Perfect Nightmare

Chapter Forty-three

Rick Mancuso sank the spike of the Open House sign into the soggy earth at the corner, two blocks from the Fine house, tamped the mud with his foot, then stepped back. The sign tilted a couple of inches but held; good enough for the few hours he needed. If it fell over by four, so be it. Satisfied, he checked his watch.

Ten of two, which meant he was running late. Normally, he liked to be at his open houses at least half an hour early, just to make certain everything was in order. And Ellen Fine had a little girl; kids in a house — even just one — usually meant the house wouldn’t look as good as it should in order to sell quickly, and since Rick liked quick sales, he didn’t mind spending half an hour putting a place straight.

Not today — there wouldn’t be time, so he’d have to trust that Ellen Fine had done her job. Giving the sign one last desultory adjustment, an adjustment that failed almost as soon as he made it, he slammed the trunk of his car, then drove the two blocks to Ellen Fine’s house and parked across the street. Even though it was small — real small — the house still had good curb appeal, looking more like the “cottage” he’d described in the ad than he actually remembered. The grass was nice and green and looked freshly mowed, and the trees that lined both sides of the street were almost fully leafed out. There were even a few daffodils still blooming along the walk. Nice — very nice: the rain last night had made everything fresh.

As he crossed the street, he saw Emily looking out the upstairs window. He waved at her, but she had already disappeared, leaving only a wisp of swaying lace to show that she’d been there at all. Rick punched another Open House sign into the lawn, picked up his briefcase and the folder of flyers, and headed up the walk.

Usually clients were so anxious about open houses that by the time he was on their porches they were at the open door, waiting. But not this time. He rang the bell.

Nothing.

He pressed the button again, then once more.

Nothing.

No sound from inside at all; no music, no “I’ll be right there” call from the bedroom or kitchen.

Just silence.

But Emily was there — he’d seen her. Feeling faintly uneasy, Rick knocked hard on the door. “Ellen?” he called out. “Ellen, it’s Rick. For the open house?”

And still he heard nothing at all from inside the house.

He tried the door.

Locked. And today was the day she’d promised to have a key for him so he could put a lockbox on. What was going on? Ellen Fine hadn’t struck him as the kind of mother who would leave her child alone in the house. Besides, her car was in the driveway.

The basement! That was it; she was down in the basement doing laundry — the last thing he needed at an open house — and she just hadn’t heard the bell or his knock or heard him when he called out.

He walked around the side of the house and tried the kitchen door.

Unlocked and unlatched.

Standing ajar, in fact.

Rick pushed on the door and it swung wide. He stuck his head in. “Hello?” No answer. “Ellen? It’s Rick Mancuso.”

Now the silence from inside felt eerie. And then the stories he’d heard, about some agent or another — always nameless, of course — being shot by a homeowner who had forgotten about a showing appointment, came to mind.

Gazing around the kitchen made him even more uneasy. There were dirty dishes in the sink and uncooked potatoes in a cold frying pan on the stove. A carton of eggs sat on the countertop along with a jar of peanut butter and another of grape jelly.

He didn’t think Ellen Fine would have left this kind of mess in the kitchen, even if no open house had been planned.

His sense that something was wrong escalating, Rick stepped into the kitchen, put his briefcase down on the kitchen table, and walked into the living room. “Emily?”

For a moment there was no response, but as he was about to call out again, a small voice drifted down from the top of the stairs. “You better go away.”

“Emily? It’s me, Rick. You remember me — I’m supposed to be here today to meet your mommy. Is she here?”

He saw pajama legs at the top of the stairs. Then, one careful step at a time, Emily appeared, her hair touseled and her thumb firmly planted in her mouth. Halfway down the stairs, the little girl sat down, staring at him.

“Hey, Emily — remember me?”

She nodded. Her face was blotchy, and he could tell she’d been crying. “Is your mommy here?”

She shook her head.

“Where is she?”

She shrugged, then sucked in a long, ragged breath. “I–I don’t know,” she finally stammered, and as she spoke, her voice broke and her eyes filled with tears.

Jesus Christ, Rick thought. What did she do, just take off last night? But Ellen Fine hadn’t seemed like that kind of woman.

Not at all.

“I’m going to come up and look, okay?” Emily nodded, and now the tears overflowed and began to run down her cheeks. “Hey, hey, hey,” Rick said, flustered. “Don’t cry, sweetie.” He moved up the stairs and sat on the step next to her, and instantly Emily scooted close to him, climbed into his lap and put her arms around his neck. Now, with her face buried in his shoulder, her sobs began in earnest.

Rick froze, with no clue what to do — never before in his life had a five-year-old girl clung to him, let alone one sobbing as if her heart was breaking. “C'mon, honey,” he finally said, standing up and supporting her with one arm. “Let’s find your mommy.”

But Ellen was not upstairs, nor was she in the basement, nor was there any sign of her anywhere else in the house. Back in the living room, Rick lowered Emily onto the couch, fished in his pocket for his handkerchief, and helped her blow her nose and wipe her eyes. Then he squatted down in front of her so their heads were on the same level. “When was the last time you saw your mommy?”

Emily’s little face screwed up as she concentrated. “Bedtime,” she finally said. “Mommy was scared, so I slept with her.”

Whatever this was, it wasn’t good. “What was she scared of?” he asked.

“She was scared someone was in the house.”

Ellen Fine had been afraid someone was in the house, and now she was no longer in the house herself. “I’m going to call the police,” Rick said, almost more to himself than to Emily.

The little girl instantly brightened. “They’re nice!”

Rick Mancuso cocked his head. “You know the police?”

Emily nodded again. “They came last night.”

“Because your mommy was scared?”

Emily nodded a third time.

Rick pulled out his cell phone and dialed 911, and in less than two minutes had explained exactly what he’d found when he arrived at Ellen Fine’s house ten minutes earlier.

“An officer will be there in less than ten minutes,” the impersonal voice of the 911 operator said when he was finished.

With Emily clinging to him like a burr in a puppy’s fur, Mancuso pulled the Open House sign from the lawn, then went back inside. He didn’t particularly want to babysit — didn’t know how — but he sure wasn’t going anywhere, at least not until the cops arrived. “Why don’t you show me your room?” he finally asked. It wasn’t going to kill him to play with dolls for a half hour or so, was it?

Besides, there was still the hope — faint though it might be — that Ellen Fine could still show up, clean the kitchen and make the beds, and between the two of them they could save the open house.

Yeah, right.

A nightmare. It had to have been a nightmare. But if it was only a nightmare, why did she feel burning scrapes on her legs as if she’d been dragged over the cracked and pitted asphalt of the alley behind her house?

Why was her nightie still damp from the rain?

And why was the panic that had always before been at its worst at the moment she woke up from a bad dream not now falling away? Why, instead, were its tentacles closing tighter around her with every second that passed as her mind slowly cleared?

Because it hadn’t been a nightmare at all.

As the last vestiges of unconsciousness lifted, Ellen felt not only the stinging abrasions on her legs, but the stinging in her feet, the aching in her joints, and the agony of a headache whose throbbing threatened to overwhelm her with every beat of her heart.

Her neck hurt.

Her wrists hurt.

Her shoulders hurt.

She tried to move, hoping to ease some of the aching.

Then, from somewhere behind her, a voice whispered: “She’s waking up… Mommy’s waking up!”

Ellen’s eyes snapped open to behold a nightmare even more horrifying than the one from which shed thought she just awakened. A strangled scream rose in her throat, but when she opened her mouth to vent it, nothing happened; instead of filling the chamber around her with her howl of anguish, she felt like her mouth — her cheeks, her eardrums, her very head — was about to explode. As the scream crashed against her taped lips, her lungs tried to suck in new air to replace the mass they’d just expelled, and a new panic seized her.

She couldn’t breathe!

She couldn’t breathe, and she was suffocating!

Yet another scream rose in her, but she found one tiny corner of her mind that had not yet given in to the overwhelming panic.

Nose! that tiny fragment of her mind commanded her. Breathe through your nose!

She caught the second scream as it was rising in her throat, and forced it back down into the pit of terror from which it had arisen. Focusing her mind — blanking out the pain, the burning, the terror, even the images she’d seen when she opened her eyes — she focused her mind on a single thing.

Breathing.

Breathing through her nose.

And breathing slowly, so the rhythm could do its part in staving off the mind-numbing panic.

Almost miraculously, air began to fill her lungs.

In… out… in… out…

As the oxygen began to flow through her, Ellen’s mind began to clear and the panic to subside.

Then the memories finally came flooding back.

Real.

It was all real. Waking up… hearing a noise… going downstairs… checking everything, even the basement. And thinking it was all right, thinking she’d been wrong, that there was nothing in the house at all. And then, just as she was going back upstairs—

Even now she could still taste some kind of drug in her mouth, smell it in her nostrils. But there hadn’t been quite enough to keep her completely unconscious. So it had all seemed like a dream. A dream from which she would awaken. But now she was awake, and the reality was even worse than the dream that hadn’t been a dream at all.

She struggled against the bonds that held her hands behind her, struggled against the tape that bound her ankles to the legs of a chair — a chair far too small to hold her body.

Across from her sat two girls. One of them she recognized immediately — the girl from Camden Green who had vanished after—

An open house! An open house just like the one that had been held at her home.

The other girl was younger, emaciated, with a grayish complexion that told Ellen almost as much as the blank look in her eyes. It took Ellen a second or two to realize that the bright smiles on both the girls’ faces were nothing more than lipstick clumsily drawn onto the duct tape that covered their mouths, and each of them was bound to an undersized chair, just as she was.

All three of them were sitting at what looked like a child’s tea table, a table that was already set for tea, though the crockery was stained and cracked, and the silver dented and badly tarnished.

A flicker of movement caught her eye, and Ellen twisted her neck to see another person, a figure clad all in black except for a white surgical mask upon which was drawn an even bigger, redder, and more grotesque smile than those the two girls wore.

Then, as she turned back to the two girls, she remembered her own daughter.

Emily! Oh dear God, Emily!

Emily… Emily… Emily, Ellen chanted in her head. She had to know if Emily was all right. Had this — this monster taken Emily, too? But maybe not — maybe he’d left her at home in bed. Maybe it was just her he wanted, and not her daughter.

That was it — that had to be it. It wasn’t Emily who had interested him in the picture. It had been her.

She had to believe that. She needed to believe that.

Once again her panic subsided and her mind accepted that none of it was a nightmare, that it was all real, and that if anyone was going to do anything to help not only her, but the two girls as well, it would have to be her.

Which meant she had to assess the situation. Telling herself once again — forcing herself to believe — that Emily was at least still safe, she turned her attention first to the blonde. What was her name? Lindsay! That was it. Lindsay Mason, or Merrill, or something that began with an M. The girl looked reasonably healthy, and when their eyes met, Ellen saw a burning anger in them. And when Lindsay’s eyes fixed on the figure in black, Ellen could feel her fury as clearly as if the girl had spoken out loud. I’ll kill him, she seemed to be saying. If I ever get loose, I’ll kill him.

But the other girl — the dark-haired, emaciated child with the dead eyes and gray complexion — seemed not even conscious of her surroundings anymore, let alone of what was happening to her.

Ellen’s gaze returned to Lindsay again, who looked back, her eyes pleading now, and once again Ellen could read their message clearly: Help us… please help us.

Ellen tried to smile, but the tape on her mouth only tore at the skin of her lips as she moved them. Nor could she speak. Then, out of her desperation to communicate with the girl, an idea came.

And Ellen winked.

For a moment she wasn’t sure Lindsay had even seen it, but then the girl’s eyes flicked toward the black-clad figure for a second, then back to her.

And she winked back.

Ellen felt a surge of hope. She and Lindsay had communicated, and they’d done it in front of their captor, right under his nose. If they could do that, they could find a way to escape. They just had to work together. Her mind began racing. The man in black had referred to her as “Mommy.” So if she was the mother, then he must think of the girls as her children, so it was going to be up to her to take care of them, just as she had to trust that someone else’s mother would take care of Emily until she herself got back. And she would get back. Somehow she’d stay awake and alert, and in spite of everything — in spite of the horrible taste in her mouth, the splitting headache from whatever drug he’d given her, the horrible pain in every part of her body — she’d find a way to prevail.

Maniac though he might be — and obviously was — in the end, he was still a man. And Ellen knew all about men. Reaching deep into the depths of memory, she retrieved the scraps of anger she’d felt toward Danny Golden, every wrong he’d done her. She examined each of them like jewels, then piled them together as if they were a hidden treasure that would renew not only her fury, but her strength as well.

Then she focused that fury and strength upon their captor.

He was standing next to the table now, holding a steaming kettle. As he started slopping scalding water into the tiny cups, Ellen assessed the possibilities.

If he expected them to drink, he would have to unbind at least one of their hands.

And if he did, and the water were still hot enough—

The vision of him screaming in agony as the boiling water struck his eyes, then recoiling from her to stumble blindly around the tiny chamber in which they were imprisoned, seemed to double her strength, and hope surged through Ellen once more. But then, as he poured water into Lindsay’s cup, he looked over at her and stopped.

He set the kettle on the table.

“What’s this?” he asked.

Ellen could almost feel his eyes fixing on the small tattoo of a bird that perched high on her thigh, a souvenir of that first weekend with Danny, when she’d managed to get tattooed and knocked up all in the same day.

“Who did that?” the black-clad man demanded. “Who did it?” He looked at the two girls, and Lindsay shook her head almost violently.

The other girl made no move at all.

“It shouldn’t be there,” she heard the man saying. “Mommy never had anything like that!” His eyes once again flicked between the two girls who sat bound to the chairs opposite Ellen. “And someone’s going to have to be punished for this,” he added in a voice so soft and menacing that her skin crawled as if something dark and cold had touched her soul. “Someone’s going to have to be punished for everything!”

Then the man was rattling around in some kind of drawer or cabinet behind her. Though she could not see what he was doing, Lindsay could, and Ellen watched the girl’s eyes for some clue as to what might be happening.

A moment later, as Lindsay’s eyes widened in an expression of horror, Ellen had to fight for breath again.

And again she struggled with her bonds, but her legs were securely taped and her wrists so tightly bound that her hands were going numb.

“This,” the man said. “I can use this, just like—” His voice broke and he fell silent. Then he reappeared, holding an ancient, rusting paring knife. “Yes,” he said, his voice trembling as he gazed at the blade. “I remember this.”

Ellen was afraid she was going to faint. But she couldn’t. She had to hold it together, had to deal with whatever was about to happen.

But when he started to carve her leg with that dull, rusty blade, the blackness closed in around her peripheral vision like a swarm of bees.

And no amount of her will could keep it away.