with all his strength, roaring. The tree bends. The branches sway back and forth, creaking. A thin twig snaps.
Another peal of thunder directly overhead makes him stop. He stands utterly still in the pouring rain, his hair whipping his face in the wind. His lips are moving, he’s whispering, I can’t hear him. Abruptly, he clamps his hands over his eyes like a scared little boy.
I just lie there. Wet, trembling. I have absolutely no idea what’s going on.
Eventually, the rain subsides a little and his voice gets loud enough that I can hear him, but he’s not talking to me anyway.
“How could you possibly think she loved you? That she’d come back? How could anyone ever love a worthless piece of crap like you? You’re nothing. A bastard. A weakling. Nobody wants you. Look at you! There you go, crying again. Didn’t I tell you to quit sniveling like a little girl? Didn’t I tell you what would happen, you pathetic little shit? You want to play dead again?”
Thunder and lightning chase each other across the sky, hunting one another. Bren sinks to his knees.
My heart hammers wildly, full of panic and dread.
“Tell me what you are, I want to hear you say it!” he screams, and then his upper body tenses up. “I’m nothing,” he whispers, so softly that I can only hear him because he’s so close, and because the rain has let up. His fingers dig into the ground. “She left me. Anybody would have. I’m nothing. Nobody can love me. I should be dead. Buried in the ground, in the darkness... I’m nothing...”
I wriggle through the muck on my back and crawl out from underneath the camper so that I can sit on my knees. I can’t let myself think about what’s wrong with him. If I do, I’ll freak out.
“Brendan,” I say urgently, not too loudly, not too quietly. The rain has died down to just the occasional fat raindrop, but the wind is howling through the treetops like it’s sweeping across earthen jars. Hopefully it doesn’t bring any branches down on us.
“Bren-dan!” I stretch out an arm in his direction.
He looks at me, but I’m positive that he still isn’t seeing me. He’s still caught in some kind of hallucination.
“Everything’s okay.” I fight the quaver in my voice. “I’m still here. See? I didn’t leave you.” Slowly, so as not to startle him, I lower my arm. Obviously I know that he must be talking about someone else leaving him, but I don’t know what else to say. “I’m not going to leave, okay? I promise. I’ll stay sitting right here the whole night. Until morning. And then I’ll give you the key back.”
I’m not sure whether it’s what I’m saying that calms him down or just the sound of my voice, but he stops clawing at the ground obsessively. It’s a small victory, but it gives me the courage to keep talking. “But I can’t aim very well, you know. I’ve always been bad at hitting targets from a distance—like throwing rocks at cans or whatever, you know?” For a moment, I wonder if he really does know that. “My brothers are good at it.” I’m glad he’s hearing me but not actually hearing me. “Especially Jayden.” A lump forms in my throat. This is all too much. I feel like crying. About everything. Crying for myself, crying for my brothers, crying over the lies that led to me ending up here, with him. Maybe even crying for him, or for whoever he used to be.
But there will be time to cry later, so I force myself to keep talking. “I was afraid of the dark for a long time, too. After my dad died. Darkness and dying, I sort of associated the two for a while. I slept in Ethan’s bed for the first couple of months, and I made him bring my nightlight into his room, the blue star. Even though it made it hard for him to fall asleep. Ethan always did everything for me...” My voice falters. I can’t keep talking about my brothers if I don’t want to burst into tears. Instead, I turn my face toward the sky for a moment. The wind is blowing the clouds along like a herd of black sheep. The rain has stopped completely now, though it’s still thundering in the distance.
“When I throw you the key tomorrow,” I continue, “I’m, like, definitely going to screw that up. We should come up with a strategy, like what we can do if I miss. You could go find a stick in the underbrush...” I ramble on and on about how long and how thick the stick should be. And then about how in track I can jump farther than I can throw, and about how I wanted to join the cheerleading squad, but my grades were too bad. “I’m actually a really good dancer, though.” It may even be the only thing I’m genuinely talented in, but Ethan never thought it was important. Dancing doesn’t help you at job interviews, he always said.
Later, the wind changes, and it starts to sprinkle again. I keep talking, but a clap of thunder interrupts me mid-sentence. Brendan leaps to his feet and stares at the sky with wide eyes. It’s like he can’t cope with his own fear.
“You should be dead, buried in the ground!” he suddenly roars again. “I’ll kill you!”
I press my back against the camper, which twists my left hand painfully. Hearing him yell like that, I suddenly have a horrible fear that he’s going to rip the tree right out of the ground and come at me.
But Brendan disappears behind the spruce once more, like a sick animal hunkering down to die. I hear him mumbling again. “So dark, so dark... in the ground... why did you leave? Don’t stop breathing. Don’t stop breathing. Keep your hands still. Don’t cry. Don’t stop breathing...”
I don’t move a muscle. I promised I would stay there, so I’m not going to hide under the camper, whether he comes back or not. No matter how scared I am.
After a couple of minutes—I think it’s minutes, anyway—I shift into a more comfortable position, facing more toward the side so I don’t have to bend my hand around. I hug my knees with my free arm to keep warm. Every inch of my body is soaking wet, even my underwear.
This too shall pass, Lou. Tonight will be over eventually, just like last night was. Everything passes. Someday you’ll be back home again.
I wait. I wait for the thunder to stop, for Brendan to reappear, for the night to end. It doesn’t get as cold as I feared, but eventually my whole body goes completely numb, to the point that I don’t even feel the sharp stones under my butt anymore. I just sit there, leaning against the side wall of the camper with one shoulder, collecting rainwater in one cupped hand every so often to still my thirst.
My eyes fall shut occasionally in exhaustion, but the thunder keeps jolting me awake. Probably for the best—I’m afraid to dream.
I keep mulling over what Brendan said. I should be dead. Buried in the ground, in the darkness.
What happened to him? Why would he think that? Who did this to him? Maybe when he was shouting, “I’ll kill you!” he didn’t actually mean me? Did someone say that to him? It sounded to me like he was being two people at once.
It’s weird how some things change in such a short time. Until a few hours ago, Brendan was just the horrible kidnapper psychopath that lured me into his trap. The person I was terrified of. The evil, evil guy who gave me knockout drops and stuck me in a box. Who apparently stalked me for months. Until a few hours ago, he didn’t have a past—he was my kidnapper, and that was that. Now, all of a sudden, he’s a human being with feelings. Someone who’s been hurt. Like, really hurt. At least, that’s what I’m getting out of everything that’s happened tonight.
I think about his eyes, about how they look like they’ve seen everything. Maybe they have. Maybe I don’t want to know. Knowing might frighten me more than I am already.
I rest my head on my knees, but then I see movement from the corner of my eye, so I turn my head to one side. Brendan is sitting with his back against the trunk of the tree, head tilted back like he’s stargazing. The sky is still too cloudy for that, though, even if the storm’s mostly passed by this point.
Right now, he seems perfectly calm. I’d love to toss him the key so that he could unchain us both and I could return to the warm RV. But he said to wait until morning.
I close my eyes. Raindrops patter softly against my skin. I picture myself at home, in Ash Springs. I see my brothers. They tell me they love me.
I can’t hold back the tears anymore.