The Lost Ones Ch.18

Chapter 18

A Knock in the Night, Part Two

“You get out!” Edgar blustered, his blood running cold in his veins as Olivia wandered around the room examining his pictures and knickknacks.

“No,” Olivia said simply. “I waited a long time for this,” She shivered. “Stuck in a storm of ice for fifty years.” She turned a gleeful smile on him. “I could have let go at any time, but I told you I was a persistent and driven woman.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about!” Edgar protested. “I’ve never seen you before!” He shivered at the disgust in her gaze. “You weren’t even alive fifty years ago!”

Olivia glanced at the clock over the fireplace, checking the time.

“Technically true,” She acknowledged. “Thanks to you, Eddie. Can I call you Eddie?”

“No!” Edgar snapped at her. “Only my wife called me that!”

“Hah!” Olivia sneered. “That isn’t all she called you.”

“What?” Ed felt lost. “What do you mean?”

“The worst mistake of my life, the old bastard, the bane of my existence, the devil, the one I have to escape from,” Olivia counted all of them off on her fingers. “And that was just what she called you while she was alive.” She picked up a picture of Edgar as a younger man and smashed it against the wall before throwing it into the fire.

“Hey!” Edgar tried to get to his feet, but she simply pushed him, sending him tumbling onto the floor. Her heel pressed into the back of his neck as she kept talking. “Quit making things up!” Edgar demanded, refusing to be cowed, no matter what. “Angie is dead. The dead don’t say nothing!”

“Oh, Eddie,” Olivia said. “They say so much. So much they wished someone would hear. You just can’t hear us, usually.” Her hand closed around the back of his neck, and with a sudden jerk, Edgar felt himself sailing backward into his chair.

“What are you? Who are you?” Edgar felt his voice waver and crack and hated himself for it. “And stop pretending to be dead! I don’t believe in any of that church stuff!”

“No one cares what you believe,” Olivia said flatly. “What is real is real. What isn’t isn’t.” Olivia gave a long-suffering sigh. “Fine! You know what? Story time.” She waved a hand, and the couch leaped back and up before smashing its way out through the windows.

The storm streamed in. She breathed deeply of the chill air.

“I think I actually missed that,” She laughed. “I guess I really caught that winter spirit,” She winked at the horrified Edgar.

His mind kept trying to reject what he was seeing, but it simply couldn’t. The reality of it was terrifying to deny.

Olivia walked around behind his chair, leaning over it and draping her arms around his neck, and breathing on his neck. “You still smell the same,” She sounded amazed. “Did you change nothing in all that time?”

Edgar went to answer her, to tell her to piss off. Get out of his house. Anything to get her away from him.

“Shhh!” Olivia slapped her hand over his mouth. The fingers were cold and strong. Try as he might, he couldn’t make a sound. “The show’s starting…”

The snow warped and moved after a moment of confusion… Eddie saw himself sitting in his living room. But it looked…different, happier. He felt his adrenaline spike as he caught the details, seeing better than he had in years.

Eddie watched his much younger self reading a paper as his wife tried to get his attention. Eventually, Angie just left, heading out into a snowy landscape.

She left behind a small cupcake, a single candle burning in the middle.

Young Eddie saw it and sneered, throwing it in the fire.

How Edgar would like to give his younger self a beating for that. He never really appreciated the little things.

The image blurred, setting again into a nighttime scene; Young Eddie got to his feet and yanked open the door. There, shivering in the storm, was a familiar figure.

He could remember her now.

Edgar began to struggle with all his might, finding himself pinned as easily as a child holding down a puppy. He wept as he watched his younger self allow the woman in, watched him drug the cocoa with a hefty amount of whisky. Saw the woman finish one cup, then another, then she tried to get up.

The image blurred as his younger self attacked her, his own tears covering his sight. But he could still remember the words. Words that were whispered in a chorus around him now…

“You come into my house alone and expect me not to take what I want?”

“Please, no! Why are you doing this to me?”

“It’s your fault, coming here dressed like that!”

“Stop!”
“Just take what you deserve! Or would you rather I just kill you?”

“Someone, help me!”

….

“Please!”

He could remember how he had laughed at her for pleading. He hadn’t remembered her name after he tossed her out into the snow and the storm as naked as the day she was born.

If he thought of her at all, it was as his surprise birthday present. That had been his thirty-seventh birthday. Exactly fifty years ago.

He remembered the search party, the young police officer asking questions door to door.

Eddie hadn’t even gone to answer it. Angie had, and she told them that she was in all night.

No one checked. No one ever checked.

“I didn’t die right away,” Olivia said in a faraway voice. “It took a little while.”

Edgar tried to say sorry, to say something… but her iron grip kept his mouth shut as tight as a clamp.

“I had time to think about my Mum and Dad, how they would find me like that,” He heard the tears in her voice before the patters of liquid fell on his head. “How they would have to wonder how bad it was. If I was scared…” She sniffed. “I thought of lots of things as the cold slowly took me.” Olivia sighed and stepped away, releasing him at last.

“I-” Edgar started to say, but she backhanded him; he felt his jaw slam shut on his tongue as blood filled his mouth.

“I was taught a lot of things in Bible school.” She said conversationally. “One of them was that if someone repents, they are forgiven… they can go to heaven.” She quirked an eyebrow at him. “Did you ever repent?”

Edgar nodded rapidly.

“Do it again, now. In your head, ask god to forgive you.” She shrugged. “Maybe it will work.”

Edgar did. He really did. At this moment, he truly, desperately, frantically, and urgently believed in forgiveness. He prayed and begged and prayed while Olivia took out a small metal nail file and did her nails.

Eventually, he opened his eyes.

“Well, let’s just see here.” She reached out and grabbed his arm before snapping his wrist. “Nope, didn’t work.” Olivia laughed.

“Just kill me then!” Edgar spat, feeling the anger and fury coursing through him, overriding the fear.

“Kill you?” Olivia smiled like a shark, cutting off his rage like a switch had flipped. “I’m not going to kill you!” She laughed. “Honestly. Men!” Olivia grabbed the back of his collar and started to pull him slowly out the door. “Come see why I’m here.”

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Edgar landed in a heap in the freezing snow, his joints screaming as the cold got into every inch of him. Wincing and crying out, he pushed himself to his knees.

Light bloomed around him as Olivia came out of the cottage with the oil lamp that Angie had kept in the kitchen for emergencies.

As his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw them. The figures cowled and waiting.

“Here he is!” Olivia laughed. “Edgar ‘The Asshole’ French. Alive and shitting himself!”

One by one, the figures revealed themselves. The girl he took during the war, the neighbor's daughter who killed herself without speaking a word days after he was done, and more. Each and every one of his crimes.

“They are all here to see you, Edgar,” Olivia said happily, “Aren’t you happy?”

“What is the point of this?” Ed snarled. “You all deserved it anyway!” He laughed. “Go ahead, rip me apart,” He grinned. “Won’t change a thing!”

“We aren’t here for that,” A voice in the crowd said.

“Then what!?” He meant to yell, but the cold took his breath.

“Tell me about Angie,” Olivia said.

“You leave her out of it!” Edgar snapped. “She didn’t do a damn thing!”

“She knew,” Olivia sighed. “You know she knew what you did.”

“She knew what you did to all of us!” A woman in the crowd snarled.

“So what?” Edgar called. “What does that matter? She was a good wife! Kept her mouth shut!”

“Yeah,” Olivia said. “We didn’t appreciate that.”

His head snapped round, his neck creaking as numbness started to spread through his limbs.

“So we paid her a visit when she died,” Olivia grinned. “And made that clear.”

“You Bitch!” Edgar tried to lunge for Olivia, who just danced away, laughing.

As he pulled himself from the snow once more, he saw another figure approaching; it was hunched and lurching as it moved.

“Who’s that?” Edgar gasped.

“That?” Olivia said. “That’s your loving wife! The one who let you do that to girl after girl just to save her own neck.”

“We thought it was only fair to let you see her.” Voices laughed around him as they ripped the shroud from the figure.

Angie’s mouth hung loose from her face, her tongue hanging down. Hatred was twisting her features as she struggled against the burning spikes in her back.

“One spike for each of us!” Olivia said brightly. “One for each time she kept quiet!”

Edgar wailed then. He wailed like a child.

“Now?” A voice asked.

“Yeah,” Olivia said. “Now.”

One by one, the women and girls went and took their spikes from his wife’s back.

Each one whispered, ‘I forgive you’ as they did so.

In a few moments, his wife was standing straight, her body repaired as the spikes were removed.

When he saw her standing there, his wife, another part of him, broke at the pain in her eyes.

“Please, fix her jaw.” He begged. “I’ll do anything, but please don’t leave her like that.”

“We can’t,” Olivia said calmly. “She did that to herself. A penance for not opening her mouth all those years.”

“It wouldn’t have changed anything,” Edgar wept in the snow. “No one would have believed her.”

“She would have tried,” Olivia said simply. “That would have mattered to us and to her.”

The figures turned and walked into the storm one by one, fading away in seconds as the snow swirled around them.

Eventually, it was just him, Angie, and Olivia.

“You’re not going to kill me?” Edgar swiped his frozen hand across his mouth. “Really?”

“Not my responsibility,” Olivia shrugged. “And I have better things to do than stain my hands with your blood.”

“Then why?” Edgar asked. “Why all this?”

“Because she wanted to make things right,” Olivia said, squeezing Angie’s hand and starting to walk away. “He’s all yours, Honey, have fun.”

Edgar turned back to his wife, seeing the hatred twisting her features, and tried to speak.

Whatever pathetic words he was going to say died in his throat as his wife was twisted before his eyes, her eyes sunken in as her mouth opened even wider, long, thin dagger-like teeth growing even as her hands twisted into claws.

Angie howled, a long echoing cry as she gave way to the transformation.

He opened his mouth to scream, but she was on him before he could.

Edgar was washed away on a tide of pain as he was torn apart.

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TEN YEARS LATER

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Gasping, Edgar ran through the storm. It was coming for him again. It always did.

He screamed as it found him once more; blood covered the snow as he screamed and screamed.

Why did it always take so long for him to die?

Seconds after the blackness took him from the pain, he woke, hearing the howl of the THING in the distance. He started to run, knowing it would do no good.

It never did.

It always found him.

And he always screamed as he died.

He just wished he could remember why this was all happening…