THREE TIMES A LADY Page 6

The boy sneered and lifted the hand that he was using to hold the meat cleaver, rubbing tear-streaked mascara gently from beneath her left eye with the pad of his thumb. As he did so, the cold metal of the flat side of the blade pressed softly against Claire’s cheek and left an impression that she knew she’d be able to feel for the rest of her life – however long or short that might turn out to be right now. ‘Well, now,’ the boy said. ‘I’m a boy, huh? I guess we’ll just see about that, now won’t we?’

  Whirling around abruptly, the boy reared back his right arm and with all his might flung the cleaver into a side of beef ten feet away, a baseball pitcher dialing up the speed on his very best fastball. The fabric of his dress wrapped around his legs from the sudden motion. An audible whoosh concluded with the grotesque hacking sound of metal biting deep into flesh and bone. Then he lifted his dress over his head.

  Claire widened her eyes in shock and horror.

  The boy wasn’t wearing underwear, and there wasn’t anything between his legs, save for a mass of ugly scar tissue where his boy-parts should have been.

  ‘Do you see a penis here?’ the boy asked incredulously, lifting his hands high into the air and staring down hard between his thighs. ‘Do I look like a boy to you, Claire?’

  Claire Bishop stopped crying then, much too stunned by the gruesome sight in front of her to feel anything but revulsion and pity. Despite her bizarre circumstances – despite the fact that this boy had kidnapped her and had her tied up half-naked in the middle of a downtown freezer – she actually felt sympathy for the pathetic figure standing before her. How could she not? Never before in her life had she witnessed anything even half as gruesome.

  Claire lifted her burning stare to meet his. ‘What happened to you?’ she breathed. ‘Who did this to you?’

  The boy dropped eye contact with Claire first. A look of sorrow crossed his down-turned face. ‘I did this to me, Claire,’ he said mournfully. ‘I did this to me because I was a disobedient little boy who didn’t listen to my mother. And I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to do it to you now, too. That’s just the way it has to be. Since I’ll never be a real man, I can’t let you be one either. Fair is fair, after all.’

  Stepping forward again, the boy slid Claire’s shorts down her hips, all the way to her ankles. His sparkling green eyes narrowed into accusing slits when his gaze landed on the feminine triangle nestled between Claire’s trembling thighs.

  He lifted his disbelieving stare and trapped Claire in his freezing emerald eyes once more. ‘What the fuck’s this?’ he snapped. ‘Where’s your fucking dick?’

  Claire tried to answer him but couldn’t think of anything appropriate to say. What in the fuck could she say at this point? The boy was clearly insane, and all she could do now was pray. In her mind, the religious mantra she’d spent countless hours repeating in catechism class echoed over and over again:

  Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our deaths.

  ‘Well, I’ll be goddamned,’ the boy said after a long moment, dropping his stare between Claire’s thighs again and continuing to study her genitalia with great interest. ‘I guess you’re not a boy after all, huh? I guess you were telling me the truth.’

  Shaking his head in confusion, the boy slid Claire’s shorts back up over her naked lower half before he turned away and teetered on his three-inch heels over to the side of beef into which he’d flung the cleaver a moment earlier. Working out the blade with a few hard back-and-forth tugs, he then walked back over to Claire and slipped the sharp metal through the thin ropes restraining her wrists and ankles. Then he put his dress back on and went over into the corner of the room.

  He tossed Claire a brand-new T-shirt from a cardboard box full of them and kicked her socks and shoes over to her feet. ‘Get dressed,’ he said. ‘Just get dressed and get the fuck out of here. I need some time to think. This wasn’t what I was expecting at all.’

  Claire did as she was told, hastily pulling the T-shirt over her head and balling up her socks in an effort to save time. Cramming her bare feet into her beat-up Keds, she was halfway out of the freezer when the boy suddenly sprang forward and yanked her backward by her hair, jerking forcefully enough to temporarily lift her newly re-sneakered feet off the slippery metal floor. The roots of her hair screamed as though they were on fire. More tears of pain and fear flooded into her eyes.

  ‘Wait just one goddamn minute, there,’ the boy said, still holding Claire backward by her hair and staring down hard into her eyes. ‘You’re not going to tell anybody about this, are you? You can never tell.’

  Claire looked up at the boy and shook her head the best she could in his viselike grip, too terrified to even whimper the wrong way, much less provide him with an incorrect answer. And it was the truth. Jaded as she was, Claire Bishop wasn’t the only one who life owed. Apparently, there were some fates in this life worse than death. Some fates in this life worse than living in a shitty third-floor walk-up with an uncaring mother and an alcoholic child molester who was constantly copping ‘accidental’ feels whenever your mother was away at work.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ Claire said; choking out the words around the jagged lump of fear lodged in her throat. ‘I’ll never tell anyone, I swear it.’

  And Claire Bishop never did tell anybody – not even when she grew up and got married and had kids of her own. At that exact moment, she didn’t know she’d live to regret that decision one day. Regret it with her whole heart and mind and body and soul. Because the decision Claire made in the freezer that day would wind up costing more than half a dozen innocent people their lives.

  Still – selfish as it sounded – at least she hadn’t been one of them.

  CHAPTER 5

  The overwhelming blackness of Dana’s nightmare morphed first into a hazy gray, then pure white, and finally a blinding flash of vibrant colours that hurt her brain so badly it threatened to bring on a seizure.

  Dana squinted hard against the disorienting visual onslaught, feeling more confused than she’d ever felt in her entire life. Nothing made sense to her. Nothing had ever made sense to her. Nothing would ever make sense to her again.

  As she gradually established her bearings, a soul-freezing chill passed through her body, directly through her heart. Shocked, she watched as the colours in her world transformed again into a grainy black-and-white, like an old-time newsreel where everything jumped around and flickered, as though the footage was being played on an antique film projector set to the wrong speed.

  Dana sucked in a sharp breath that sent an agonising stab of pain slicing hard through her lungs. A man had just walked right through her. A small silver pistol peeked out from the rear waistband of his dirty jeans. His walk was confident, completely sure of itself, practically a swagger.

  Dana blinked rapidly and tried desperately to make sense of the mind-bending scene in front of her. No use. Suddenly, though, her brain collapsed on itself when she realised exactly what this was, exactly where she was.

  The home of her childhood. 3330 Eastlawn Street; West Park-section of Cleveland. The place where her parents had been brutally murdered thirty-five years earlier. The place where she’d barely escaped bloody murder at the hands of the same deranged madman when she’d been just four years old – saved only by a concerned neighbour who’d heard screaming in the night.

  Dana’s breath hitched in her throat. Her heart stopped beating dead in her chest. A cold shiver ran down the length of her spine, as though some unseen ghost was using its bony fingers to lovingly trace a feathery path along the vertebrae.

  Dana shook her head in bewilderment and tried again to process the baffling imagery before her. No good. But then a second, more powerful wave of shivers racked her body as the next chilling realisation dawned on her. Since she now understood exactly where she was, it could mean only one thing. She also
knew the identity of the man who’d just passed through her in the darkened hallway, knew his lifeless eyes as well as she knew her own.

  And now he was heading for her bedroom.

  Dana willed her legs to move but it wasn’t easy. Her limbs felt like cast-iron weights chained to her body. Marshalling all her strength, she struggled forward to the doorway of her bedroom and peered in to witness a horror movie she didn’t want to see. Not again.

  A Superman nightlight illuminated a child’s sleeping face in the darkness. Nathan Stiedowe loomed over the child’s bed with a huge butcher’s knife dangling from his powerful right hand. Beams of moonlight streamed in through the window next to the bed and bounced off the razor-sharp blade. Dana almost threw up when the child shifted in his sleep and afforded her a clear view of his unlined face.

  Bradley, the little boy from the plane who’d promised to marry her one day.

  Stunned stupid, Dana watched in horror as Nathan Stiedowe lifted the gleaming knife over his head, ready to plunge the unforgiving steel deep into the boy’s tender throat. She tried to scream out a warning but no sound emerged.

  Shifting her gaze to the mirror hanging above the bureau of her childhood bedroom, Dana abruptly caught sight of her own face. Her mouth had been sewn shut. Tight stitches fastened her lips together, rendered her mute.

  She tried to hurtle herself into the room to stop the monster before he could kill the little boy but looked down in horror to see that her feet had been nailed to the floor by six-inch railroad spikes bleeding rust. All she could now do was look on helplessly as Nathan Stiedowe brought down the sharp knife in a blinding flash of silver that would soon be joined by a sickening explosion of red as the boy’s jugular vein severed and he bled out all over the matching Superman sheets.

  But the knife never came down. Instead, Nathan Stiedowe simply lowered the glimmering steel to his side and reached down to stroke the boy’s silky blonde hair. ‘I’ll be back for you in just a minute, little boy,’ he whispered. ‘That much you can count on.’

  The little boy only mumbled dreamily in response.

  Turning away from the child, Nathan Stiedowe then exited the room, passing through Dana’s body again as he went. In a flash of jumbled images, Dana’s mind sped through the police reports of the devastating night in 1976 that she knew by heart. Her father, James Whitestone, would be the first to die, gunned down by his wife’s illegitimate child – the product of a brutal rape over a church altar when Sara Whitestone had been just sixteen years old. As he relieved himself in the bathroom following a tender lovemaking session with his beloved wife, a .22-calibre slug would shatter James Whitestone’s skull from behind and send chunks of his destroyed brain matter sliding down the tiled wall above the toilet in a disgusting rainbow of gray and white and red.

  Dana strained her eyes through the darkness and watched Nathan Stiedowe enter the bathroom, the scene of her father’s hopelessly grisly murder in 1976. The soft scratch of plastic shower rings sliding across a steel rod filled her ears as her half-brother concealed himself inside the tub. Right on cue, her father emerged from the master bedroom and closed the bathroom door behind him. The gunshot that rang out ten seconds later was loud enough to rattle all the pictures hanging on the wall, followed almost at once by the muted thump of a heavy weight collapsing to the floor.

  Horrified tears streaked down Dana’s cheeks and blurred her vision. Through the veil of tears, she watched numbly as her mother emerged quickly from the master bedroom, alerted by the commotion out in the hallway.

  Dana’s heart shattered into a million tiny pieces at her first glimpse of the beautiful face she hadn’t seen for more than thirty-five years. Same short blonde hair as her own. Same pale blue eyes. Same diminutive figure.

  Sara Whitestone knocked lightly on the bathroom door, a pattern of worry-lines etching a series of deep wrinkles into her smooth forehead. ‘James, honey? Are you okay? What was that noise?’

  The monster cleared his throat inside the bathroom. ‘I’m fine,’ he coughed. ‘I’ll be out in just a minute.’

  Sadly, Sara Whitestone was completely fooled by the mimicry, just as she’d been on the devastating night of 4 July 1976. Without knowing it, Dana’s mother had just made the same horrible mistake that would lead to her same horrible death. The same horrible death that Dana couldn’t do a goddamn thing to stop. Once again – just as had been the case when she’d been four years old – Dana found herself completely powerless to wake up from this awful nightmare. ‘Jesus Christ,’ Sara Whitestone breathed, laughing nervously. ‘You scared the shit out of me, babe. I thought you broke your neck in there or something. Hurry up and come back to bed already.’

  Turning on her heel, Sara Whitestone then walked back to the master bedroom with her satin night robe flowing behind her in the narrow hallway like the train on an elaborate wedding dress. Fifteen seconds later, the monster followed her out into the darkness and loomed in the doorway of Sara’s bedroom, just another seemingly harmless shadow in the night.

  Without warning, Dana’s body suddenly vaulted down the hallway at great speed; moved by an unseen force that positioned her just as easily as a chess player positions a pawn. In the blink of an eye, Dana was standing directly behind the monster, close enough to reach out and touch him had she been able to control her arms. From this distance, she could actually smell the murdering bastard. Smell the pure evil wafting off his body. A sickening combination of vinegar and battery acid and rotting meat that turned her stomach inside out.

  Inside the bedroom, Sara Whitestone lay on her side in the king-sized bed, dressed in only a flimsy off-white negligee now, the night robe she’d been wearing a moment earlier dripping from the doorknob of the closet like strands of shimmering silver garland dripping from the branches of a beautifully decorated Christmas tree. She’d propped up her pretty head coquettishly on one small hand.

  Sara smiled at the monster through the darkness. ‘You just gonna stay out there all night or are you gonna come keep me company in this big old bed, lover boy?’

  When the monster crossed the threshold of the master bedroom, Sara Whitestone bolted upright in horror as she suddenly realised he was not her husband. A tiny squeak escaped her lips, but she was much too stunned to scream immediately.

  Taking in a deep breath that expanded her birdlike chest nearly to the point of bursting, Sara finally let out a loud, earsplitting wail that caused the monster to race across the room and clamp a large gloved hand over her mouth. ‘Shut the fuck up, bitch,’ he hissed, spraying hot saliva all over Sara’s smooth cheek. ‘One more sound and I’ll chop up your precious goddamn son into so many pieces that they won’t be able to put him back together again for the funeral.’

  Sara Whitestone squirmed in the monster’s strong grasp, an impotent little field mouse struggling to escape an eagle’s powerful talons. Smiling, Nathan Stiedowe leaned down into her face. His perfectly even teeth sparkled brightly in the darkness, emitting an eerie, almost phosphorescent light. ‘Tell me something,’ he snarled. ‘Do you even know who I am?’

  A brief look of confusion coloured in Sara Whitestone’s beautiful face, followed almost at once by a horrified jolt of recognition that Dana could feel inside her own chest. ‘Jeremiah,’ Sara whispered.

  Rearing back, the monster slapped Dana’s mother so hard across the face that Dana could hear Sara Whitestone’s teeth rattle in her mouth. ‘That’s not my name anymore, slut,’ the monster spat. ‘You made damn sure of that a long time ago and now I’m going to kill you for it. For your information, my name’s Nathan Stiedowe now – not that you give a flying fuck. Stupid little cunts like you never give a flying fuck about who you hurt, do you? Only worried about yourselves and your precious goddamn families. But before I kill you, tell me something first, Mom. How could you do it, anyway?

  ‘How could you give away your own fucking baby?’

  CHAPTER 6

  Annabeth Preston had performed her rudimentary version of a c
astration on Nicholas the day he’d turned thirteen – the same day she’d started giving him the testosterone shots to ensure his continued physical development. After all, she certainly wouldn’t want to arouse anybody’s suspicions, now would she? Of course she wouldn’t. Wouldn’t want anyone to suspect that the devil’s soul lurked just beneath the façade of that gorgeous angel’s face of hers. And apparently she’d grown weary of arousing other things on Nicholas, too. Unholy things.

  Even though they weren’t Jewish – they were Catholic – Nicholas had received a horrifying bris when other boys his age who actually were Jewish were busy celebrating their bar mitzvahs. Not that the Catholics had anything to puff out their chests and crow about when it came to the ghastly practice, though. In medieval times in Europe – back in the days when women weren’t permitted to perform in choirs during religious services due to their lowly social standing – the Roman Catholic Church had often castrated boys in order to prevent their voices from breaking at puberty, allowing the lads to develop especially high vocal ranges. Italian church records dating all the way back to the 1550s mentioned castrati, and it wasn’t until the late-1880s that the church had finally condemned the practice officially. A hundred years later – when Catholic priests would fill in their time by molesting untold numbers of altar boys behind the locked doors of vestibules, the church would turn the same blind eye to the sickening abuse, led by none other than cover-up master Pope Benedict the Sixteenth himself.

  Early-onset puberty had allowed Annabeth Preston to dismiss the concerns of Nicholas’s voice not developing properly. His adult voice was already there. Even at thirteen years old, he possessed a deep baritone that people often mistook for an adult’s whenever he spoke with them on the phone, often leading them to think that his cadence and pitch belonged to his deceased father. ‘You sound exactly like him,’ they’d say with amazement in their own voices. ‘It’s uncanny.’