Speaking in Tongues (32 page)

She heard Matthews’s unearthly scream—it seemed to shake the walls—and then footsteps.

Making slow circles through the corridors, she finally found the door, the one leading to the basement. She grabbed a cinder block and smashed it down on the hasp and lock, which snapped off easily.

Megan flung the door open, looked down into the musty place. For a moment she was paralyzed.

No choice, girl,
Crazy Megan the tour guide shouts.
Move, move, move.

But Josh, she protested silently, I can’t leave him.

Hey, if you die, he dies. Go!

She clomped down the stairs and found herself in a dimly lit warren of corridors. Trotting slowly from room to room, she took care to avoid the standing water so she wouldn’t leave footprints he could follow.

Please, a door, a window . . . Oh, please.

She heard the creak of footsteps from the ceiling above her as Matthews made his way to the door she’d just broken open. She found a door leading outside. It was locked. And the windows too were sealed. Another door. Nailed shut.

Goddamn him!
C.M. blurts.
Why’d he padlock the fucking door upstairs if we can’t get out this way?

Megan didn’t bother to answer. She couldn’t figure it out either. She returned to a room near the base of the stairs and glanced again at one of the windows. The bars on these were wider than the ones on the main floor but she doubted that she could get through.

Fucking hips.

Don’t start! Megan muttered silently and started to turn away. Then she paused, looked back. Thinking: Okay, maybe I can’t get through the bars. But I can make him
think
I did.

She smashed the glass and pushed an overturned plastic bucket beneath it so that it looked like she’d climbed out.

Then she ran back into the warren of dark storerooms to find someplace to hide.

Most of the cardboard boxes piled in the rooms were too small to conceal her. And she didn’t have the strength to pull herself up into the pipes that ran along the ceiling.

His steps were approaching the door upstairs. Then he started down.

Megan ran into a cluttered storeroom, the farthest one from the stairs. It was filled with cartons, small ones like the others. But over to the side of the room, in the shadows, was a long metal box. It was almost too obvious a choice to hide in but this room was nowhere near the window where she’d faked her escape. And it was pitch-dark in here. Matthews might not even see the box if he bothered to look.

Could she get it open? And was it empty?

But Megan stopped asking questions. Matthews was now in the basement. A shuffle of footsteps, a moaning wheeze from the pain of the wounds, words muttered to himself.

Now!
Crazy Megan prods her.
Go, girl!

Megan unlatched the trunk. It took all her strength to lift the thick lid.

And it took all her willpower not to scream as she looked inside and saw the blue-white flesh, the limp hair, the closed eyes, a dark, shriveled penis, the long yellow fingernails . . . Cuts and gouges covered the young man’s entire torso, which was further mutilated by the large
Y
incision from the autopsy. An ear and an arm had been crudely stitched back onto his body.

It was Matthews’s son, Peter. She recognized the eerie face from the newspaper clipping.

Oh, God . . . My God . . . Tate, Bett . . . Somebody!

The footsteps were closer now. They sounded only thirty or forty feet away.

Go on,
Crazy Megan urges.
Do it.

I
can’t
do it, Megan thought. No way in hell.

Get inside,
C.M. chokes.
You have to.

Either you fight him with your fists, she told herself, or you hide in here. Those’re your choices. A moment’s pause. The doctor was now right outside the doorway, it seemed. Then Megan closed her eyes—as if that would lessen the horror—and climbed into the box, lying down on the corpse, on her back, shivering fiercely. She let the lid down. The air reeked of sweet formaldehyde, pickled flesh—she recalled the scent from biology class, hating to be in school at the time but now praying that she could somehow be transported back to that time and place.

And beneath her, terrible cold.

Nothing’s colder than cold flesh.

Then she heard, faintly, a moan very near. Aaron Matthews was in the room.

•   •   •

Crossing a gap in the Shenandoahs, Tate glanced out the window of Bett’s car at the darkened bungalows and ramshackle farmhouses, abandoned barns, the black pits that opened into the network of caverns that laced the earth beneath the Shenandoahs and the Blue Ridge.

They sped past walls of ominous forest—the stark pines, the scrub oak, the sedge, the young kudzu and Virginia creeper. Tate imagined dozens of eyes peering at them and he thought of the Dead Reb once again.

Ten minutes later, well into the Blue Ridge, Tate pulled Bett’s Volvo into an all-night gas station. The elderly attendant glanced at them cautiously when he asked about the mental hospital.

“That old place? Phew.” The man cast a dark look westward.

“Where is it?”

“You get back on the interstate and go one more exit . . .”

“We’d rather stick to back roads, if we can.” The state troopers would be looking for him on the highway, a fact Tate didn’t share.

The man cocked his head, shrugged. “Well, that road there. Route one seventeen? Take it west ten, twelve miles till you see a Buy-Rite gas station. Then go left on Palmer and just keep going.”

“We’ll see the hospital?”

“Oh, you’ll see it. Can’t miss it. But I’d wait till sunup. You don’t wanna go there this time of night, no sir. But you asked for directions, not opinions.”

Tate handed him a twenty and they sped off down the road.

They’d driven several miles when a no-nonsense siren burst to life a quarter mile behind them. It was a county trooper. The light bar flashed explosively in Tate’s rearview mirror. He accelerated hard.

“You think he knows it’s us?” Bett asked.

“If he doesn’t he will when he calls in your tags.” Tate’s foot wavered. “What do I do?”

“Drive like hell,” Bett muttered. “Try to lose him.”

He did.

For about two miles it looked as if they’d get away. The Swedes make a good car but it was no match for the souped-up engine of the pursuing Plymouth. “Can’t make it,” he told her.

He eased up on the gas. “I’ll talk to him. Maybe he’ll at least send a car to the hospital.”

“No,” Bett said. “Pull over.”

“What?” Tate asked, jockeying the skidding car onto the gravel shoulder and braking.

Bett ripped her purse open and dug inside. She paused, took a deep breath, then sat upright, staring in the rearview mirror at herself, stroking her cheek as Tate had seen her do so often.

What’s she up to? he wondered.

“Bett!” he cried as she lifted the nail file to her face and dragged it hard across her skin.

Blood poured from a gash deep in her cheek.

“Oh,” Bett wheezed. “It hurts.”

Tate stared at the blood, running more black than red down her neck and falling onto her chest in delicate paisleys.

•   •   •

“Get out of the car!” reverberated the metallic voice through the rectangular mouth of the PA speaker atop the car.

The young trooper stood beside the open door of his squad car. His blue-black pistol, dwarfed by the lawman’s huge hand, was aimed at Tate’s head.

“Get out of that vehicle! Keep your hands up.”

For a moment neither of them moved.

Then Bett’s door opened so fast Tate thought that another deputy had snuck up behind them unseen and pulled her out. But, no, she was moving on her own. She screamed shrilly as she rolled onto the grassy shoulder of the road. The leather strap of her purse was wound around her wrists as if she were tied up. Without the use of her hands she fell hard and dust mixed with the blood covering her face.

“Help me!” she cried. “He kidnapped me!”

“Don’t move. Nobody move!” the trooper called, swinging the muzzle toward Bett. Tate sat perfectly still, hands on the wheel.

Bett scrabbled toward the cop.

“He’s got a knife!” she cried. “Help me, please. He cut me. I’m bleeding. Help me!” She put the harrowing wail of a frightened child into her voice as she stumbled forward. “He was going to rape me! Get me away from him! Oh, please . . . Oh . . .”

The trooper gave in to his instincts. “Over here, miss. You’ll be all right. He’s that fella from Prince William, isn’t he? The one killed that girl? Where’s the knife?”

“In his belt. He picked me up at a rest stop,” she cried. “He kidnapped me!”

“Put your hands up!” the trooper called over the microphone. “And I mean now!”

Tate did.

“What happened?” the cop asked Bett, who was stumbling closer.

“Cut me . . . I need a doctor . . .” The words were lost in the sobbing.

“You in the car. Leave your right hand up and with your left reach out the window and open the door. Don’t lower that right hand.”

Tate didn’t move.

“I’m not telling you again! I have a—”

“Put it down!” came Bett’s raw scream from inches behind his head. Tate’s pistol was resting at the cop’s throat.

“Oh, shit.”

“Do it!”

“I’ve got him covered, lady. You do anything to me and he’s gone. I’ll shoot him. I swear . . .” But he said this out of shame, not resolve, and when Bett screamed, “We’re after my daughter and I’ll kill you right now if I have to,” the cop’s disgusted grunt was followed by the sound of his large pistol hitting the dirt.

Bett stepped away from the man, who towered over her. He went limp as he saw the ferocity in her face, maybe wondering just how close to death he’d come. He sagged against the car.

“All right,” Bett muttered. “Lie down on the ground. There. On your stomach.”

Tate was out of the car and jogging toward them.

“There’re other troopers coming, lady. They’ll be here in minutes.”

“All the more reason to
move!”

He eased down. Bett handed the cop’s pistol to Tate.

“Cuff him and let’s go,” she said.

But Tate put his hand on her shoulder. “No. You’re staying.”

“No, Tate,” Bett said, holding a wad of Kleenexes up to her bloody chin. “I want to come.”

What could he say to her? That there wasn’t anything she could do and Tate needed to focus on saving Megan—if she could be saved? That it was important for her to stay here and tell the police exactly what had happened, send them out to the hospital? They were both surefire arguments. But Tate answered instead from his heart and told her the truth. Simply: “I don’t want to risk losing you.”

She looked at the dark blood on the Kleenex and up at Tate once more. She nodded.

“Now, listen to me,” he said gravely. “When they get here, just set the gun down and put your hands up. They’ll be nervous and looking to shoot. Do exactly what they say. You hear me?”

She nodded. He touched her cheek, wiping away some blood.

“A sexy woman with a scar—won’t be a man in the county’ll keep his hands off you.”

“You’ll get her, won’t you, Tate?”

“I’ll get her.”

He kissed her forehead and ran to the car.

He floored the accelerator, splattering the squad car with gravel and dirt. As he drove over a crest in the road, the tach nosing into the red crescent of the warning zone, he caught a glimpse of Bett in the rearview mirror, crouching beside the prone trooper, undoubtedly apologizing earnestly. Still, the pistol that was gripped in both her hands was pointed steadily at his face.

•   •   •

She couldn’t take it anymore.

Crazy Megan was gone, dead and sleeping with the fishes.

The depleted air suffocated her. The smells—the rot and the sweet scent from embalmed skin—wrapped themselves around her throat and squeezed.

Which was bad enough. But then the panic started to sizzle through her body like electricity. The claustrophobia.

“No, no, no,” she said, or maybe she just thought it. “No, no . . . Let me out, let me out, let me out . . .”

Suddenly she wasn’t even worried that Matthews was outside the casket, waiting for her. It didn’t matter; she couldn’t stay inside a moment longer.

Megan pushed against the lid of the coffin.

It didn’t move.

She tried again, with all her strength. Nothing.

“Ah,” she gasped. “Oh please, God, no . . .”

He’d locked her in! She pounded on the lid then heard a wild laugh outside. Words she couldn’t distinguish. More laughter.

More words, louder: “. . . two having fun together . . . likes you . . . Peter likes you . . .”

“Let me out, let me out!”

Her voice rose to a wild keening, her whole body shivered in violent spasms.

“You fucker you fuck let me outoutoutout!” With both her fists Megan pounded on the lid until they bled, banged it with her head, feeling with horror Peter’s cold face against her neck, his cold penis against her thigh.

From outside Aaron Matthews beat on the lid too, responding to her pounding. Then more laughter. And finally more tapping, like a drummer, keeping perfect time with the rhythm of her raw screams.

•   •   •

No subtlety, no nuance . . .

Tate Collier came to the end of Palmer Road and saw the mental hospital in front of him. He aimed Bett’s car directly toward the gate, got his speed up to about forty and bounded over logs and potholes in the neglected surface. He saw the infamous gray
Mercedes parked in the staff-only carport. He saw a faint light in one of the windows.

He had no plan other than the obvious and as he skidded around a fallen pine and straightened for the final assault on the gate he pressed the accelerator down harder, sealing his resolve.

He pressed his hands into the steering wheel, pinning himself into the seat. The car plowed through the chain link. The air bag popped with an astonishingly loud bang. He’d forgotten about it and hadn’t closed his eyes. He was momentarily blinded and lost control of the car. When he could see again he found the vehicle skidding sideways, narrowly missing the Mercedes. The Volvo crashed obliquely into the cinder blocks, stunning him.