The Dark: A Collection (Point Horror) Page 15

  The flashing mailbox symbol lighted up on her computer screen. She clicked it and brought up her new mail. Her banker had sent her a copy of her latest statement for her interest checking, money market and brokerage accounts.

  One hundred thousand dollars had been wired out of her account today!

  Her bills were big, but they weren't that big. She hadn't remembered authorizing a wire for that much money. She picked up the phone and called her banker. She asked for the time of the transaction. She wanted to know the name on the wire transfer form.

  "That's why I called you earlier," the banker replied. "The wire transfer request date was last Friday about eight o'clock in the morning, as soon as the bank opened. The signature on the form was Mr. Harry Fellini. It takes a couple of days for a wire to go through, you know."

  "Harry!"

  "The young man does have your permission to withdraw money from all your accounts. I have a signed paper here that says so. You don't limit the amount he can take either."

  "That's right."

  "Do you want me to put a limit on Mr. Fellini's future withdrawals and wires?"

  "Ah . . . no. . ." Bianca hung up.

  True, she had given Harry a debit card and an ATM card for her checking account. She had given him permission to withdraw whatever money he needed from her stock funds and money market accounts for books and other necessities to supplement what the Shipleys had given him. Bianca had wanted to help him and his mother.

  Harry had told her he would carry the debit card and ATM cards around to make her happy, but that he would never take money from her no matter how rich she was. Up to now he had withdrawn not a penny. Why all of a sudden had he taken one hundred thousand dollars? He hadn't even mentioned it to her!

  She picked up the phone and dialed Harry's house. Mrs. Fellini answered and said he'd started back to Brunswick. Bianca leaped into her car and went after him, hoping to get an explanation.

  It was getting dark out as Bianca drove through the Village right by the waterfront. She caught sight of Harry all right. He was sitting at a table in the corner of the cafe, talking to another girl. The girl was dark-haired and pretty. Her bosom was brushing against his arm as she leaned in his direction and whispered into his ear. He laughed at her remark. The girl looked like Marianna Haynes!

  Bianca stopped at the red light and didn't move when the light turned green. Other cars started to honk. One came up right beside her. The driver rolled his window down.

  "Get moving! Your car's in the middle of the intersection!"

  Bianca pulled over along the side of the road. She had believed Harry when he told her that he'd gone off to Brunswick to get a bodyguard's training as well as a pilot's license. Now she wondered what he was doing in his dorm room. Was he seeing Marianna? Did they live together during the week? Harry had promised to come home on weekends. That gave him plenty of time for "extracurricular activities".

  Harry would never do anything like that to her, would he? He said he'd never even liked Marianna. She wasn't his type. Why was Bianca watching as Marianna fawned all over him?

  Marianna had a way with guys. If she broke up with Rick Roscoe, she could seduce any guy she wanted if she put her mind to it. She was spiteful. She'd do anything to make Bianca feel miserable.

  Bianca turned her car around. She headed back home. She felt crushed — not that the money meant that much to her. It meant the world to everybody else — even Harry, who wanted to use it to impress another girl.

  The oppressive humidity of the summer night weighed down on her lungs. It made it hard to breathe. She heard sounds in the darkness. She could pick out the whine of the cicadas. An owl hooted. A dog barked. She was alone on this side street with no one else around.

  Someone was following her car. When she speeded up, he speeded up. When she turned, he turned. When she stopped, he stopped. She floored the gas pedal. He chased her down a winding, narrow road with overhanging live oak trees lining it. Branches swiped the sides of the car. One slammed against the windshield and almost broke it.

  She reached the end of the road. A yellow sign with the words dead end appeared in her headlights. Bianca veered into the parking lot. The other car followed her.

  Bianca leaped out and began running. Why was she running into stone pillar after pillar, some bigger than others, sticking up out of the ground? Was this the graveyard? Somehow the monuments and markers were way too far apart for that. Some of them loomed in the shadows twenty-five feet high. None in the graveyard were half so tall.

  Bianca remembered Fort Frederica. She hadn't visited this place since grade school when her whole class had come here on a bus. It was a national monument to commemorate how the English soldiers had beaten back the Spanish threat from Florida — not very far to the south — hundreds of years ago. The stone markers rose up like white wraiths under the silvery moon, dotting the nightscape.

  A dark form cornered her in a thicket of live oak trees. She stumbled over the intertwined roots. She fell flat on her face. At the last moment she got her arms and legs around the trunk. Bianca started to climb the tree.

  The freak grabbed her ankle. He was dragging her down, pulling her along the ground through puddles of standing water. Mosquitoes were eating her alive. Swamp miasma hung all around.

  He got his hands around her neck and started to push his fingers into her windpipe. He strangled off her scream. All she could do now was whimper.

  In a whispery, low voice he hissed, "I wanted that little girl. You stood in my way the other night. That makes me very angry."

  Bianca groaned.

  "Now you won't shut up!" he hissed more loudly. "That makes me furious."

  He tied a gag around her mouth and kept on pulling her along the ground. He roped her to a live oak tree that hung over a black swamp with gnarled tree roots sticking up out of it. The roots were in the shapes of tortured, twisted forms that looked human.

  What was he going to do? Drown her?

  He went back to his car to fetch something. It smelled like raw steak meat, fresh from the butcher's shop. He tied it to her ankle and let her foot hang into the water.

  "Now you'll understand how you made me suffer when you deprived me of my ransom for Little Katie. You shouldn't have done that."

  The freak raced off through the high grass. She could hear his footsteps for a long way. His car door slammed shut. His engine started. He drove away. She was alone in the darkness.

  Soon she saw what he had obviously intended. Two garish yellow eyes above the surface of the water swam toward Bianca in the dark. The moon was bright. The sky was cloudless. It was an alligator! The alligator began to eat the steak and gnaw on her tennis shoe.

  Bianca worked the gag down over her mouth. Her assailant had not had enough time to tie it right.

  She screamed.

  Chapter 3

  The hungry alligator had almost bitten through her shoe. She didn't know how to fend him off. She was too paralyzed with fear.

  Footsteps raced toward her. It was the same English doctor who'd saved her from the lighthouse the other day.

  "What on earth?" he exclaimed, shining a flashlight on her.

  He threw rocks at the alligator and chased the creature away. Then he untied her and carried her back across the Fort Frederica National Monument grounds to the adjacent apartment complex.

  "You're lucky I like to sleep with my windows open. I'm used to the humidity from all my foreign travels. Everybody else has air-conditioning going. I heard you scream."

  He put her to bed in his apartment and watched over her as she slept. He talked to her in the morning, giving her lots of advice about coping with her ordeal, and took her home.

  "Will you be all right if I leave you here alone?" he asked. "Nobody else seems to be here."

  "I can manage. I'm used to it," Bianca assured him. She remembered what Harry had told her about being strong.

  "Sometimes patients who experience trauma suffer flashbacks. It's goo
d to have somebody around in case you need them. You've been through a lot during the past couple of days."

  Her eyes met his blue ones as she climbed out of the car. It seemed like deja vu, another time, another place. Those eyes held her transfixed. She had forgotten where she was when he took her house keys from her and opened the front door. He scribbled his name, address and phone number on a piece of paper.

  He took down her phone number. "I'll call this afternoon to see if you're all right."

  She nodded. "I'm sorry to be so much trouble."

  "That's what doctors are for. That's what I'm doing here in Georgia. Brunswick Memorial is one of the finest hospitals in the States for psychiatry, my specialty. Your hospital draws interns from all over the world."

  "What's your name?" It was funny. He reminded her of someone that she had known very well.

  "Dr. Byron Kingsley. My friends call me Ronnie."

  She stood there staring long after his car had left. Shaking off her abstraction about the newcomer, she went inside her house. She opened an old photo album from a year ago and leafed back through the pictures. She put her finger on the ones of her and Doc. Ernie McCollough was the last doctor who had shown an interest in her case. Would Byron Kingsley be the next?

  Finally she glanced at her watch. Bianca was late for summer classes. She had to get over to the high school in a big hurry. In fact, she should have asked this Dr. Byron Kingsley, Ronnie, to drive her there.

  Distractedly she flicked on the radio while she stepped into the shower and changed her clothes. The announcer came on:

  This just in. Mike Fellini, notorious felon, convicted kidnapper and hardened thief, has just escaped. He was being transported from the city park at the harbor where he was helping the other prisoners clean up the lawn. On the way back to the prison he overcame the van driver. Now he is free to prey on the public. Lock your doors. Don't pick up hitchhikers. He is believed to be armed and dangerous. He is liable to do anything to resist recapture. And—

  Great! Bianca thought as she flicked off the radio. That's all I need.

  She ran out of the house only to remember that her car wasn't parked in her driveway. She'd left it at Fort Frederica National Monument last night. Bianca raced back inside to call a tow truck.

  In the meantime she'd just have to walk to school. She'd checked her wallet. Oddly enough, she seemed to be out of cash, though she had been to the ATM machine the other day. Cabs wouldn't take checks or credit cards.

  Where had the money gone? She didn't have time to think about it.

  Nothing was that far from anything else on St. Simons Island. Still she had to walk a mile in the hot, sticky weather that was coastal Georgia in the summertime. The live oaks that lined the street provided deep shade. She stuck as close to them as she could. Spanish moss draped from the branches brushed against her head. The dry, scratchy stuff that was full of bugs rubbed the back of her neck, reminding her of human fingernails.

  She stopped and turned around in a hurry. Was someone following her? She stood there listening, her heart beating a mile a minute.

  Marianna Haynes drove up beside her and slowed way down in her broken-down jalopy. Bianca turned away. She recalled the scene she had observed yesterday evening in the cafe. It made her blood boil to think of it.

  "You haven't got any wheels. Poor little rich girl!" Marianna taunted. Then she sped up, leaving Bianca in a cloud of exhaust fumes.

  Bianca heard the sound of leaves crunching behind her. A few twigs snapped. Worse, the crunching sound was accompanied by the scraping of something against the pavement.

  What could that be? With a sudden stab of fear, she knew it must be footsteps.

  She told herself to keep moving and stay calm. This was a public sidewalk. Other people could and did use it, even if it was late morning on a blustery hot Georgia summer day.

  The footsteps were getting louder. It sounded as if someone were about ready to run right into her. Was it because she was focusing on the sound? Was it because of the racket her heart was making? Bianca sucked in her breath to get up her courage. She turned around and peered over her shoulder. She couldn't see anyone.

  If the footsteps were that loud, somebody would have to be visible. Had somebody ducked behind one of the many trees, some with hollowed-out chambers big enough for a person to hide himself and nobody be the wiser? Or was Bianca imagining it all?

  Bianca speeded up. She stopped. The footsteps stopped. She resumed walking. They resumed walking. Now she knew that she wasn't imagining things. Someone must definitely be following her.

  Bianca ducked into the Christ's Church Graveyard. The gravestones and mausoleums were big and moss-covered. She hid behind the first mausoleum that she could find, a memorial to a man and his wife that rose at least eight feet into the air and was topped by a big cross. Soon she saw a shadow pass in front of the same crypt. She couldn't tell who it was.

  Suddenly footsteps pressing down the grass sounded near. The stalker had obviously bounded around behind the mausoleum to search for her. Without glancing over her shoulder, she bolted. She threw herself down on the ground behind some live oaks in a patch of high grass.

  Mosquitoes hovered overhead, big, fat ones that looked like vampires with long stingers. They kept on biting her. She didn't dare slap at them. She heard footsteps move all around her, as if someone knew she was nearby but didn't know exactly where.

  Right in front of her rose the biggest and oldest mausoleum on the island. If only she could reach it maybe she could find someplace to hide until the creep went away. Bianca didn't hear anything for a long while. She dared to stand up as quietly as possible. No one lunged at her. She moved forward slowly, step by slow step. Finally she pressed herself up against the big mausoleum door.

  To her surprise, the door opened. She stepped inside. No one would think to look for her here behind the wrought iron, swinging gate — rusty at that — of an old tomb. She could wait here until the assailant got tired of looking for her and went away.

  Someone grabbed her from behind. She tried to scream. His hand was over her mouth. He dragged her away from the wrought iron door to the back of the mausoleum. She saw shelves lining the walls from floor to ceiling, each with an old mahogany casket resting on it.

  He slammed her up against the cold stone wall, cold even in this heat. The wall felt damp with slime and mold. Spiders skittered around her. Cobwebs hung overhead, draping themselves from one side of the tomb to the other. They touched her cheek. They felt wet and sticky.

  "I warned you what was going to happen to you the next time I saw you." It was Mike Fellini's gruff voice.

  She could barely make out his shadowy outline in the dim light of the mausoleum. His voice she would remember anywhere.

  Had he been the one to abandon her in the swamp last night for the alligator? Had he been the one who had chased her and Little Katie up into the lighthouse tower, even though at that point he had still supposedly been in prison? Had he been able to come and go at will from his cell until he'd gotten so tired of it that he had escaped permanently?

  "I —I had to protect Little Katie. I —I couldn't let you kidnap her and hold her for ransom."

  She remembered all too well the incidents of the spring. If she hadn't let Mike think the cops were concealed behind a tree in the fog, he would have taken the little girl. Who knew if Little Katie would be alive now?

  "I — I also had to protect Harry."

  She gulped, recalling how Mike had been beating Harry silly that night in May. That night she and Harry had been so close, far from the way it was since Marianna had intervened.

  "It's payback time!"

  Mike's giant form loomed over her. The nineteen-year-old was nearly seven feet tall and weighed over two hundred pounds. He was built like a football player with big, broad shoulders and a titan's chest.

  "You can remember my kid brother while you're kissing this world goodbye."

  Holding Bianca firmly in place
with one hand, he reached up on a shelf with the other. He knocked over a casket. It popped open. A skeleton with empty eye sockets and white hair still attached to it fell out.

  It looked like a woman's skeleton, dressed in tattered, torn silks from early in the past century. Her leather shoes toppled to the floor, breaking off the brittle foot bones and taking them to the ground. Bianca didn't have a chance to scream before Mike lifted her up and hurled her into the casket. He slammed the lid down on top of her. She felt him lifting the casket back up on to the shelf. She heard footsteps leaving. The rusty gate swung behind him. Mike was gone.

  A dim light shone through a crack in the casket. She could hear birds from the outside. She could still breathe.

  Bianca had to get out of here. She tried to push the casket lid up the rest of the way. It was stuck. It wouldn't budge more than an inch or two.

  What was she to do? Die here lying in a mausoleum in an old, musty, moldy casket? Bianca felt for her cellphone in her pocket. Thank God it was still there! Would it work inside the mausoleum?

  She thought of calling Harry. When she punched in his number, it rang and rang. His message machine wasn't working.

  Should she call 911? They would probably think it was a crank phone call if she claimed to be stranded inside a casket in a mausoleum. It sounded like a horror movie.

  Bianca remembered the slip of paper in her wallet. She reached into her jeans pocket. It was still there, the one that the new doctor, Byron Kingsley, or Ronnie as he had asked her to call him, had given to her only this morning when he had taken her home.

  There was barely enough light to read the number and dial it on the cellphone. She punched the numbers in and held her breath while the phone rang.

  "Hello? Dr. Byron Kingsley here," came the prompt answer in that crisp British accent.

  "Thank God I reached you!" She burst into tears.

  "What's wrong, Bianca?" He recognized her voice. "Try to keep calm and tell me what's happened now."

  "I'm — I'm trapped inside a casket."

  "Have you been drinking? Are you on medication? Remember those flashbacks I warned you about. You could be hallucinating," he cautioned her.