It was then that I noticed the sliver of shadow beneath a small window that was part of an alcove cut into the wall. The shadow moved. No, the shadow was rocking. I heard the creak of wood. A shiver raced up my spine. As the chair rocked forward, the pale light from the window revealed a hand curled over the chair’s arm. Behind him, the sky was bleak.
“Look.” My voice quaked. “I—I don’t know what you’re talking about or who you are even, but we don’t have to do anything rash here. It’s not too late to let me go, and we can forget about this whole thing.”
I felt vulnerable on the floor so, with great effort, I wedged my feet underneath me and worked my way into a standing position by using the wall to support me.
“Look at him.” The man sounded familiar, but I wasn’t sure why. I narrowed my eyes, trying to cut through the room’s murky depths, but it was like trying to open my eyes in the ocean.
“At who?” I asked. Then my eyes landed on the glass trunk at the foot of the bed. “But I can’t move,” I whispered. “You’ve tied my feet together.”
“Are you going to run?”
“No. I won’t run.” My knees knocked together. “I promise.”
He stood up. Meg’s gun glinted from his belt loop. He noticed me staring at it. “That’s right. You’re not going to run.” The shadow slid from his face, and standing before me was Old Man McCardle. He wore a camouflage vest with a utility belt tied around his army green pants.
I stammered. “It’s you. It’s—” But I couldn’t finish. Evil had roamed our school’s halls unnoticed and untouched. Fear left a gaping hole in my insides.
He didn’t answer. McCardle crossed the room. He bent down beside my feet. I saw that his left hand was wrapped in bandages. The smell of tobacco choked me. A blade flashed. I shrieked and shut my eyes, but then the ropes fell loose from my legs. I rolled my ankles, stretching them. At least one part of me was free. I wondered if his other victims had been so lucky and tried to tell myself that there was still time to win.
McCardle’s eyes were sharp and cunning. He pointed to the glass trunk. “And the Lord said, ‘Look upon my son.’”
I hesitated, then caught another glimpse of the gun. My feet still numb, I advanced slowly until I could see over the lip of the open glass casket. I brought both hands to my mouth. My knees buckled. Inside the syrupy liquid was the floating body of a teenage boy. Much of him had been decomposed. Bits of his teeth showed through the pruned skin of his cheeks. The nose had begun to recede into the skull’s abscess. Tufts of hair were missing from his scalp. But none of that was the most grotesque part.
The eyes bulged from the sockets. Crusted blood formed a ring around them. I thought of the boy with the missing eyes and knew at once that I’d found them stuck haphazardly to fit into the naked corpse. The first to decompose, I thought. The eyes were the first thing to decompose. My head grew woozy.
Each of the boy’s legs was a different shade of flesh. One was pale and the other olive-skinned. Jagged stitches attached the thighs to the hip joint. Between stitches, skin flaked from the wounds, and it was clear that the old and the new body had never healed together.
“The hand,” I said, and I wasn’t sure whether I’d meant to say it. Only that my eyes were glued to the floating cadaver festering in pustule liquid. “None of the bodies were found missing two fingers.” I stared at the boy’s left hand, where a new pointer and middle finger had been attached using the same barbed stitching. “There’s a body that hasn’t been found yet?”
I peeled my eyes away from the monstrosity to look back at McCardle. He held his left hand up, and I noticed now that the bandages ended in nubs on his left hand. He’d used two of his own.
I closed my eyes and breathed through my nose. “This is what you’re going to do to me? You’re going to use me for parts. You’re sick.” Then a piece of my memory clicked into place. Paisley at the field party. Old Man McCardle, his son, and the tractor. I turned back to the corpse. The legs, which had been caught in the machinery. Perhaps his fingers had been, too. “This is your son. The one that died. You’re trying to rebuild him. You can’t fix him. He’s gone. You’ve gone mad,” I screamed. “You don’t need to hurt me to make him whole.”
“Of course not,” he said. His tongue slid over his lips. I didn’t know if he was playing some kind of joke on me. Toying with me as he would prey. The Hunter of Hollow Pines was standing right in front of me, and I felt the clock of my life winding down.
Thunder crashed overhead, shaking the walls and causing me to jump. I struggled with the ties on my hands again. “You can’t do this. You can’t.”
McCardle came closer, taking even steps toward me. I retreated until my calves were against the cool glass of what I realized wasn’t a trunk at all, but a coffin. “He was buried into death in order that he be raised from the dead by the glory of the Father to walk in the newness of life. So sayeth the Lord.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Then the Lord formed him of dust from the ground,” McCardle boomed. “And the man became a living creature.”
I shook my head. Mucus dripped from my nostrils. Tears flooded my eyes.