Just as light lit the room, two knocks hit the door.
I stood. As I crossed the room, I heard footsteps, slowly fading, as if whoever had been there didn’t want to be seen.
And when I opened the door, the hallway was already empty.
A small box sat on the floor, its lid carved with the initials‘Z.’
I picked it up and closed the door behind me.
I moved back to the bed as I opened it.
Inside were two cassette tapes and an old voice recorder, one of those old ones that smelled faintly of plastic and dust.
I sat down and picked up the first tape, labeled 1998.
I slid it into the recorder and pressed play.
“I have failed,” a man’s voice said. “I have created a monster. Not just one. But two.”
I knew that voice.
I knew why he had failed.
And I couldn’t stop laughing.
I leaned back onto the bed. My chest hurt. One hand pressed flat against it while the other rewound the tape and played the first sentence again.
“I have failed.”
Again.
And again.
Laughter tore out of me. Too loud. Too hard. Saliva gathered at the corners of my mouth, slipping free as my body shook.
Monsters born from monsters will always be monsters.
It doesn’t matter how carefully you try to reshape them.
Some people never change. They only learn how to pretend better.
ONE
Emily
Ilook down at my sheer black tights and the pointed stiletto heels clicking beneath me as I rush down the sidewalk. Cold air slips through a small hole near my knee, the rip spreading from all the times I had to yank them back up. I lift my wrist, breath fogging in a pale cloud as my silver watch confirms it.
9:15 a.m.
I’m late again.
I was supposed to be there at 9:00 a.m. sharp.
My oversized wool coat drags on my shoulders, its weight pressing into my chest like it knows what I’m walking toward. The coffee in my gloved hand has gone completely cold, and the only trace of heat left is the bitter smell of coffee beans. None of it matters now. Nothing has mattered since the file arrived on my desk.
Inside were sixty-two Polaroids. Women in their late twenties. Sixty-two puzzle pieces positioned with chilling precision along the bare skin of their backs. Sixty-two families have been trapped in the same unanswered nightmare since May 2008.And the man behind it all is someone who can’t, or won’t, speak even two words.
I close my eyes and exhale once before walking toward the Halden Institute in Eureka Springs, where they transferred him last week.
