“She’s not your anything! She’s a person!”
They’re standing toe-to-toe now, faces livid and trembling, and Julie somehow appears to be staring him down, despite being a foot shorter.
“Daddy?” Sprout says, her voice so soft and timid it’s almost lost in the tense air. “I want to build things.”
Abram gives the gate a fierce kick. The lock snaps and the bar swings open. He grabs Sprout under the shoulders and lifts her roughly onto his bike. He starts the engine and takes off in a spray of mud, and Sprout shoots Julie a sad glance before they disappear into the woods.
For a moment, the only sound is the discomforting squeak of Julie’s teeth grinding. Then she jumps on her bike and starts it.
“Julie, don’t,” I say, running toward her.
“Don’t what?” she snaps.
“Don’t keep pushing him. You don’t know what he’ll do.”
“He’s pushing me,” she says with her back to me, and I’m suddenly hyper-aware of the shotgun strapped to it. “I don’t know what I’ll do.”
She twists the throttle and roars up the trail. With a mounting sense of dread, I go after her. My brain feeds me images of possible outcomes, and by the time the trees begin to thin in anticipation of a clearing, I am bracing for war, begging my past self to loan me his combat skills one more time.
Then I round a corner and Julie and Abram are there, stopped at the clearing’s edge, and I hit the brakes and the bike slips and tips over and slides away from me as I roll to a stop in the dirt. Neither of them even look at me as I pull myself up and brush the mud off my clothes. They’re looking straight ahead, at a log cabin in the center of a small, sunny clearing. Rough-hewn timbers, shingled roof, a brick chimney promising cozy evenings by the fire—it’s the classical image in every detail except the door and windows. The door is a not-so-rustic slab of riveted steel, and the windows are dark holes covered by less-than-quaint steel gratings.
In the center of the door: a logo. A jagged, hollow mandala.
Abram yanks his rifle out of his backpack and gets off his bike. Julie does the same.
“Stay close to me, Mura,” Abram says, and moves toward the porch. No rocking chairs. No lanterns. A stack of ammo crates where a stack of firewood should be. He steps to a window grating and listens. The only sounds I hear are distant bird calls and the rustling of pine branches. He grips the door’s heavy latch, readies his weapon, and pulls the door open.
There is no one inside to shoot. The cabin is empty. No furniture, no beds, just a bare floor and a kitchen counter covered in utensils that probably aren’t for cooking. Instead of elk heads and landscape paintings, the walls are lined with shackles. Rubber cuffs and collars hang from thick cables bolted to the wall. The shackles are unoccupied, but the dark stains on the walls tell a dark story.
“What is this?” Julie whispers, keeping her shotgun braced and ready.
Abram sifts through the tools on the kitchen counter. Scalpel. Speculum. Cranial saw. I think of Nora’s Morgue and then the facility that preceded it, a place to study the Dead and to practice killing them. It’s the simplest explanation, but something is askew.
I step forward and lift an object off the counter just to verify what I’m looking at.
A doll. A plastic baby doll, naked and bone white, with a blank, flat oval where its face should be.
“Daddy, look,” Sprout says, picking something off the floor and holding it out to Abram. It’s the baby’s face. Or one of them, anyway. I see others scattered across the countertop, little paper ovals cut out of magazines: attractive men and women smiling blandly.
Sprout pushes the cutout onto the doll’s face, and it sticks.
What was happening in this cabin?
Abram shakes his head as if to regather his focus. He kneels down and lifts a hatch up from the floor. He pulls a flashlight from his pack and looks at Julie.
“Stay with Sprout.”
Julie shakes her head. “I’ll cover you. R can stay with Sprout.”
“I don’t need cover and I don’t trust ‘R.’ Stay with Sprout.”
He descends the ladder and disappears into the square of darkness. We wait.
“Well?” Julie calls to him after a moment.
No answer.
“Abram?” She steps to the edge of the hatch and peers into the darkness. “Abram!”
She looks at me, twisting her hair. “I can’t see him.” She glances at Sprout, then back at me. “Go down and check.”
I realize I’m standing in a far corner of the room as if something has backed me into it. I don’t remember moving. The basement hatch is a perfect black square, like a missing pixel in the rendering of reality.
“R?”