Page 42 of The Whisper Place (To Catch a Storm #3)

The door was solid wood and Theo was no athlete, but he’d break it down sooner or later. The thumps came steady and fast.

I stumbled up, trying to remember if there was any furniture I could push in front of the door.

I felt along the walls toward the kitchen, finding nothing.

It didn’t matter. As long as I could see, I could grab Theo’s keys and drive away.

I could take his phone and call 911. I could run into the woods if I had to.

They’d already saved me twice. They would do it again.

The kitchen was even brighter, but my eyes were adjusting.

I could see the counters, the island. I ran my hands over everything, looking for car keys, begging any God that would listen to help me, to deliver me from this nightmare.

My breath hitched, tightening in my chest in smaller and smaller gasps that felt in time with the whacks of the crowbar against the door. He was coming. He was going to get out.

I couldn’t find any keys. There was nothing in the kitchen but papers and dirty dishes and moldy food cartons. I swore and begged and cried. A sharp pain in my side felt like it was stabbing me with every breath. Then, something splintered in the hallway.

“No. No, no, no, no.” I backed up, facing the direction of the sound. It would have to be the woods. I could still make it to the woods.

I turned, ready to run, and screamed at the sight of a man standing in the front doorway. He took a single step toward me and smiled.

Ted.

My heart stopped. My lungs froze. My vision contracted to a single face surrounded by black.

“No. No.” I stumbled against the kitchen island and backed around it, trying to put as much distance as I could between me and the man I’d killed.

This wasn’t possible. I was hallucinating. The time-out room had drained the last of my sanity and now I was being haunted by a ghost. It was the only explanation.

Ted walked calmly into the room like he’d stepped through a rip in time.

He wore boots, khakis, and a pullover sweater.

His hair was combed in the same side-slicked style, but a tennis-ball-shaped line above his temple had the shiny, puffed appearance of skin stitched back together.

His nose was different, too—larger and crooked.

One eye sunk down further than the other as his black gaze lit on me, watching me like a cat stalking a caged bird.

“Not leaving so soon, are you, Kate?” His voice was the same rolling tenor, the same precise inflections called up from the depths of my nightmares. It eclipsed the sounds of splintering wood coming from the hallway.

“Not real,” I chanted, shaking my head. My back hit another counter and I felt along the top of it, searching for a weapon without taking my eyes off the distorted ghost. “You’re not here. You’re not real.”

“Why would you think that?” He closed the space between the island and the stove. “Just because you tried to kill me and bury my body doesn’t mean I’m not real. I’m the most real, the most alive person in this house.”

I shoved a stack of papers off the counter, knocking over a cup of pens and sending a cereal bowl to the floor with a crash.

Shards of blue ceramic scattered across the tile.

There were two ways out of the kitchen: through the door to the dining room that he was blocking; or the hallway leading back to the basement door.

I tried to ignore what the ghost was saying and focus on the dining room door behind him.

If he was really a ghost, I could walk right through him. If he wasn’t . . .

I leaned down and grabbed a shard of the ceramic bowl, holding it in front of me. The blue porcelain shook and dug into my hand, covered instantly in sweat.

“Get out of my way.”

The ghost stopped talking. His eyes flashed and I remembered—Ted didn’t like to be interrupted.

“There’s only one way out of my house, Kate. I think you’ll enjoy the lesson in it. I’ve worked hard to make it an experience neither you or your mother will forget.”

I took a deep breath, filling my lungs until they almost burst from the pressure, and ran.

I charged the ghost—ready to run right through it—and met Ted’s closed fist with the side of my head. His punch sent me reeling across the island, the burst of pain making the lights fade in and out. Ringing filled my ears.

“Oh my god.”

I swung wildly with the porcelain shard until my arm was shoved behind my back. The edge of it dug into my own skin and I screamed.

“That’s better.”

I was hauled up to face Ted, which is when I realized Theo had escaped the basement. He was holding me in place.

Ted stepped closer, his damaged face leering over me, and my heart beat as though it could take flight and leave the rest of me behind.

Ted was real. He was here. He wasn’t dead or buried or gone.

“How?” I whimpered.

The smile stretched his scars wide, pulling his skin back from his skull.

“I’ll show you.”

The woods were dark even in the middle of the day.

The full summer canopy let only stray fragments of sunbeams inside, slicing across us as Theo hauled me over the uneven terrain.

I tried screaming, but they’d gagged me and tied my hands behind my back.

The muffled garbled sounds were trapped in my throat, choking around sobs and squeezed by panic.

I thought I heard a car once, and tried to yell before Theo shoved my head against a tree and told me to shut up.

Ted walked behind us, reminiscing about my mother and wondering, in a tone that twisted my gut into nauseating knots, how she was doing.

Once, after Theo dragged me over a fallen tree, I saw Ted struggling to get over it.

There was something wrong with his leg, held straight and stiff, and in a lucid burst I remembered the stab wound.

Mom had swiped him in the torso and jabbed him in the knee.

It hadn’t mattered at the time. Dead men didn’t need to walk.

But Ted was walking, struggling through the woods behind us in a furious, uneven gait.

Theo shoved me forward. I knew where we were going long before we got there.

I’d only been there once, but I’d dreamt about the place almost every night since.

The impossibly hard dirt, shovels cracking against rock after rock, the form wrapped in a sheet on the sled.

I’d thought the body moved at one point while we were digging, hadn’t I?

And it must have. Ted was still alive when we’d done all that, still breathing as we dug his shitty shallow grave.

“Stop here.”

Theo obeyed, bringing me to an abrupt halt and shoving me to my knees at the base of a gnarled, bumpy tree.

I was confused. I didn’t recognize the spot, didn’t see the brush I’d remembered covering the grave with or any disturbed ground.

But it had been dark, and that was months ago.

The woods had changed since then, always growing, always shifting, always spitting back the bodies you tried to hide inside them.

Maybe this was the spot and my nightmares had twisted it into something else in my head.

Ted walked forward, one sure step, one hesitant one, until he towered over me.

“You remember that night, don’t you, Kate?”

I stared into the trees, willing any movement between the shadowy trunks. I would take a human, a bear, a wolf, anything. Before a savior could appear, Ted grabbed my chin and jerked my head up.

“You probably remember it a little differently than I do. I’m sure you and Valerie drove back to that pathetic little duplex thinking you got your revenge on me. That the two of you had somehow beaten me. But in your stupidity, you hadn’t even bothered to check my pulse.”

We had, though, hadn’t we? Mom said he was dead. She’d felt his neck. I tried to remember, but everything was spinning. I couldn’t focus, couldn’t think.

“Then you make the mistake of burying me facedown with a pocket of air in the sheet you wrapped me in. I woke up feeling branches scraping over my back. I couldn’t move, until I heard the two of you hauling shovels away, and I realized what you’d done.

That’s when I found the strength to pull myself out of my own grave, and crawl my way back through the woods. ”

“Theo came as soon as I called and nursed me back to health. He wanted to go after you right away, to make you pay for what you’d done, but I knew better. We waited and we watched.

“At first you disappeared and Theo thought we might have lost you entirely. I knew you couldn’t stray far from Valerie, though. The two of you are thick as thieves. And I was right.”

His hand tightened on my chin until I thought my jaw would snap. I whimpered around the wet cloth of the gag. I hated the sound, and I had no control over it.

“It didn’t matter where you went, Kate, or what you called yourself. I would’ve found you. Remember what I told you about Jonah? About how he tried to flee? You could’ve gone to the ends of the Earth and I still would’ve hunted you down and swallowed you whole.”

He was in my face now, breathing on me, his eyes as black as the tree branches behind him.

“So I’m going to have to show you—again—what it takes to do things right.

You think you can bury someone and walk away?

” The hand on my chin moved to my throat, and he started to squeeze.

His disfigured face filled my vision, massive and unhinged, and his voice dropped to a guttural whisper. “This is how it’s done.”

The hand at my throat pushed me backward, choking off most of my air until I fell next to the gnarled tree.

On the other side of the trunk, someone had dug a gaping hole in the earth. Inside was an open, empty box the size of a coffin.