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Clara walked over to the van, thinking that it was things like this – little kindnesses from total strangers – that all but restored her faith in people. Hicksberg was a weird town for the younger generation, full of religious devotees that were traumatized by a bizarre crime that took place back in the eighties. It looked lovely on the surface, but it had a dark underbelly.
Clara opened the back door of the van. She expected to see toolboxes, ladders, buckets of paint, dirty sheets – the manual laborer’s trappings. But instead she saw… nothing. The interior of the van was immaculate. Except for the exercise mat on the floor. And the coil of blue and white rope. Before she could put the flowers down she sensed a presence. A close presence. Too close. She smelled cinnamon, saw a shadow just inches away.
When Clara turned toward the shadow, the man swung the jack handle at the back of her neck. It connected with a dull thud. Her head rattled. Black circles ringed with a supernova of bright orange fire presented themselves behind her eyes. He brought the steel bar down again, not hard enough to knock her cold, just to stun her. Her legs gave way beneath her and Clara collapsed into the man’s arms.
The next thing she knew she was on her back, on the exercise mat. She heard the doors slam, heard the engine start
Then they were in motion.
***
From her new world of total darkness, layers of sound and touch peeled away slowly – the echo of moving water, the feel of cold wood against her skin – but it was the sense of smell that beckoned first. For Clara Provost, it had always been about smell. The scent of sweet basil, the redolence of diesel fumes, the aroma of a baking fruit pie in her grandmother’s kitchen. All these things held the power to transport her to another place and time in her life.
The scent invading her nostrils now was familiar too. Decaying meat. Rotting wood. Where was she?
Clara knew they had traveled, but she had no idea how far. Or how long it had been. She had dozed off, been rattled awake a few times. She felt wet and cold. She could hear wind whispering through stone. She was indoors, but that was about all she knew. As her thoughts became clearer, her terror grew. The flat tire. The man with the flowers. The searing pain at the back of her neck.
Suddenly a light came on overhead. The low-watt bulb glowed through a layer of grime. She could now see that she was in a small barn, and she could feel the cool night breeze coming in from every direction.
She had read a newspaper story about the woman found murdered a few days ago. There’d been something else this morning but she only skimmed it on her way to work.
Then there were sounds: metal on metal. Then fabric. Within moments she heard footsteps. Someone approached from behind, but Clara dared not try to turn around.
After a long silence, he spoke.
“I don’t know who you are, but you’re going to die tonight.”
“Who are you?” she coughed. “What do you want from me?”
“You don’t know me, but you might recognize my name. History calls me the Crawler.”
Clara froze still, losing all function in her limbs and nerve endings. Yes, she knew the name, but the Crawler wasn’t real. He was a myth, a phantom, a local folklore story to scare children.
“Bullshit. Let me out of here!” she screamed.
Then she coughed again violently. She tried to shout at the top of her lungs, maybe carry her voice across the distant fields to a passerby, but she found it impossible to make any sound. In her dreary haze, she looked down and saw a rope around her neck.
“Like I said, you’re going to die.”
Clara shook her head. No. She wouldn’t die here. Not in this lifeless town. Not before making it big. Not before performing on a theatre stage. There was too much to do, too much life to live.
“And here’s the fun part. I’m not going to kill you.”
The man dragged her along the ground, out of the barn and into the fields. He pulled out a gun and fired, penetrating the night.
“Stand up, sweetheart. This is the part where you kill yourself.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Ella thrashed around on the bed, trapped in her dream cage again.
She’d headed down to Virginia and got to Ben’s house with a head full of hopes and dreams. She’d sauntered up to the door, all cakes and smiles, then noticed a bloody handprint on the living room window. Ella ran inside and followed the trail of blood through the kitchen, through the hallway, into the living room where her boyfriend and his family sat, bound to chairs.
Tobias’s army then invaded the room, manifesting from the shadows. They blocked off every exit, and their machetes and firearms told her that no one in this room was getting out alive.
One of the men removed their plague doctor mask, revealing themselves to be the mastermind himself. That sickly yellow smile spread across Tobias’s face as déjà vu came surging. She dreamt this scenario a hundred times and lived it once, and it never got any easier.
Ella knew she was dreaming. Lucid dreaming. She experienced every wave of despair as though it were real, and disturbingly, her body couldn’t tell the difference. As far as her nerve endings and her cognitive system were concerned, the visions in her head were no different from reality.
