Her killer had been here. And gotten away.
“Dammit,” she cried.
She pushed away to run for her car when the lights flickered.
Melissa tensed.
The effect had been minor at first, but when it happened again. This time the whole basement became awash in deep two-dimensional waves of light and darkness. The overhead bulbs didn’t just flicker, they flashed on and off like the emergency strobes of a squad car blinking out of sequence.
Melissa leveled her weapon. She edged to the right, looking to the opposite end of the room.
Where a figure stood by the stairs.
“Freeze,” she shouted, transforming her cry of surprise into a demand. She put the person in her gun sight. “I’m a police officer and I’m armed. Put your hands above your head.”
The lights continued to flash in erratic bursts, shrouding the person in the pulsing display. She couldn’t tell if he—the shape looked like a man—had a weapon or not, but now that she looked for his hands, she noticed his arms hung at his sides, unmoving.
So, who’s working the lights?
The bulbs over the suspect burst, hailing sparks and shards of glass. The suspect instantly vanished in the darkness.
Melissa flinched, her eyes wide.
More bulbs exploded: two went out over the garage sale boxes, three others ruptured from behind her.
She opened her mouth to shout a warning at the person when the sound of crackling glass emanated to her left. She pivoted toward the noise, and two powerful hands clamped down on her shoulders. They pushed her away, shoving her off her feet and into a metal storage shelf.
The impact jarred her to the bone. She spilled to the floor with half the items on the shelves, hearing dozens of things clatter and break.
She slumped to her knees, only to be seized by her clothing and hauled upward again. Her attacker spun her around, hurling her with unimaginable strength into the cinderblock wall opposite the freezer. She hit shoulder-first, saving her from a skull fracture. Bright fairies of light capered across her vision.
She fired her weapon blind, having somehow held onto it, but only wounded the floor.
Something flew out of the flickering darkness and clubbed her arm, striking the gun out of her grasp. She tried to stand and defend herself, but another blow caught her jaw and whirled her back into the wall. Hands of ice clamped down on the back of her neck and the waist of her pants. A frantic scream escaped from her throat, then choked off to a gasp when the attacker lifted her off her feet and over his head, ramming her into the lights. Glass shattered. Jagged metal corners tore through her clothes, raking flesh. Then down she went, body-slammed face-first onto something hard and cold. An icy chill molested her body.
Oh, God. The freezer!
She struggled to get up before another assault caught her in the back. Revulsion gave her the strength to ignore the pain in her limbs and push away from the frozen cadaver, but as she did, the barrel of a gun pressed against the base of her skull.
She went rigid, not moving a muscle. She clenched her eyes shut, saving herself from having to stare into the face of a corpse.
The attacker remained silent and slowly pushed her head down with the gun.
“Don’t do this,” Melissa finally said. Her voice cracked from lack of saliva. When no reprisal followed her remark, she added, “Like I said, I’m a cop. If you let me, I can help you. You’re only making things worse for yourself by doing this.”
“Need you,” a voice replied.
The sound of it spilled into her ears like poison from an assassin’s flask. Her body went rigid, paralyzed with the comprehension that her future now lay in the hands of someone who’d patterned their life after the atrocities of a madman.
“Y-yes,” she answered, choking on her aversion. “I can help—”
But before she could finish, the gun withdrew and the freezer’s lid slammed down over her head, covering her in absolute darkness.
She pushed off the shoulders of the frozen body beneath her, trying to force the freezer’s top open with her back.
The cover wouldn’t budge.
A grating sound penetrated the compartment, first at her feet, then again, closer to her head. It sounded like a power drill… or a screw gun.
He’s sealing me in!
She pushed up again and again, straining every muscle, but the cover wouldn’t give.
Silence enveloped her, broken only by her labored breathing.
She had to stop, had to calm down before she used up all her air.
Her mind hunted for a way to break free, but the more she thought about it, the worse her predicament appeared. She didn’t have her gun, so she couldn’t shoot an air hole through the cover. How long would the air last: ten, fifteen minutes? Sandwiched atop the dead body, with the freezer door at her back, she obviously didn’t have enough leverage to break whatever appliance her attacker had sealed her in with. Her only other hope, her phone, had died. No one would even know she was missing until she failed to show up for work the next morning.
The deepening cold embraced her, triggering a shiver, and she bit down on her lower lip to keep from screaming.
She couldn’t afford to waste the air.
CHAPTER 29
Lori sat on the Wiesses’ living room couch, a protective pillow held across her chest while she used the television remote to flip through the cable channels. Upstairs, she hadn’t heard a word from BJ since putting him to bed, which she took to mean he’d sleep peacefully through the night.
Their talk about creatures lurking in the darkness had gotten to her more so than she’d known, however. With the kid in bed, sitting there alone, the house seemed eerily large and unsafe. There were so many rooms, so many windows for a prowler to sneak in through. She kept thinking about the noise she’d heard earlier, behind the attic door, and she imagined that whatever made it had slipped out of sight before she turned on the light, slinking within the walls to emerge somewhere else in the house.
“Some hero,” she thought aloud, thinking of the bravery she’d tried to display earlier.
Thud!
She stopped channel-surfing and looked to the ceiling.
Thud!
Lori sprang to her feet. The muffled noise came again, the sound of a door slamming shut.
Clicking off the television, she hurried to the foyer and looked up from the foot of the stairs to the second floor landing. She should’ve been able to see the glow of BJ’s lamp from where she stood, but the hallway appeared dark.
The only light where Lori stood came from the outside lamp over the front steps. Its whitish gleam shone in through the sectioned windows lining each side of the main door and cast bar-like shadows over the floor and steps. In this strange setting, the entry seemed murky and uninviting, specifically designed to repel guests rather than to welcome them. She flipped on the entry light to dispel the mood.
“BJ? Are you all right up there?”
When no answer came, she mounted the steps two at a time, now fearing that what she’d heard could’ve been the sound of the boy falling out of bed, possibly injuring himself and breaking the lamp in the process.
“BJ?”
From the landing she could see through the crack in BJ’s door, and even in the dark she could tell he wasn’t in bed. The noise thumped again, closer this time. She spun to face the other half of the hallway.
Stepping into the lesser gloom below one of the hallway’s two skylights, she said, “For someone who was so afraid of going to bed earlier, you sure don’t seem too scared of playing hide-and-seek in the dark.”