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A nonchalant cat sat in the corner, staring at her as though he could do no wrong.
“For God’s sake, Charlie,” Abigail said. Charlie, the treacherous little thing, must have been sauntering across the kitchen units again.
She sighed, relieved, but her heart leaped back into her chest as something tapped against her front door.
Not a scratch, not a knock. Something in between.
Charlie cowered at the sound, ready to claw, as though a mouse might be on the other side.
Abigail crept closer to the door and squinted through the spyhole.
Not a mouse.
She wasn’t used to this.
Wasn’t used to seeing someone waiting outside her apartment in the dead of night.
Was it him? The guy from yesterday? She couldn’t make out his face because a cap concealed his features, but given he’d come with a gift, it couldn’t be anyone else.
Abigail took a deep breath. Another new venture, but she couldn’t hide her excitement. Her hands jittered in anticipation as she weighed whether or not this was the right thing to do, but it took her just a few seconds to make her decision.
She chose to live a little. Take a risk or two.
She opened the front door. Charlie ran outside, and Abigail’s mystery man immediately invited himself in.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Ella’s arms were numb and her legs felt like dead weights, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t penetrate the fleshy tissue of her dream. She knew she was in a motel room in Iowa, probably asleep at her nightstand-turned-desk, but her imagined self was lost in rural Virginia.
She was five years old again, sitting on the edge of her pink-and-white bed as her nightlight hummed, jingled, and danced neon circles across the walls. She never woke up before eight a.m. unless she couldn’t contain her excitement for the next day’s activities, but today was a school day, and something had disturbed her while the owls were still hooting. She slipped off her bed, tiptoed across her bedroom floor towards the landing. A beam of orange light had lodged itself in the door crack. Her dad never forgot to turn the landing light off, especially in the wake of his lectures about saving electricity.
Five-year-old Ella made her way from the landing to her father’s bedroom, drawn by an ominous, unexplainable sense that something was wrong. She knew now, as an adult, that it was the disruption in routine that placed her on high alert. But as a child, all she could gauge was that something was different tonight. It put her into panic mode, and the only thing that could make things better was her father’s soothing presence.
He’d left the door open for her, as he always did, just in case she got scared. As she stepped over the threshold into her dad’s bedroom, she heard thuds on the creaking floorboards, sensed that she was sharing the room with an animated soul. Was her dad awake already? Maybe it was morning and she hadn’t realized it?
Ella called out for her dad, saw him standing beside his bed like a giant doll. But as her vision adjusted to the darkness, young Ella saw her father in his usual position: flat on his back, one arm dangling from beneath the bed sheets.
There were two people here.
Ella didn’t know what was going on. All she knew was that something was wrong.
She’d been taught to kick strangers, bite their hands, scream out for help. She rushed at the man, utilizing an instinct she’d harbor for the rest of her life. But her frail stature did nothing to subdue the stranger in her dad’s room, and instead he simply walked past her without a care.
This vision was nothing new. Ella had replayed it a thousand times over the past twenty-five years, but this time she saw things she hadn’t seen before. This mystery aggressor had a face, identifiable clothing, leather gloves, gleaming black boots, and a distinctive walking gait. She felt like she’d finally unlocked the true vision, a memory that had dwelled and rotted in the inaccessible depths of her brain. Now it was crystal clear, like a remastered version of grainy old camera footage. All the trappings were present: the sights, sounds, and feelings that she’d experienced the night that changed her life.
But there was one more thing.
Something that she’d never envisioned before.
As her dad’s killer reached the door, he turned around and spoke to her.
‘I’ll come back for you one day.’
The dreamworld vanished. Reality came calling.
“Dark!” a voice shouted.
Ella somehow shot back to life, slumping back in her chair like a sack of bricks. She was at her nightstand, a blank laptop screen staring back at her. She jumped in fright at the two people standing at the door.
