Bram
A waking nightmare. My life had been reduced to that so very long ago. There are only so many terrors a human being can undergo before the body decides to shut the shitshow down. That stark numbness I’ve become so familiar with has transcended into something deeper, something perhaps far more meaningful, and it’s as if I’m watching all of this sublime misery from some place up in the clouds. The Peter Woodley Show. A horror flick that hasn’t quite hit its climax yet. A story of misfortune embedded in sorrow and rolled in misery for good measure. It’s overwritten, overdone, over-the-top, but ironically, it is not over. In fact, it might just be far from that.
In a strange ballet of what feels like choreographed moves, Ree and I head out front. The howl of a man comes from down the street as our footsteps quicken. We find ourselves in the Montenegros’ backyard, only to meet up with a deluge of black feathers. A stark naked woman—Astrid herself sits stuffed in a tire swing, her neck cinched with a wire, her mouth agape, stuffed with a bloody stump with dark feathers pluming out.
Ree gags on sight, screams so loud and long she sounds like an opera singer working her vocal cords. But my eyes flit to the poor woman’s left hand, bloodied as if a finger were severed, and I know which one.
Miles Montenegro lets out a low guttural cry, one after the other while I call 911 on my cell in a panic. The panic is what they expect, so I know to give it. And although the panic is indeed very fucking real, it’s not entirely of the new tragedy unfolding.
“God, the kids. I’ll make sure they’re not watching.” Ree staggers toward the house and in through the back door.
Miles falls to his knees, his face pitched toward the heavens as he shouts the wordwhyover and over again. Astrid swings in the breeze, every inch of her folded body as disturbing as the next. Across the yard lie scattered pieces of that bird, that damned bird she lugged around with her everywhere she went. It looks as if it was torn apart with bare hands.
Who in the hell could do this? If Astrid saw someone so much as give a crooked look to that creature, she’d have them on a spit. Her adrenaline would have kicked in. There was probably a struggle. But that calling card. I have no doubt in my mind that a body part from that poor woman now sits in my garage in a box like some twisted trophy.
The fire department arrives on the scene, their faces white with shock, vomiting ensues. One retch inspires the next. The cops show up, and I’m shuttled out front, asked a million questions before I’m left to stagger back toward my own house. A crowd thirty deep congregates around the Montenegro home, providing an impromptu vigil.
Ree comes back out and pulls me to the side. “I called Tessa. She took the kids to her house. She’s letting them spend the night. They wanted Lilly and Jack, so I sent them, too.” Her voice shivers. Her body convulses as if she were having a seizure.
“It’s okay.” I wrap my arms around my wife, sink a kiss over the top of her beautiful head, and wonder how in the hell we will ever survive this.
Darkness falls, and the crowd dissipates. No sign of Lena or Ree’s mythological mother I’ve yet to meet, and I was fully expecting both.
Ree lures me to the shower, undresses me robotically, undresses herself, and it’s a relief, a pleasure. I would do anything to forget the last twenty-four hours, the last entire decade. She runs the water and takes me in with her, our bodies inadvertently slow dancing under a prickling of heat. Hellfire and damnation. The water’s too damned hot, but it feels necessary as if it were stripping us of something horribly demonic, a past we can never escape.
Her hands cup my cheeks as she pulls me close, her skin beaded with moisture, droplets of water hanging precariously off each and every lash. Ree looks like a fantasy, a mermaid come to life with that long honey-blonde hair slicked back, her ruby lips quivering.
“Peter”—she hisses my name, my real name, and it lacerates open this wound that’s been festering for so very long—“tell me right now. Did you do it? Did you kill all those women?” Her eyes search me for clues that my mouth seems unwilling to give.
“No”—it comes out curt and a touch too loud, breaking the spell for a moment—“but there are some things I need to tell you. Things that I could never have told you from the beginning.”
She gives a brief nod, her gaze magnetized to mine. “There are some things I need to tell you, too.”
