Page 71 of The Whisper Place
I moved the light around us, checking the floor, walls, and back inside the crawl space. “I don’t see much blood anywhere else. A few smears inside the room, but nothing that looks like a violent crime scene.”
“That depends on your definition of violent crime.”
Feeling sick, I offered a hand to help Valerie up. “You’re right. Let’s get out of here and—” Jonah wasn’t next to the stairs anymore. I didn’t see him anywhere.
“Jonah?” I flashed the light around the empty basement.
He was gone.
Jonah
This house was a scream choked off, a hand squeezing a throat, and all the desperate energy swelling behind it. Everything I touched, everything I looked at was caught in the same vise and the longer I was in here, the more it felt like a hand on my throat, too. I broke into a cold sweat long before we reached the basement, barely staying on my feet as Max and Valerie disappeared down the stairs. The darkness ate them in a cold, greedy gulp.
I needed Eve. I needed Xanax or maybe a two-by-four to the head. I needed anything that would take me out of this reality and I needed it now. Swallowing a pill dry, I fought to stay upright as the world tilted and spun. I didn’t want to sit, or hold on to a wall. I trusted contact with this basement like I trusted serial killers.
Max said something. It sounded like it came from the end of a long tunnel. The Xanax stuck in my throat, closed off by the fist of this house. I doubled over, gagged, and waited to pass out. Voices receded. Somewhere, someone was hyperventilating like wind whipping through trees. It sounded like it was coming from upstairs. I staggered out of the basement and through the mainfloor. No one. The rooms were empty of everything but the grasping energy, ripping at me like fingers. Another staircase. Another hallway, pitching like a ship in a storm. All the doors were closed except one.
“Jonah!”
I tried to answer.
The open door led into an office. Dark wood, heavy bookcases. An empty chair, turned to the side, like someone had just left. Framed pictures hung on the wall. Wedding photos, with Ted and both his wives. A family picture of Ted, Valerie, Theo, and a young, recalcitrant Kate sitting at the edge of the shot. Ted and Theo, both in suits.
I moved to the desk, off-balance, praying I wouldn’t have to catch myself and touch something in this room. The work surface was littered with laptops, maps, pages torn from books, and dozens of Polaroids. The photos were all of Valerie and Kate taken at a distance. Valerie in front of her duplex. Kate at the bakery. Valerie’s back, standing at the edge of a river. Kate, running alone. One paper was a diagram of the interior of a house, each room filled with doodled stick-figure bodies. A stack of journals sat underneath the diagram. I opened the cover of the top one with my phone. It was filled with cramped, practically illegible handwriting.
A hand touched my shoulder. I whirled, crashing into the desk and the cascade of foul energy emanating off of it.
“It’s us.”
Max and Valerie stood in the doorway. Max had a gun. Valerie must have picked up a kitchen knife on the way upstairs. She brandished the cleaver, looking sick as she absorbed the shrine.
“You okay?”
The panic attack was still unspooling inside me. Every breath felt like a fight. “Sure.”
“I don’t think anyone’s here. The crawl space was unlocked, no damage on the door.”
“Lot of damage on the basement door, though.”
It didn’t make sense. I could feel Max wrestling with it, too. Valerie, who’d been surveying the desk with mounting horror, picked up one of the ripped-out book pages and read a highlighted line. “‘They shall not feed, nor shall they drink.’” She looked up. “It’s from the book of Jonah.”
“Biblical torture playbook?”
“She was given food and water,” Max argued. “There was both inside the crawl space.”
“Maybe this refers to somewhere else—a secondary location,” I guessed.
Valerie kept reading, her voice flat. “And Jonah said: ‘Take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.’”
I leaned on Max, who threw an arm around my shoulders. “If it’s in this house, I agree. Either kill me or let’s go.”
We went back downstairs and out through the garage door. The cars in the garage bothered Max. If Kate—or anyone—had gotten out of here, it didn’t seem like they’d driven.
“On foot?”
Max looked at both of us, eyes widening, and detoured sharply to the backyard. The long, unkempt grass showcased a well-worn trail leading from the back of the house into the woods. As soon as I saw it, I knew.
Kate was still here.
