Page 18

Kali

M y heart was so torn. When I first heard Chance and the others in the neighbouring campsite, I hadn’t heard them again, so I thought I’d just imagined it. Wishful thinking, or something like that. But no…

Seeing Chance again was tearing me in two different directions. Part of me couldn’t believe that he would have had anything to do with my murder, or any of the girls Blake kidnapped. And yet, there was no way to know for sure. Not without some digging. I just couldn’t make sense of anything. How could he not know, but also, how could he know?

I wanted to scream.

So I did.

I released my warring emotions in the loudest, rawest yell I could muster. It echoed around me, scaring off the ghosts of the other girls as they lingered by their graves until it was just me, my rage, my sadness, and my confusion.

I just wanted everything to make sense for once. I wanted answers before I went insane searching for them. I didn’t want to end up like those poor girls’ spirits that slowly withered away into nothing, their minds no longer capable of keeping their forms in one piece. I’d watched a few of them slowly lose their grip on reality and blow away in the breeze.

That was not my fate. I couldn’t let it be.

Shadows twitched in my periphery, and I knew I was no longer alone. I ignored him. I was in no mood to deal with the shadow man’s cryptic antics, not when my entire being throbbed with my emotional torment.

‘You are upset,’ he stated. I almost acknowledged him in my shock over him breaking the silence first, but I caught myself at the last moment. Instead, I pointedly gave him my back and floated away. My grave was calling my name. I needed peace right now, or at the very least the illusion of it.

‘The silent treatment is beneath you, ghost girl,’ he taunted, following close by. I still refused to acknowledge him, but it only made him release that now-familiar dark chuckle. I didn’t have the energy the respond or argue with him in any way. I still didn’t know what he wanted from me, but I was losing the will to care. He was insignificant in my quest to seek the truth and my revenge.

‘Or perhaps you are not the woman I thought you were,’ he mused, a tendril of shadow snapping out to flick at my cheek. It was almost like a caress, if it didn’t feel like half of my face had been frozen solid from the contact.

‘Immaturity is so… tediously unattractive,’ he continued, but I wasn’t stupid enough to take the bait. He usually left when he got bored of waiting for me to bite back. I wasn’t capable of adding him to my list of problems right now, though, so I stared down at the grass that blended into the rest of the lawn, successfully hiding where my body was buried.

‘He’s coming, ghosty,’ he finally said after sitting in the silence for a while. ‘Perhaps he will help to loosen your sweet tongue.’

I felt his presence leave, like the sun had come out to spread its warmth after a cold, dark night. It was an odd sensation, but I couldn’t say it was bad . I would never admit it out loud, but it was almost soothing. There was so little to feel here in the realm of the dead, so there was a sort of solace to be taken from any physical sensation to be had.

Not a moment later, the wheels of Blake’s car crunched over the gravel again. He was coming and going more often than usual, but since Chance and the others were around, it made sense. His attention was being pulled in multiple directions, and it was clear as he stepped out of the vehicle, grumbling under his breath, that it was starting to get to him. He didn’t seem to be mumbling any words, just nonsense noises to express his frustration. That, combined with the slamming of doors and the stomping of his feet, told me that he would be taking his anger out on the poor girl in the basement.

When her first screams reached me, I knew that she was in for a terrible night. From the sound of things, he might actually end up killing her tonight. Probably sooner than he planned, since the more he killed, the longer he liked to draw it out.

I was proud of her when she didn’t beg. Her screams were involuntary, a survival response she couldn’t refuse. None of us could. Yet, she was accepting her fate, embracing the pain. She didn’t cry. She didn’t plead. She knew there was no way out, and she was ready for the killing blow.

Eventually, her screams became so hoarse that her voice finally gave out, and I figure she might like a familiar face to greet her when her spirit separated from her physical body. I knew how disorienting it could be, especially with a dead as brutal as ours. It was incredibly jarring to find oneself hovering over the man dismembering your body, especially when you hadn’t quite processed the fact that you were dead, and watching the horrific scene from beyond the veil. For me, I could still feel it. Every cut, slice, and break, the rendering of my flesh. He was still somehow torturing me from beyond the grave.

And when he’d buried me, I’d felt every shovel-full of dirt as he chucked it on me until the weight became suffocating. It took me even longer to figure out that I didn’t need to breathe, or that I was no longer connected to my physical form.

For all the girls that had come after me, I had never once tried to ease their passing. Perhaps it would make a difference.

As if I had summoned him with my thoughts of doing something kind for someone else, like the very idea was appalling enough that he needed to see it for himself, the shadow man returned. This time, he didn’t bother letting me ignore him. He appeared right in front of me, the shadows writhing like a mass of snakes to shield his features, but I could still see the way he tilted his head to the side as he contemplated me.

‘What?’ I snapped tersely. ‘What do you want now?’

I immediately regretted giving in when I sensed more than saw his lips spread wide into a pleased grin. ‘I want to see what you will do.’

And then he disappeared again, but not completely. He was still lurking in the shadows, but he had somehow made it inside the basement before I could even think of moving from my spot.

I rushed to follow, stopping short as soon as I entered the dank space at the horrors I’d just waltzed into. Blood was sprayed on every wall, every surface. It even dripped from the ceiling like an upside-down puddle. Bianca wasn’t unconscious, but she wasn’t present, either. Her moans of pain were barely more than whispered whimpers fighting to escape. Her chest rattled in that familiar death rattle we all made right before our bodies gave out.

But it was the way he used her intestines to tie her up like some fucked up form of Shibari that truly caught my attention. He had gauged deep grooves into her flesh that he had used to wedge the length of her internal organs into, twisting and tying them until she was trussed up like a pig with her own innards as the rope.

Blake was in the process of stabbing her repeatedly, the force of his movements harsh and aggressive. Typically, he was precise and careful with his incisions, almost delicate, like the doctor he was. His kills were like artwork to him. It seemed that poor Bianca had been subjected to his artistic tendencies before he’d lost his temper. Whatever was going on with him, it was messing with his murderous hobby to the point where even I flinched away, despite knowing he couldn’t hurt me anymore. At least not physically. His mental and emotional torment would forever remain, likely long after he had died himself.

Bianca went silent, her body going fully limp as her last breath bubbled out of her in a bloody mess that leaked from her lips, and I was glad it was over for her. No one should have to suffer through something so horrific, so evil . I had seen it happen over and over again, but something made this time different. He was killing out of anger, his face twisted into something hideously monstrous. His careful composure was broken, and I didn’t know why. For the first time since he’d killed me, I was genuinely afraid of him.

Bianca’s spirit tore from her body with an audible snap, a sure indicator of her eagerness to depart the realm of the living. Blake kept stabbing, slicing, cutting away slivers of her flesh and gouging deep holes into what was left of her body. She was mutilated beyond recognition, and the horror on Bianca’s ghostly face had me springing into action.

‘Come here,’ I told her firmly, though not unkindly. ‘You don’t need to see it.’

Watery eyes met mine, and her face crumpled as she wailed for what was done to her. ‘ Why?’

‘I don’t know,’ I answered honestly. ‘I don’t know, but you don’t have to watch. You’ve suffered enough.’

She averted her gaze, my words penetrating through the haze of her violently forced transition. When I extended my hand in invitation, she took it without hesitation, desperate to escape the grizzly scene before us.

‘Get me out of here,’ she begged, and I complied wholeheartedly, dragging her through the walls and outside in the blink of an eye. It was faster than I had ever moved before, but I didn’t dwell on that development. Instead, I focused on Bianca and her soul-wrenching sobs.

I pulled her to me, the urge to comfort her too strong to deny. No one had comforted me. Some of the girls would comfort the others when they passed over, but they were the ones to lose their minds the fastest. They didn’t offer me the same kindness, however, not after they had learned of my connection to our monster. I understood it after a while. I was their version of revenge. They couldn’t attack him, so they attacked me through their silence.

But the others had stopped caring now. Where the girls had congregated before at each other’s deaths, now they pretended like it was nothing. Like it wasn’t important. I didn’t want Bianca to suffer further for their apathy.

As I embraced her, she trembled against me. It felt less like a physical shake and more like a vibration of chaotic energy. She hadn’t settled. She likely wouldn’t for a very long time. She sobbed, screamed, lashed out, anything she could think of to relieve herself of her agony; she tried, and I held her through it all.

‘I’m going to make him pay, Bianca,’ I told her, stroking my hand over her hair. It was soft and pliant, like I was skimming the surface of a pond rather than her hair. Neither of us was tangible in any real way, but our energies seemed to make contact almost as if we were, but just barely not. A magnetic pull that pushed away just before we could sink into one another and merge into something new.

She pulled back, her eyes shining with emotion, but not puffy and red like they would have been when she was still alive. Instead, they held a vast ocean of injustice and desperation, but also determination.

‘Do it,’ she told me, her voice wavering slightly but still firm. ‘Make him suffer for what he’s done. Take from him like he took from us.’

Those words snapped something within me, and I couldn’t stop what happened next if I’d tried. I wasn’t even sure what was happening, but I felt it the moment that thin shield that made us separate dissipated. The only way I could describe what happened when we touched was that she fell into me. Her spirit latched onto mine, which sucked her in so deep that she became a part of me.

Memories and emotions that were not my own bombarded me. A smiling couple gazing lovingly down at me that I didn’t recognise, yet I did. A young girl was clinging desperately to my legs in a hospital room where that same couple were resting in consecutive beds, wrapped in bandages as plaster casts, hooked up to machines that beeped and oxygen tanks that whirred in a constant pattern. The scene morphed once again to an attractive young man pulling silly faces to make me laugh before leaning in to press a sweet kiss to my lips that quickly turned passionate. His face merged with another’s. A man with a hood covering his face, shadows obscuring his features, only for me to knock it off when he tackled me to reveal none other than Blake, gazing at me with cold, dead, evil eyes. And then I was looking at myself over his shoulder from the familiar position of being strapped to that damn bed in the basement, my expression grim and resigned as I met my eyes – Bianca’s eyes – before filling of fury as I glared at Blake’s back.

Then came the emotions. Happiness, fear, heartbreak and love, a lifetime of emotions compounded into one brief moment. The sadness, the helplessness, the terror. The pain she felt as Blake continued to mutilate her corpse. All of it was reminiscent of what I’d felt when it was me subjected to his instruments of torture.

Her energy continued to flood into mine with increasing persistence. What started as a gentle warmth when we first connected soon became a blazing fire as more and more of her essence merged with mine. Our emotions and memories tangled until I struggled to pick apart which ones were mine and which ones were hers. My head spun with the whirlwind of images I was bombarded with. Separate childhoods, opposing dreams, joyful moments interspersed with despair. I was being picked apart into tiny fragments and sensations that no longer made sense.

Who was I?

Why did I hurt?

Was I even hurting at all?

And then a chilling, otherworldly voice hissed in my ear. Eager. Wanting. Excited. ‘ Yesss… Consume her. Take it all.’

Pain seared through every part of me, burning away the torrent of memories and emotions until my mind was nothing but a blank canvas, but it wasn’t peaceful. My every essence was being torn apart and reformed, reshaped into something new and unrecognisable. All I could focus on was the pain. The frigid burn, like I was being frozen solid from the inside out. It was unlike anything I had felt before, and I wasn’t sure I could handle it.

I couldn’t. It was too much. Too powerful.

So I did the only thing I could do and let it shred me to pieces, embracing the end of my existence as I knew it and faced head-on the abyss of nothingness.