Once the rope was secured, he pulled the knife from his mouth and squatted so his face was in line with hers. He pawed at his eyes, wiped away the rain and gently brushed his lips against her. “It’s all right to be afraid.” He looked to the section of forest from which he’d come. Interspersed with flashes of lightning, visions of him skipping and tossing her clothes as he went flickered through his mind. And like a child who had peeked under his bed to find that a monster did, in fact, reside there, he struggled back into a standing position, feet slipping and sliding beneath him.
He placed the blade against her pubic bone with a disturbingly steady hand and found himself wondering if his suspicions were correct. Maybe Hell was here on Earth. Maybe he’d already found it. And as the master had tempted the one he despised—the one from Nazareth—all those years before, perhaps this too was little more than a final temptation, a test of his conviction.
Bernard turned back to the woman. “You’re supposed to die screaming.”
And as he thrust the blade forward, gripped the handle with both hands and dropped to his knees, gutting and tearing her open from pelvis to throat in a single ripping motion, she did her best to comply…
I was sure whatever evidence these woods had held was long gone. No one ever came out here, and animals and the elements would have destroyed remains within days. Months later, besides the ghosts and the stories they felt compelled to tell me, there might be a bone here or there, but not much else.
Silence followed the breeze, whispered through the forest. It hadn’t become completely dark yet, but night was close.
Rick snapped his flashlight on. Through a loud swallow he asked, “You think there’s bodies here?”
“Not here.” I motioned over his shoulder. “There.”
We were mere feet from the edge of the woods. Beyond the last line of trees stood a chain link fence separating the beginnings of parking lot from the wooded area. Perhaps one hundred yards away sat the phantomlike silhouette of an enormous structure, the decomposed remains of a behemoth from earlier times staring down at us through rapidly darkening skies.
Without a word, we headed for the fence.
CHAPTER 33
Thankfully the fence was only about five feet high. We scaled it and dropped down into the parking lot, and I suddenly felt like I was twelve years old again, hopping fences and climbing trees, going on adventures like the world was still new and innocence still meant something.
Waves crashed the beach beyond as darkness closed in around us.
“My grandparents worked here,” Rick said.
I’d driven by a few times but had never set foot on the property before. I vaguely remembered walking miles of beach or riding our bikes along the sandy coastline when we were kids, watching the huge old buildings ominously perched atop the cliffs, rundown and neglected even then. In those days they had represented intrigue and menace, dinosaurs at the edge of town only the elderly could speak of with firsthand knowledge. To us, as kids, they were oddities, the topic of endless imaginary possibilities.
“No unions then, fucking sweatshops,” Rick continued. “In those days there was nowhere else to work in this town besides the mills. Broke their fucking backs in this place. A lot of people did. Made them old before their time.”
“Life has a way of doing that,” I mumbled. “Come on.”
With Rick leading the way, his flashlight aimed at the cracked and uneven pavement before us, we started across the parking lot.
“I wonder if the cops checked out these buildings?” he asked a moment later. In the dark, and in this strange place, the sound of our voices was somehow comforting.
“Probably.”
“I mean, they already said they know the killer tortured and murdered his victims somewhere besides where they found the bodies, right? These buildings make sense. They’re about the only places in town where you could do something like that and no one would know. Problem is they’ve all been condemned and abandoned for so long they say they’re unsafe to the point where you can’t even walk around in most of them. If they checked them out, I bet they did it half-assed. That’s if they even got this far yet. If you read the papers or listen to the news, they’re all stuck on the drifter bit and the killer already being long gone.”
The killer. Even now, he couldn’t bring himself to use Bernard’s name.
The smell of sea air grew stronger, and the wind off the ocean was a bit steadier, which helped to lessen the humidity some.
“I think even if the cops did check these places out they only found what it allowed them to find, what it wants them to see.”
“It?”
We stopped, looked at each other. “Those other bodies were found because Bernard wanted them to be found and eventually revealed to the authorities. The rest of it, I’m not so sure about.” I motioned to the mill. “I think whatever’s in there is for us to find. Things he wants revealed to you and me. Maybe only you and me.”
Rick puffed his chest out like he hoped to intimidate his own fear. “Something’s either there or it’s not, Alan.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Unless it all depends on who’s looking.”
Neither of us spoke for several seconds, but as we turned and continued toward the mill, I said, “I wonder why the town still leaves these beasts standing in the first place?”
“It’d cost a fortune to demolish the fuckers,” he said. “Plus, it’s Potter’s Cove history. About all this shit town has for history, anyway.”
Until now, I thought. Now town history would forever hold hands with violent and bloody death, with torture and mayhem and madness.
We were within one hundred yards of the main building when a loud boom stopped us. The sky lit up over the mill, brilliant blues and reds bursting and streaming in various directions before trailing slowly toward the ground. The fireworks had begun, and against the night sky, in this old and forgotten hellhole, they offered a beautiful contrast, a magical presence of the surreal against an otherwise decidedly conventional setting.
Forgetting it all for a moment, we stood looking up at the sky like starstruck kids.
Every few seconds a new display briefly painted the sky, washing our faces in colorful hues that slipped past like headlights along the walls of a dark room.
The spell finally broken, we approached the front of the building. Rick slowly raised the flashlight, moved it gradually up the face of the mill. Most of the long vertical windows were broken or completely gone, and the few panes still intact were blurred with years of grime. The doors and windows on the first floor were boarded up, covered in graffiti and filth.
“Getting inside might be a problem,” Rick said. “They got it boarded up pretty good.”
And then, as I studied the mammoth before us, it hit me.
“I’ve seen all this before,” I said quietly. “That night in New Bedford. The old factory across from the car lot, I—it was the same. It wasn’t this building, but—but it was. It looks the same. I was in a completely different place, but what I saw was the same. What I saw was this.”
Rick swung the flashlight around, pointed it at my chest so that there was just enough light illuminating my face. “Say again?”