Page 69 of The Whisper Place
Ted was real. He was here. He wasn’t dead or buried or gone.
“How?” I whimpered.
The smile stretched his scars wide, pulling his skin back from his skull.
“I’ll show you.”
The woods were dark even in the middle of the day. The full summer canopy let only stray fragments of sunbeams inside, slicing across us as Theo hauled me over the uneven terrain. I tried screaming, but they’d gagged me and tied my hands behind myback. The muffled garbled sounds were trapped in my throat, choking around sobs and squeezed by panic. I thought I heard a car once, and tried to yell before Theo shoved my head against a tree and told me to shut up.
Ted walked behind us, reminiscing about my mother and wondering, in a tone that twisted my gut into nauseating knots, how she was doing.
Once, after Theo dragged me over a fallen tree, I saw Ted struggling to get over it. There was something wrong with his leg, held straight and stiff, and in a lucid burst I remembered the stab wound. Mom had swiped him in the torso and jabbed him in the knee. It hadn’t mattered at the time. Dead men didn’t need to walk. But Ted was walking, struggling through the woods behind us in a furious, uneven gait.
Theo shoved me forward. I knew where we were going long before we got there. I’d only been there once, but I’d dreamt about the place almost every night since. The impossibly hard dirt, shovels cracking against rock after rock, the form wrapped in a sheet on the sled. I’d thought the body moved at one point while we were digging, hadn’t I? And it must have. Ted was still alive when we’d done all that, still breathing as we dug his shitty shallow grave.
“Stop here.”
Theo obeyed, bringing me to an abrupt halt and shoving me to my knees at the base of a gnarled, bumpy tree.
I was confused. I didn’t recognize the spot, didn’t see the brush I’d remembered covering the grave with or any disturbed ground. But it had been dark, and that was months ago. The woods had changed since then, always growing, always shifting, always spitting back the bodies you tried to hide inside them. Maybe thiswas the spot and my nightmares had twisted it into something else in my head.
Ted walked forward, one sure step, one hesitant one, until he towered over me.
“You remember that night, don’t you, Kate?”
I stared into the trees, willing any movement between the shadowy trunks. I would take a human, a bear, a wolf, anything. Before a savior could appear, Ted grabbed my chin and jerked my head up.
“You probably remember it a little differently than I do. I’m sure you and Valerie drove back to that pathetic little duplex thinking you got your revenge on me. That the two of you had somehow beaten me. But in your stupidity, you hadn’t even bothered to check my pulse.”
We had, though, hadn’t we? Mom said he was dead. She’d felt his neck. I tried to remember, but everything was spinning. I couldn’t focus, couldn’t think.
“Then you make the mistake of burying me facedown with a pocket of air in the sheet you wrapped me in. I woke up feeling branches scraping over my back. I couldn’t move, until I heard the two of you hauling shovels away, and I realized what you’d done. That’s when I found the strength to pull myself out of my own grave, and crawl my way back through the woods.”
“Theo came as soon as I called and nursed me back to health. He wanted to go after you right away, to make you pay for what you’d done, but I knew better. We waited and we watched.
“At first you disappeared and Theo thought we might have lost you entirely. I knew you couldn’t stray far from Valerie, though. The two of you are thick as thieves. And I was right.”
His hand tightened on my chin until I thought my jaw would snap. I whimpered around the wet cloth of the gag. I hated the sound, and I had no control over it.
“It didn’t matter where you went, Kate, or what you called yourself. I would’ve found you. Remember what I told you about Jonah? About how he tried to flee? You could’ve gone to the ends of the Earth and I still would’ve hunted you down and swallowed you whole.”
He was in my face now, breathing on me, his eyes as black as the tree branches behind him.
“So I’m going to have to show you—again—what it takes to do things right. You think you can bury someone and walk away?” The hand on my chin moved to my throat, and he started to squeeze. His disfigured face filled my vision, massive and unhinged, and his voice dropped to a guttural whisper. “This is how it’s done.”
The hand at my throat pushed me backward, choking off most of my air until I fell next to the gnarled tree.
On the other side of the trunk, someone had dug a gaping hole in the earth. Inside was an open, empty box the size of a coffin.
Max
The house looked different in the day. The brick and precise black trim seemed ghoulish in the overgrown lawn, like the lost toy of a giant, morbid child. The windows were all dark, their shutters drawn. I rang the bell and knocked, waited a few seconds, and did it again. No answer. There was no movement or noise from inside.
Valerie, who’d gotten here less than five minutes after us, stood at my shoulder. Her jaw was set in determination. We’d stayed on a call with her most of the way here while she explained the torture of the time-out room. Valerie’s description of the room—although secondhand through what Kate had told her—matched exactly what Jonah had dreamed.
The man in the dream said we’d been asking questions. And we had. We’d talked to the only other person who had a key to this house: Theo Kramer, Ted’s son.
The pieces all slotted into horrible place.
