***
The doctor was true to his word. Avery was allowed into the room seven minutes later. Another one of those stuttering sobs came crawling out of her throat when she stepped through the doorway. Rose was lying motionless in bed, hooked up to a breathing tube. The doctor had warned her before entering that she was unconscious and could likely remain that way for at least a day or so.
There were still two nurses in the room, one of whom gave her a heartbreaking look. The other nurse was checking Rose’s vitals on a monitor that stood by the bed like a sentinel watching over the terrible scene.
Avery approached Rose’s bedside and took her hand. She squeezed it lightly and slowly sank into a chair. She was dimly aware of the nurses taking their leave as she broke into a crying fit. For a moment, she felt like the fabric of space and time had torn open and spit her right back to Ramirez’s bedside—when he had been coming around and sure to come home any day. Of course, that’s not how it had played out. He had been murdered in his hospital bed when she was elsewhere trying to find a killer.
Of course, the hand she now held was not Ramirez’s. Still, the implication was the same. Rose had done this to herself for some reason—likely for reasons closely related to her mother. The only glimmering hope in all of it was that, according to the doctor, Rose had changed her mind at the last moment and had called for help. So maybe all wasn’t lost. If Rose could change her mind in such a dark moment, maybe it meant there was also hope for repair between the two of them in the future.
How about you stop worrying how you can benefit from this and worry about her getting better, you selfish bitch, she told herself.
Because when it came down to the bare bones of it all, this was her fault. She was sure a therapist or any good friend would shoo this away, claiming that their stressed relationship might have been only a small part of Rose’s troubles. But Avery could still easily replay the brief visit to Rose’s apartment when Rose had screamed at her to get out.
No…this was pretty much one hundred percent her fault and she just had to learn to deal with that. Maybe it had been a mistake to go back to work so soon—or at all, for that matter. She had put Rose second again and look what had happened.
“I didn’t know what else to do…” Avery said. “Rose, I’m sorry. I didn’t know where to go or what to do and without Ramirez…work seemed the only option.”
She had no idea if Rose could hear her or not but admitting it all out loud was freeing. It also brought on another bought of weeping. Avery stayed there, at Rose’s bedside, her daughter’s limp hand held tightly in her own.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
Janice Saunders could feel the migraine coiling around the inner workings of her head, tightening its grip like a python. She felt it behind her right eye first, as usual. But it was stretching out to the back and then around the base of her skull. She’d had enough of them to know what was coming and was glad that her work day was over. She was walking up the steps to her porch when she felt the first real pangs of the migraine hit and her thoughts instantly turned to the ibuprofen in her medicine cabinet and the peppermint essential oil on her bedside table.
The headaches were a result of her job. As if the stress of putting together those stupid pointless government proposals wasn’t bad enough, staring at a computer screen for eight to ten hours straight was certainly a culprit as well. It was so bad that Janice would sometimes even skip watching TV on the nights when she’d had a particularly bad day. She was already five episodes behind on This Is Us and hadn’t even gotten to start the second season of Stranger Things.
She’d quit the damned job if it didn’t pay so well. With her next paycheck floating in her mind’s eye like some wavering finish line, Janice unlocked her front door. She pushed the door open, wondering if today would be the day the place no longer felt too big. Her husband had left a little over a year ago and the place still felt too big for her, like it was no longer hers. Some nights, it felt like it was trying to swallow her and—
As she pushed the door closed behind her, Janice noticed the mess that the living room was in. It made no sense at first but then a stark feeling of absolute terror seized every nerve and fiber within her body.
A series of clown faces were staring at her. Dolls, stuffed animals, cardboard cutouts that had been taped to the walls. They all smiled at her, their greasy painted grins like bloody gashes. She looked from wall to wall, like a deer caught in headlights. Her mind was too slow to reach the obvious question of where the hell they had all come from. In that moment, terror was all she knew.
There were at least thirty clown faces looking at her. They had been propped on her sofa, sitting on the bar area that separated the living room from the kitchen, on the living room floor. Some were the so-called cute antique clowns with jolly smiles. Others were the more menacing kind that newer generations had claimed as their own thanks to Stephen King.
She felt a scream rising up in her throat. She hoped that when it came out, it would unfreeze her knees so she could get the hell out of there. But with the scream came logic.
Someone put these here, she thought. Someone broke into your house and put them here. And they know about your thing with clowns…This is a mean prank, a very mean prank, and whoever broke into your house might still be here and—
That’s when a figure rose up from behind the bar from the kitchen side. They’d been hiding there the whole time. It was the figure of a man, dressed in a black hoodie and sweatpants. She did not see his face because it was covered by a clown mask. The skin of it was a mottled gray and the sinister smile stretched from one side to the other, impossibly wide.
The man behind the mask let out a high-pitched giggling noise. And then he brought out the knife.
Still giggling manically, the clown climbed over the bar with insane agility, the knife raised in the air. Tufts of colorful hair flowed out behind him like pure nightmare fuel. Seeing this, that’s when Janice’s bladder let go.
Perhaps it was the warm trickle running down her legs that finally broke her free. With her heart slamming like a caged animal in her chest, Janice turned and headed for the door. Her hand was about three inches away from the knob when the knife plunged into her back, just below her right shoulder blade.
The pain was sharp and immense, particularly when the blade clanged against the bone of her shoulder. She cried out, partially in pain and partially the bloodcurdling scream her lungs had been working on for the last several seconds. She felt the knife pull away but then it was in her again, this time lower. Then again and again.
Her legs gave out and she went hard to the floor. The clown was on her, rolling her over onto her back. As it straddled her, her first fear was that she was going to be raped, but that was a fleeting worry. In a pool of her own urine and quickly spilling blood, she realized that the clown had other things on his mind.
The clown giggled again, his large face maddeningly close to her own as his little legion of dolls watched from behind him. He raised the knife and brought it down. She counted four times before a dim sort of darkness finally crept in front of her eyes. The last shuddering thought in Janice’s mind was if she had actually stayed alive long enough to actually feel her heart stop.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE