From Black Roses,
A novel of demonic sexual obsession
By Christine Morgan © 2003
All Rights Reserved
Buried alive.
She was alone in the dark, buried alive.
The walls crowded in on all sides. Bare wooden walls. Encasing her, trapping her.
Panic roared like a beast in her mind. She remembered her grandfather, his strict and severe face slackened into waxy dough by death, hands folded on his breast. They made her touch him, made her kiss his cold cheek as she'd never done when he was alive.
When the funeral was done, they had closed the lid, shut him off from the light forever. The carriage, drawn by horses with black plumes atop their heads, bore his coffin to the graveyard, where a gaping hole awaited.
She remembered standing beside her grief-stricken mother and somber father, her black dress and hat weighing her down. Watching as ropes and men lowered the coffin into the earth. The white marble headstone, with his name carved into it. She could only read a little bit, but she knew what it said. Her grandfather's name, his birthday, and the day he'd died. Three days ago.
He was dead and gone, dead and gone, his days of ruling with stern tyranny over forever. His days of arguing with her father, scorning and criticizing her mother, and ignoring the girl herself all over forever.
She knew she was supposed to be sad. Her mother was sad. But she couldn't find it in her heart to shed an honest tear for her grandfather.
Was that why she was buried alive? Because she had not loved her grandfather, she would spend eternity in a grave of her own? Was that her punishment?
Pain battered every part of her body, so many pains that she couldn't tell where one left off and the next began. Except for her legs, drawn up, curled up, because the coffin was no bigger than that a doll might use.
No lining of satin, no pillow for her head. Her grandfather had been buried in his finest suit; she was half-naked and cold and covered with sticky wetness.
Buried alive.
It hurt so much.
Where were her parents? Why had they let this happen? Didn't they love her any more? Or was it just that they couldn't stand in the way of her punishment?
So cold. So alone.
She screamed. Couldn't help it. Children should be seen and not heard, and not even seen unless absolutely necessary. That had been her grandfather's rule. But everything had changed. Hadn't it? Hadn't it? She had gone to a new place, where she was allowed to run and laugh and play.
And scream.
She hammered at the wooden walls, not caring that the impacts sent jarring bolts through her agonized limbs.
Why? Why?
She hadn't done anything wrong!
Had she?
It didn't matter what she'd done. She wanted out! Out! An end to the hurting!
Please! Somebody!
Shrieking and pounding.
Shrieking and pounding.
Shrieking and ...
... pounding.
Theresa Zane bolted upright, her breath slashing in and out of her lungs.
Nightmare.
Whew.
Except ... the shrieking and pounding were still going on.
The sounds had followed her out of sleep.
No. They were real.
Wakefulness like ice water splashed over her as she realized the sounds were coming from the front door. The child's screams of her nightmare.
"Please! Somebody! Help me!"
Theresa leaped out of bed and ran downstairs. She nearly collided with her father, who had just come out of his room, belting his robe on inside-out in his rush.
They tore the door open together, and Jenny Forrester fell inside.
"Jenny!" Theresa flipped on the light, saw that the soaked, shuddering girl was barefoot and wearing a nightgown filthy with mud and muck. "Jenny, what's wrong?"
Sobbing and hysterical, Jenny threw herself into Theresa's arms, clawing and clambering at her as if she was a tree to climb. Theresa picked her up, feeling the frantic trembling all through the child's body.
"Help, please, you gotta help!" Jenny wailed. "My mommy ... my mommy ..."
Travis was already at the phone. "Somebody must've broke into their house --"
"No!" Jenny said. "My mommy! She's got a knife ... she cut Jerry ... Daddy told me to run ..."
"Call," Theresa told her father. "Jenny, hon, tell me what happened."
"You gotta help Daddy! They're fighting! And Jerry's got bad owies!" In the extremity of her emotion, Jenny's voice and words were becoming more and more childlike.
"It's okay, honey, it's okay," Theresa said. "We're calling people right now. Everything's going to be just fine."
"Chief Blake? Travis Zane here." He turned away, cupping his hand over his mouth, speaking quietly but urgently.
"She cut him," Jenny said.
"Shh, shh."
"He's bweedin'. Jerry's bweedin'." She dissolved into a tempest of wracking weeping.
Theresa bundled her onto the couch and held her.
Travis hung up. "Maybe I should go down there."
"No, Dad!"
"They might need help. I'll get my rifle --"
"Let the police handle it, Dad!"
"I'm not too old to do what's right, Theresa!"
"It's dark, it's raining, and if the cops gets there and sees a man with a gun, they'll blow you away first and ask questions later. We don't know what's going on."
"She said Sandy ..." he said, shaking his head.
"I don't know what to believe. Maybe you're right, someone broke in, and Jenny got mixed up."
"No, no," she mumbled through her tears. "Mommy gots a knife."
"We just --" Theresa began, then stopped dead. In her mind, she heard Gary Haverley's voice -- Jeez, Jerry, she had a knife!
When had that been? Sunday morning.
Sleepwalking? Had Jerry said something about sleepwalking?
But Sandy had been fine on Saturday when they'd run into her at the market. Fine, happy, cheerful, bouyant.
She hugged the child, stared up at her father.
"Somebody's got to go down there," Travis said. He went to the closet, got out the long locked box that held his rifle.
"I'll go, Dad." Theresa disengaged Jenny's arms from her neck.
"Theresa --"
"Stay here with her. Call the hospital, too, have them send an ambulance."
She took the rifle, looked at it, realized she hadn't fired a gun since the time she and Travis had gone target-shooting when she was eight, looked at him, and saw in his eyes that he hadn't fired it since then either. Wordlessly, she handed it back and grabbed her pepper spray out of her purse. That, she was sorry to say, she had used on two occasions, once in a darkened parking lot and once on the street outside of a comedy club, of all things.
Travis sat down beside Jenny and put his free arm around her, holding the phone with the other. "Be careful, Theresa."
She had left her hiking boots by the front door on a ribbed rubber mat to catch the mud; now she stepped into them and laced them tight, thankful that she'd gone to bed in thick sweats instead of just a T-shirt and panties. She threw on her jacket, found a flashlight on the pantry shelf, and let herself out into the steady rain.
The light bobbed and danced, making shadows that seemed to be lunging at her. Adrenaline rollercoastered along her nerves. Her hand clenched and fidgeted on the pepper spray, revolving it and revolving it until she made herself stop, worried that she might need it and find she'd reversed it so that she tagged herself instead of any potential enemy.
A siren keened through the night. Another good thing about a town this size. Nothing was more than five minutes away, and it was extremely unlikely that rescue vehicles would get caught in traffic.
The Forrester house was just ahead. Several lights were on, the kitchen door stood open, Bingo barked wildly at the end of the rope tethering him to his cunningly-made doghouse.
She approached cautiously, thinking wryly to herself that stuff like this was just what she hated most about horror movies. Here she was, alone in the woods in the middle of a rainstorm just past midnight, inadequately armed, with possible psychos galloping gaily on a mission of slaughter. Didn't she always, watching such a movie, criticize the idiot protagonists for doing just what she was doing now?
It didn't stop her, though. She continued up the path and peered through the open door.
Sandy Forrester's neon-yellow kitchen was garishly decorated in blood.
Theresa froze, only her eyes moving as they ticked over the hideous scene. Puddles and streaks on the floor. A handprint perfectly outlined on a cabinet. A fine spray of droplets making scarlet constellations on the wall. A knife, a butcher knife roughly the size of a bayonet, had spun to a rest beneath a chair.
Cookies were scattered everywhere. The heavy ceramic jar that had held them, a jar whimsically shaped like a smiling pig in a yellow apron, was cracked into pieces. It lay near the head of Sandy Forrester, whose hair was matted with blood. She was wearing a sleepshirt with a row of raised-tail cat rumps across the back.
The door between the kitchen and the living room swung open. A gangling scarecrow-form loomed. Theresa came within a heartbeat of letting Charlie Forrester have it full in the face with her pepper spray, and he almost clouted her with a baton.
Not a policeman's nightstick, a majorette's baton. Silver with trailing spangly ribbons from the rubber nubbins at either end. It added the final unreal touch.
Theresa sprang back, slamming into the corner of the table hard enough to leave a fist-sized bruise that she wouldn't notice until the next day. "Charlie! It's me!"
He was covered with blood and bits of broken crockery, and a ladder of cuts marched up his forearms. Defense wounds, the medical shows called them. His eyes were blank and aghast, but recognition finally came and he lowered the baton.
"T-theresa?"
"Charlie, what happened, are you okay? Did someone break in?"
"We need a doctor."
"My dad already called. Where's Jerry?"
"Out there. He's hurt." Charlie waved vaguely in the direction of the living room, then slumped into a chair and stared at his wife with such a befuddled and uncomprehending expression that Theresa suddenly knew Jenny was right. No intruders. Sandy with a knife.
"I'll go check on him," she said.
Jerry was stretched out on the floor, on his back with his feet propped on a pillow and an afghan over him. His boyishly handsome face looked ancient, sallow, warpainted with his own blood.
She knelt beside him, saw that he was still breathing. Like his father, he had defense wounds, seeping sluggishly. Theresa gently drew back the afghan and sucked in air between her teeth.
Charlie, for all his seeming state of habitual dazedness, had done what he could for his son. Dishcloths were folded and pressed to the wounds, held in place with masking tape. The cloths were already dark and wet. It looked like Sandy had stabbed him at least four times, maybe more.
An unwilling picture formed in her mind. Sandy, her normally pretty face twisted into a witch's mask, attacking her son. Charlie struggling with her, earning a few cuts of his own before seizing up the cookie jar and crashing it down on her head. Jenny a witness to some or all of it before fleeing into the night.
Red and blue lights revolved across the front of the house. The siren warbled to a stop, but Theresa could hear more in the distance.
Jerry opened his eyes and looked up at her, bleary and suffering. Her mind made a quick insane cross-connection and she found herself thinking of the time her stepfather's dog had been struck by a car. Duke's eyes had looked just like that. Not understanding, only pleading for someone to make it all better.
Glory's eyes looked like that too, she thought suddenly and for no reason.
Bang-bang-bang on the front door. "Charlie? Sandy?"
"In here!" Theresa called.
The door opened. Unlocked. She still couldn't get used to that, and judging by the look on the face of the handsome black cop, he was thinking that it was overdue for Trinity Bay's laissez-faire attitude regarding home security to claim a victim.
He leveled his gun at her and Theresa recoiled. She was unarmed, didn't even have the pepper spray because she'd dropped it to examine Jerry. Thank God she hadn't brought the rifle!
As fast as he'd drawn down on her, the cop raised his gun to that ready beside-the-head stance familiar to her from action movies.
"I'm a friend," she said once her pulse stopped hammering from the fright of looking at the bad end of the gun, realizing how stupid that must sound in a house where the mom had apparently gone berserk. If a mom could do that, who knew what a friend might do? "Theresa Zane."
He gave Jerry a quick once-over, then popped into the kitchen to survey that unholy mess. Judging by the disconnected, drifting tone of Charlie's answers, the cop wasn't going to get any information that way. He reappeared, the gun now holstered.
"The ambulance is on the way," he said. His voice was rich and deep, striking. "I'm Damon Blake."
She nodded, then told him what had happened, starting with Jenny's arrival. She hesitated, then mentioned the overheard exchange between Jerry and Gary on Sunday.
By the time she finished, the paramedics had arrived.
* * *