And Ruin Followed Behind Her

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

I read police report after police report for the rest of the night, sitting on the floor of Mama’s living room. There was one thing I knew for sure by the end of it: police reports were boring as hell. Seriously, I couldn’t believe there were people who wanted to be in the police force since it meant writing—and reading—such boring bull all day.

By the time I reached the end of the pile, I had read three dozen reports. The abductions had happened all over Stubbins, a city of just a few thousand people. There seemed to be no consistency, rhyme, or reason to the abductions except that they were concentrated heavily in the last six months. I figured there shouldn’t be more than a couple disappearances a year, and there were several dozen in just a couple months.

The only consistent things that I saw in them were that all the abductions happened at night, and they all involved girls between eight and ten, just like Kimberly. Other than that, there were little, white girls, black girls, Asians, and Hispanic girls all the same. They came from rich homes and poor homes, broken homes and intact ones.

Around three am, the front door creaked open. I stood up from my place on the living room floor and readied myself for a fight, but it was just Adelaide.

“You gave me a fright, girl,” I yelled at her as she crept inside. “What happened? I thought you would be at home now that—”

And that’s when she turned to me and revealed her black eye, so swollen that she could barely see out of it. She tried to give me a smile, even if it was a fake one, but winced at the effort.

“I’ll kill him!”

“No!” Adelaide grabbed me as I rushed for the door. “That’s what he wants. That’s what he wants!”

I spun around and gripped her by the shoulders. “You can’t let him do this to you. I won’t let him do this to you.”

“It’s not your choice! If you fight him, he’ll take it out on me. Every time somebody stands up for me, it just gets worse.”

“Then why don’t you leave him?”

“He’s a good father.” Adelaide looked at the ground, shrugging my hands off her. “He’s a terrible husband, but he’s a good father, and a girl needs her father.”

She was lying to herself, of course, but I didn’t know the situation enough to comment on it. Instead, the best thing I could do was just be a friendly ear. “Sit down.” I pulled an ice tray out of the freezer and poured some ice onto the towel that had been hanging from the stove.

“You don’t have to do that,” Adelaide said. “I’ll be fine.”

“I know,” I said, handing her the towel. “After all, it’s not the first time, is it?”

She sighed. “It won’t be the last, either.”

“It’s not my place, but—”

“You’re right. It’s not your place.” She grimaced as she placed the ice-filled towel over her eye. “What did you find out?”

“I went through over thirty reports of girls that have been abducted in the past six months. Who knows how many more there are, but even thirty, in a town like Stubbins, is really high, right? Like, really high?”

“Is it? It’s been a way of life for us for a while, but yes. I think it’s high. ‘Course I think one is too high.”

“It can’t just be coincidence. There must be a person, or a string of people, orchestrating these abductions. Is there anyone—anywhere—that’s particularly freaky in Stubbins?”

Adelaide tensed up. “Since I was a kid there was a weird house, the Colburn house. Guy murdered his whole family back in the fifties and then turned the gun on himself. It’s been abandoned for years cuz nobody will buy it, so it’s even creepier now. People still say they hear screaming in there from time to time, but police say it’s just the wind.”

“How well do you know it?”

“It’s haunted my nightmares since I was a child.”

“That’s as good a place as any to start. Close your eyes. Think about it. Really concentrate. You need to remember every single brick. Do you have it?”

Adelaide winced again as she closed her eyes for a moment. “Yes, I have it.”

I placed my hand on Adelaide’s forehead. “Good. Good. I see it. All right, stay here. Get some rest. Lock the door. Don’t let anybody in. Do you understand me?”

“I understand,” Adelaide replied without opening her eyes.

I took a deep breath and then, in a second, I was gone, leaving Adelaide to deal with the broken pieces of her life by herself, just as she must have done a hundred nights before.

*

IT WAS POURING DOWN rain where I reappeared, in an alley across the street from an old, abandoned mansion that looked like it was owned by a Scooby-Doo villain. When I took a step forward, the toe of my boots dragged across a doughy lump on the ground. I bent down to investigate and found a teddy bear, soaking wet and worn to pieces. It looked like the kind a little girl would lovingly wear to the felt.

If nothing else, I was on the right track. I didn’t know if I wanted to be, though. Frankly, I hadn’t fought anybody scarier than Adelaide’s drunken blob of a husband since the portal to Hell opened. I wasn’t ready to handle a kidnapper, but I pressed forward anyway. Lightning cracked across the sky and a booming rumble of thunder followed it.

The house was guarded by an old, rusted gate, which opened to the lightest touch. I pushed through it on my way toward the house. The whole thing was falling apart. The bowed roof over the front porch looked like it would collapse at any moment, with any one of the drops of rain that fell on it. Holes rotted through the wooden skeleton and rain swamped the house’s interior.

Drenched and cold, I knocked on the front door and it swung open for me. “Hello?” I called down the echoing hallway. The house responded with a loud, creaking sound and the whole frame shifted, almost moaning for me to run away.

But I didn’t run away. I stepped another foot forward on the loose floorboards and made my way into the house. If I were in a scary movie, the door would have shut and locked behind me, but instead it just blew in the wind, rapping against the doorjamb.

An eerie emptiness filled every room. There were no chairs, or any other furniture. Somebody had taken great pains to write words in a foreign language on every wall of the house in what I hoped was paint but could have easily been dried blood. I recognized three of the words from my time fighting the Cult of the Bloody Dagger: Dealus Mylarus Zilarus.

The rest were foreign to me, but I remember the cult kept saying those words to open the portal to Hell. Was it happening again? Was somebody searching for the blood of a pixie to open another portal to Hell?

It stood to reason that more people than just the Cult of the Bloody Dagger wanted to use the beasts of Hell to do their bidding, and it appeared I had just stumbled onto another one of these horrific cults.

“Hello!” I shouted again. I knew I was acting like I was the dumb person in a horror movie, but if Kimberly was here, she needed to know I was coming for her.

The only sound that responded, though, aside from the house settling, came from underneath me. Faint at first, it grew louder when I knelt on the ground to listen. A scratching sound was coming from the basement.

A bolt of lightning flashed through the rotted holes in the ceiling and illuminated the door in front of me. It was a stupid idea to enter the basement, every horror movie ever made told me that, but I couldn’t stop now. A little girl’s life was on the line—a little pixie girl’s life at that— and I wasn’t going to let her become a victim. Not if I could save her.

I pulled open the cellar door and peered down. Nothing to see but the dark. I closed my eyes and pressed out from my shoulder blades until my wings sprouted from me. They glowed blue and shimmered, lighting my way. The steps were old and creaky, so I chose to float down them instead. The scratching intensified as I made my way to the bottom of the staircase, and I knew I was headed in the right direction.

“Maybe it’s just a bunch of rats,” I said to myself. “A bunch of disgusting rats, like a rat king.”

Of course, I didn’t believe that at all. Rats kings were just the stuff of urban legend. Of course, but so was Hell, and I had seen it with my own eyes, so I could never rule out any possibility. I would have loved it to be a rat king. That wouldn’t have been scary at all, not compared to the other horrors that lived in the dark.

I turned the corner once I reached the bottom of the stairs. The unfinished basement reeked of mold. The wooden pillars holding up the house were bowed and nearly gnawed through, and dozens of boxes littered the floor, sagging and waterlogged. At the far end of the basement sat a large, iron door. That’s where the scratching was coming from.

“Kimberly?”

But it couldn’t be just Kimberly. There was too much noise for just one small set of hands. It sounded like dozens and dozens of hands. My fear turned to excitement when I realized it must have been all the girls—at least those that were alive.

“Watch out girls! I’m coming!” A metal bar crossed the door, locking it from the outside. I pushed the crossbar into the air and threw it across the room, then dropped my feet onto the ground for better leverage. I pulled the door open and peered inside, expecting to see a group of little girls...and I got them. Except they didn’t look like little girls in anything but stature.

Their eyes were bloodshot—no, not bloodshot—their eyeballs were red. When they smiled at me, in unison, their mouths curved out behind the reaches of their cheeks. They shrieked at me all at once, and the sound was so painful I grew dizzy, fighting not to pass out.

The girls charged at me in the enclosed basement, screaming their horrid sound and unhinging their jaws to reveal row after row of pointed teeth. I was too scared to raise my hands to defend myself. All I could do was close my eyes and think of the safest place I could imagine, and then I vanished.