Blue Water Ocean Beach
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“What is going on?” I asked. “Why didn’t the other three people come back with me? Why are you here by yourself in this creepy lighthouse? And why is my phone out of service?”
He looked at his watch and then smiled, a look that sent shivers up my spine. “It’s nearly nine-thirty, my dear girl—the witching hour. This is when all those stories about monsters and demons begin to be fulfilled.” He reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out an old black cell phone, holding it up to show me the screen: dead. “This was mine. It died just after noon today.”
I stared at him, trying desperately not to scream or faint. I tried to make sense of what he’d just said but could think only of one thing—he must have been part of the gang who had taken me from the airport yesterday morning, the same group that had drugged me and stolen the jewels from my hotel room.
I felt sick, nauseous, and dizzy. My knees buckled slightly as the world tilted around me.
As if sensing that, Blue walked toward the stairway. When he got there he turned and smiled again, like a jackal. “You should be more careful where you put your phone,” he said, before turning away again, and starting up the stairs.
As I stood watching, confused, he began talking aloud. “I’ve told them that we’re not far from here, so they’ll probably get here soon—not that they care.” Then he disappeared inside the lighthouse.
The house creaked loudly, sending a chill through my body. The wind whipped across the beach and the waves crashed against the cliffs. A low moan rose from somewhere deep within the rocks, sending chills along every inch of my skin.
I looked down at my watch, but it showed no signal. I took another step closer to the door, thinking to go up the stairs after the man. But before I made it halfway to the steps, I heard someone else approaching from behind. There was the sound of footsteps clapping over wet sand as whoever was coming climbed the rocky path leading onto the beach.
For several minutes there was only the sound of footsteps climbing up to the door. Then the footsteps were gone. For a moment nothing happened. I thought maybe the coastguard officer had finally decided to call for help—or perhaps the person walking along the shore had come to investigate the noise.
But the footsteps started right up again, louder this time. They echoed from the cliff edge above. Someone was walking along the rocks. The wind was whistling softly in the eaves of the lighthouse, creating ghostly sounds that added to the creepiness of the scene.
Someone came running toward me from out in the surf. She was wearing a long red dress—a bride, I imagined—but she was pale and thin and her face had been horribly scarred. I saw her eyes first, which seemed to shine with a cold light, as though the moon had somehow gotten lost in her skull.
The woman ran straight at me, stopping short just inches from me, staring into my eyes. “Help me!” she screamed, reaching out and grabbing my hand. “Come quick! You have to save me!” Her fingers dug into my flesh, digging deep, drawing blood.
But the pain didn’t scare me—instead, it was a strange kind of relief. The horror of having a crazed stranger clawing at my hand seemed to dissipate and I felt strangely calm.
She grabbed me tightly by both arms and shook hard. In the process she sent the sea spray flying up and over our heads, washing her pale white skin and shining red hair. She was crying now, as if in anguish, but there was also something else in her voice as if she were speaking through some sort of machine.
“Save me, please… save me,” she whispered over and over until finally, I realized that her words sounded more like a chant than anything resembling coherent speech.
When she’d finished screaming, she stopped abruptly. I could hear her inhaling sharply as if in pain as if she hadn’t breathed properly for miles. Then she leaned forward and kissed me deeply, pulling me close to kiss my lips. The taste of her lips was sour and bitter as acid, but the shock of it was gone in seconds and instead, I found myself enjoying the feel of her mouth on mine.
At last, I understood what was happening, and I pushed her away gently, looking into her face and seeing that it was a mask of madness, a crazed expression of terror.
Blue stepped from around the corner behind her and held a gun in front of his chest. “Hello darling,” he said, smiling at her. “You’re late.”
The bride-wearing-the-red dress laughed, the sound echoing loudly from the cliffs. “Oh, you’re going to pay dearly, Blue.”
But Blue paid her no heed. He moved in close to kiss her again. “That’s right,” he said quietly, leaning in, kissing her neck and then her face, as if he couldn’t stop himself. “It looks like it’s going to be a long night.”
***
After the woman left, I wandered back through the house to see how the others were doing. To my surprise the place was full of people, some sitting silently in dark corners while others stood in groups talking. As far as I could tell, everyone was alive—which meant they weren’t dead either.
It seemed that the woman had been one of many people who had entered the house in search of an answer. And now all of them had gathered here, trying to figure out who or what had caused the disaster. Some had brought flashlights; most were using cell phones.
All of them appeared to be in shock, their expressions grave and troubled, with the exception of Blue, whose grin seemed to say that he was enjoying every minute of the whole thing.
I heard someone calling me and turned to see that it was Driscoll and his two bodyguards. Driscoll was holding a piece of paper in his hands. “This is where she lives,” he called to me, pointing down to the address. I glanced at the piece of paper—it was a note, handwritten on yellow legal paper.
“There are only three roads leading into town,” he continued. “And none of them go past this area. Which means she must live within a mile or so of here. Do we know anyone in that neighborhood?”
He passed the note to his men. “Check it out,” he ordered, turning to me again. “We need to find her. If you can find the address, you might be able to track her down before Blue does.”
“Can you send someone else after her?” I asked him. “Or maybe take me somewhere safe? I don’t really want to get involved.”
Driscoll shrugged. “Maybe later, if you help us. But you may not even have time to think about your own safety right now. I’m sure as hell not letting you wander out here alone. Not yet, anyway.” He paused, looking me up and down thoughtfully.
“If you’re worried about leaving the rest of these fools alone, don’t. Take some of them with you, and if she comes back—or any of those other people do too—”
He looked around the room at his friends, shaking his head slightly, then nodded to me. “Get going.”
I headed out to the kitchen to look for a telephone, hoping it would prove more useful than its electronic counterpart. I found it easily enough, tucked between a stack of boxes and a set of plastic chairs. It wasn’t working, of course.
I tried to call my phone company anyway, asking for my home phone number—thinking perhaps if it didn’t work I could use the emergency line. But no matter how many times I pressed the keys I got nothing but static and noise.
The only good thing I could find among the detritus in the kitchen were three old-fashioned landline telephones. They were old and battered, and they made me think of a small-town post office or a public library, though it was hard to tell which since there hadn’t been much traffic in the house before the phone company took it off the net.
I picked up the first one I saw and dialed 911. When I did, a recorded message told me that no service existed in the local area and that calls to outside lines were forbidden under penalty of law. That seemed unlikely to me, but I kept trying until I realized that the phone was probably broken. So instead I tried the second phone—a phone with an orange plastic handle.
“Hello?” I said when the receiver picked up.
“Hello, hello,” came the reply. The voice was high-pitched and sounded like it belonged to someone younger than the girl Driscoll had sent to check on me earlier.
“Um, is this someone from your neighborhood?” I asked.
“What do you mean, ‘your’ neighborhood?”
“Someone who knows you.”
“Are you a cop?”
“No, but…” I hesitated. It occurred to me that this little girl might not speak English very well. And if she spoke Spanish—she might be the wrong person to ask. “Do you speak Spanish?”
“Yes,” she said excitedly.
She was still speaking Spanish when I went back outside. Everyone in the kitchen and living room had disappeared, leaving the house to me. I walked around a bit, peering into closets and cabinets while I waited for someone to return.
The only person I saw was Driscoll’s girlfriend, who was sitting in the middle of the room with her face buried in her hands. She was trembling, so I guessed she’d been crying.
When a few minutes had passed and nobody showed up, I went back inside and called Driscoll again on the phone in the kitchen. This time he answered almost instantly. “You okay?” he demanded when I said hello.
“Not really, no. Who else is out there?”
“Nobody. Just some kids.”
“Who, please?”
He sighed impatiently. “Just go out and talk to them and try to calm things down.”
I went back out to the front porch. There, I found Driscoll and his two bodyguards standing next to a truck parked in the driveway. One of the men held a shotgun, and both carried long hunting knives in their belts.
“How many people are out there?” I asked.
“A couple dozen.” Driscoll pointed to a group of people huddled in front of a house down the street—the place where everyone had been watching me and the others arrive.
I glanced toward the house, but I couldn’t see very well through the window. And although it had looked empty, it might not be now.
Driscoll turned to the door behind me—the front door that led upstairs and into the house. It was closed, but when Driscoll reached up to press the button on the wall by the knob, the door swung open without making so much as a sound. “You want to take another peek inside?”
“I’ll get a better view if I come in and sit down somewhere. How about the basement?”
He frowned, then shook his head and stepped away from the door. “Too far from here. You know anything about computers?”
“I… sort of learned to program my computer at home.”
“That’s what I thought. Can you do that with these phones? I need someone down there to call my cell phone.”
“Sure.” If there had been a telephone desk in the kitchen, I wouldn’t have known, but I found one stacked against the wall in the hallway downstairs. I sat down in front of it, pulled up the phone book online, and started calling Driscoll’s cell number from various numbers throughout town—first using the ones I knew, then switching over to random phone numbers.
I didn’t expect all the calls to go through; I figured that Driscoll’s phone was probably turned off or something like that, and he would simply refuse to answer. But one after another, the phones rang. Every single time Driscoll picked up and heard the number calling him, he smiled and said, “I’m glad to hear from you,” and gave me permission to keep calling.
***
As I worked, Driscoll talked me through the process of getting access to his phone books—how it was possible to send out e-mail from any public address, and that anyone could do it as long as they knew the right commands to enter into the system.
Then, just as I dialed the last number, the screen froze. I tried everything I could think of: pressing the keys, moving my finger around the screen, even shutting the device off and restarting it—but nothing helped. The damn thing refused to respond at all.
There wasn’t anything I could do except give up for now. I switched to calling people at Driscoll’s office—people I’d met there before. As I did, Driscoll came back inside, and he and his men started heading toward the garage. “Where are we going?” I asked.
“To the house across the street,” Driscoll said. He paused a moment, looking over at me with an odd expression. “And how about some coffee?”
He headed for the kitchen—which meant that his girlfriend was also likely somewhere in there. The other man with the shotgun stayed near him, and one of the guys holding a knife was close behind. They were going to check the woman’s house first; once they knew Driscol had gone inside, they would follow along upstairs to make sure I wasn’t hiding anywhere.
I felt pretty helpless sitting alone in front of a dead phone, but I had no choice but to wait. So I waited, listening carefully and wondering what Driscoll must be thinking about me. What kind of guy would he find more threatening than the two men who followed him everywhere? I couldn’t believe he hadn’t already killed me.
If only I had brought my gun from the car…
The phone rang, and the man answered it—then put it back on the hook. He stood up and turned to Driscoll. “What do you want us to do?”
“Don’t let them out of your sight, and don’t let them leave.”
His men nodded and headed outside, leaving Driscoll and me alone again. We stared at each other in silence for several minutes until Driscoll finally broke the silence. “Are you ready?”
“Ready for what?”
“We’re coming in,” he said. “But if you want to run, this is your chance. You can take the stairs to the upper floor, but don’t try to hide anywhere on the ground level.”
It took me less than ten seconds to decide. If they were coming up the stairs, they wouldn’t notice if I left the lower-level entrance and went around to the other side of the house. The men would probably look in every room on the way, but they wouldn’t search everywhere.
So I made my move when the last man was just turning to go into Driscoll’s garage. I jumped up, grabbed a handful of snow from the pile next to me, and threw it as hard as I could at his head. It hit him directly in the face, and he stumbled backward.
The second he saw what happened, Driscoll ran toward the front door—and his friends rushed past him to see why their boss had stopped. One of them fell on the floor when he tripped over himself, while the other managed to reach Driscoll and help drag him into the garage.
“They’re not in here,” Driscoll yelled over the noise of the engine, sounding irritated. “Go check her place.”
One of the men with the knife said, “That woman was here, Doc.”
Driscoll ignored him and kept yelling out directions to the men searching the upstairs rooms.
Once they got Driscoll into the garage, I headed for the stairs. My feet sank deep into the snow, and I stumbled on some rocks in the walkway. A glance down told me that Driscoll’s two companions were nowhere to be seen, but then they came running out onto the driveway.
I ducked into the nearest building and found myself in a small foyer. The door to the kitchen was open, so I walked inside to see what it looked like.
At first, I thought I was safe—but then I saw that Driscoll’s men had left me a couple of gifts. In the corner, between the table and the wall, was a big piece of paper that I recognized instantly because it was still covered with the names written by Mr. Hargrove.
It was a map of the entire neighborhood and surrounding area. And I realized with a jolt that Driscoll had been planning something like this all along. He wanted to know where the bodies had been buried so he could start digging them up.
I didn’t have time to worry about what was happening upstairs or wonder what they planned to do with me. Instead, I picked up the picture and turned back toward the stairwell, deciding that the basement might be my best bet.
But even before I reached the bottom step, there was a thump behind me. Then, a scream.
I turned to see Mr. Hargrove lying on the floor, blood seeping through his clothes, and one of Driscoll’s men with a knife in his hand, pointing it at Driscoll. He had tried to grab for the gun on his belt, but his right hand had slipped. Now, he was too far away to use the pistol.
A second man appeared at the top of the stairs—he must have come up to check on what Driscall’s partner was doing—and the three men surrounded Driscoll. But they couldn’t kill him, which meant they had to make their move quickly. They circled Driscoll and his friend—who wasn’t moving much because he was lying in a pool of blood on the floor—while I backed away to the door.
When Driscoll spotted me standing near the kitchen, he called out to his men, “Get her!”
He and his partner weren’t the brightest guys Driscoll had hired, but they did realize that I’d helped Driscall escape. I didn’t think they would hesitate to put an end to me if given a chance. I knew that if Driscoll was dead, they wouldn’t hesitate to kill me.
“You’re going to pay for this, bitch,” Driscoll shouted at me, and the men lunged toward me.
I heard two loud cracks before the world went black.
The End