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I am paranoid. Part of the problem with having a psychotic foster-father and PTSD-induced nightmares is that you become very paranoid. I do not like walking home alone in the dark; I hold my apartment key between my fingers, jutting out from my fist, from the moment I leave work or in this case a bar until I am standing on the threshold of my apartment, just waiting to stab a mugger or maniac.
And I always lock my door.
When I reached my apartment, I noticed immediately that the keyhole was turned the wrong way, horizontal instead of vertical. Heart pounding in my head, not daring to breathe, I opened the door as silently and slowly as I could, slipping cautiously into the apartment. It was pitch black, the heavy shades having been left pulled and all the lights off. Gritting my teeth, blood running cold in fear, I flipped the nearest switch, throwing the kitchen and living area into bright light. I blinked to be sure I wasn’t hallucinating, but no, the apartment looked untouched. Everything appeared to be as I had left it that afternoon with Frost. All the books lined up neatly on the shelves, stacked haphazardly on the floor, kitchen table, and ten-dollar rummage sale coffee table, the pills and bottles strewn across the kitchen like a drug bust gone bad, my sweatshirt tossed carelessly across the back of the couch. Everything looked normal.
I quietly shut the door and checked the locks. Broken. Someone had forced their way in. But why? Nothing appeared to have been taken, not even my prescription medications and I knew those had to be worth a lot at street value.
Setting my keys down on the kitchen counter, I instead took a wicked-sharp boning knife from the drawer, raising it and gripping the black handle in my fist as I tiptoed across the living area to my bedroom and bathroom. My pulse racing, I checked my bedroom and then the bathroom, finding, again, nothing out of place. It wasn’t until I vacated the bathroom and had nearly assured myself that nothing was wrong and I would just ask the landlord to change my locks when I discovered something out of place. I frowned in confusion and lowered the knife as I approached the battered copy of Stephen King’sNight ShiftI had left open on the counter. It had been flipped toThe Boogeyman, the monster’s last line underlined in red.“So nice…”
A door slammed and I spun, raising the boning knife as I did so, and felt my stomach fall through my body as my foster-father, Jonathan Aaron, launched himself from the bedroom, lamp in hand, face a sickening purple, swinging his arm. I tried to turn and duck, but the lamp smashed over my shoulder and I stumbled, falling to my hands and knees. I didn’t feel the broken glass cutting into my palms, didn’t register the throbbing in my shoulder. All I cared about was the boning knife skittering out of my hand and stopping against Mr. Aaron’s leather shoe. He stooped to pick it up, chuckling maliciously as I stared up at him in horror. The light in the room played off his eyes eerily, dancing in his pupils as he grinned like a demonic Cheshire cat. “Hello, Elenora. I heard you paid my wife a visit this afternoon.”
He wasn’t supposed to be home until tomorrow. He wasn’t supposed to ever find out. “Mr. Aaron, please,” I begged quietly. “I just wanted her to know I was alright. I swear. It didn’t have anything to do with…”
“You tried to tell her to leave me!” he roared.
I flinched back and scrambled away from his reach, but within moments I found my back against the radiator. “No! I swear!” Panic flooded my mind, poisoning every possible plan of escape.Runkept darting through my head, but I knew I wouldn’t even get off the floor before he killed me. “Mr. Aaron, I swear to you, I did not tell her anything like that! I wouldn’t, I swear! Please!”
“LIAR!” he screamed, reaching down suddenly to grab me by the throat and slam my head back against the radiator. The sound of metal on bone echoed through my skull like a jackhammer and the room swam around me. I thought of my concussion on Saturday and began immediately to fill ill, my eyes rolling. “Oh God…” I moaned weakly, sliding to the floor. I heard a clinking noise of metal on metal and felt a cold bracelet wrap tightly around each wrist. Something soft was jammed into my mouth and I grimaced, gagging on it. I struggled to ease my eyes open, registering handcuffs on my wrists chaining me to the radiator within the kaleidoscopic image. The smell of heavy alcohol made my stomach flip and Mr. Aaron snarled down at me, “This is what you get for being a stupid bitch. You’ll never talk to my wife again!”
White-hot pain sliced through my side and I screamed in agony, but scarcely a sound made it past the gag in my mouth. Eyes wide in horror, I craned my neck to see the black handle of the boning knife protruding from my already blood-coated side. Without another word, Mr. Aaron withdrew the knife and stood. Silently, stumbling beneath the weight of too much alcohol, he left the apartment, closing the door calmly behind him and leaving me to bleed.
EIGHT
White mist curled around him, sending gooseflesh crawling across his arms. “Hello?” Frost called. “Where am I?”
“Nowhere,” a grim, heavy voice answered, the voice of a very old man with a young man’s vocal cords. “Somewhere that does not exist.”
Frost frowned and stepped forward, peering through the fog in the direction the voice issued from. “I don’t understand. Who are you?”
A dark silhouette gradually faded into sight, though never fully materialized. “I think you already know who I am, don’t you, Frost?”
He hesitated, tension seeping into his muscles, tightening his brow and contracting his hands into fists. “Why me? I would’ve thought you only spoke to Poe.”
“Because this message isn’t for her. It is for you,” the voice answered wearily, an impossible misery reverberating in its timbre. “Poe needs you. She’s dying.”
Frost’s heart stopped. “What?” he breathed, the word coming out scarcely audible.
“You don’t have much time. Hurry.” The silhouette seemed to dissolve and the white mist quickly fell away into complete and utter blackness. From the thick, tangible darkness, he could hear her screaming, her pain so loud that his eardrums bled. “FROST!”
Frost sat bolt upright in bed, bathed in ice-cold sweat. In an instant, he scrambled out of bed and grabbed the nearest pair of jeans and a T-shirt, yanking them on, shoving on the nearest pair of shoes without socks, and snatching his car keys from the counter on his way out the door.
----
The lock was broken. That was the first thing he noticed. The next was the silence. When he opened the door, he fell against the frame with the weight of the scene before him. Directly across the room, Poe lay sprawled in a widening pool of blood. She was handcuffed to the radiator, unconscious. In a moment, he had recovered from the shock and crossed the room at a run, snatching her sweatshirt from the couch to try to stop the bleeding with and falling to his knees in the blood at her side. With one hand struggling to hold her lifeblood in her body, he pulled the gag from her mouth and tossed it aside in disgust. Two thin lines of blood from where she had been cut by shards of glass stood out monstrously against her white cheek and, eyes blurring with unshed tears, teeth gritted with fury and pain, he brushed the blood away with his thumb.
Frost struggled with the handcuffs, finally finding a tiny lever on each that released her wrists. Gently, he pulled her upright so she leaned limply against his shoulder, then, hands shaking, he took the hem of her shirt between his fingers and carefully pushed it up above the wound. It was much deeper than he had first guessed, but appeared to be a fairly clean stab. If nothing major had been cut, she might survive.
As he pushed her shirt back down, he hesitated. At first, he’d been shocked by the proof of how thin she was. Her tiny body seemed as though it could snap in his hands. But what made him stop and stare was a narrow, raised white line drawn down the center of her stomach. It ran from her waistband up, disappearing under her shirt, and was perfectly straight, cut directly across her belly-button. A scar…but something that clean would take someone very skilled and very much in control with an incredibly sharp tool to be done. And yet, he had grown up with a surgeon for a father. No surgeon would have cut across her belly-button like that.
He filed away the discovery, shuddering in a revulsion he couldn’t quite explain, and pulled her shirt down to the edge of her jeans. Then, pressing the sweatshirt tightly to her side, he drew his cellphone from his pocket and dialed. “This is Detective Caleb Frost. I need a bus right now. I have a stabbing victim that’s going to bleed out in less than five minutes.”
----
I woke up to LED lights once again, for the second time in three days. I gritted my teeth against the pounding in my head and the sickening twisting of the room and asked weakly, “Is anyone there?”
In answer, a strong, warm hand wrapped around mine, sending heat and comfort through my veins. I opened my eyes wearily and found my gaze immediately drawn to two pools of molten blue ice. “Frost?”
He squeezed my hand gently in acquiesce, then said quietly, “Your buddy Edgar told me you needed me. I’m glad I was crazy enough to listen. He saved your life.”
