Father of the Esurient Child Read online

breast pocket. Letter for letter he wrote the apparent title down into something he might be able to read. Anaye.

  “Anaye?” he read aloud, remembering an entry from his nephew’s AD&D Monster Manual he’d thumbed through one boring Christmas afternoon. “Demon?”

  A strained growl, like the sound of a distant, wounded animal seemed to answer as he spoke. Startled, he whirled around, looking for the source.

  A long, tense moment passed. The room seemed to stretch and contract as he held his breath, searching the room with hungry eyes, but he found nothing.

  “Frankie!” He heard his partner calling from upstairs. “I think I found something!”

  Frankie took one more look about the room to reassure him that he’d been imagining the noise. He closed the parchment back inside the book and took it with as he searched for his partner.

  Climbing the multi-tiered staircase, he found Hugo standing at the top, waiting for him. High overhead, rose a three-story chapel ceiling. Frankie’s eyes fixed on the massive, carved granite plaques of the Ten Commandments; the monument was suspended on a shelf high above, where the large, stained glass windows could shed light upon it.

  “Not that,” Hugo said. “This. I found the fourth missing teen.”

  5

  Hugo led Frankie to a nearby room off the main hallway. As they neared it, the stench gave away the hiding spot.

  On the floor, face down, the body laid ripped open. His back shredded and torn apart, his broken bones were exposed to the air. Scattered like an exploded bag of beef jerky, his dried entrails contributed to the macabre scene. A rusty axe lay just behind the cadaver.

  “Whaddaya think? Wild animal or something?” The wound looked more like claws, obviously not from the axe. He offered the first suggestion, more to eliminate possibilities than nail down the exact cause.

  “I think the coroner’s gonna have a long day, marking each of these nuggets with tape. But yeah, any animal powerful enough to do this would’ve made some noise; it wouldn’t have struck him in the middle of his back, either. It would’ve gone after softer tissue, and the boy would’ve turned in surprise at the noise or size of the thing.”

  “Unless he was doped up on something stronger than that ditch weed circulating through the nearest high schools these days.”

  Frankie shrugged and conceded the point, although they hadn’t seen evidence of anything harder than a little booze.

  He rolled the stiff corpse over. It made a distinctly sticky, shuffling noise as the body pulled away from the floor. “No signs of struggle or other damages from the attack.”

  “This here is even more interesting,” Hugo pointed out. He stood and drew his partner’s attention to the wall. It was damaged and splintered in very specific areas. “It looks like the kid tried to bust through the wall.”

  “Yeah, I see it.” He and his partner examined the wall intently, poking and prodding at the damaged plaster and lath board. The discovery of the bodies was overshadowed by the unfolding mystery of this house; the missing boys were merely a sideshow to the rest of this freaky carnival that was the Woodson house.

  Pushing at the studs, Frankie noted, “Looks like there’s some kind of access here.” It appeared to be a half-sized door, “Maybe some kind of crawlspace entrance?”

  “You know,” Hugo nervously stated, “we don’t have to keep exploring. We can wait for coroner and forensics team. We found the fourth missing teen.”

  Frankie shot back a glare. “And the missing girl?”

  Hugo sighed. “Yeah. I know.” He knew it was more about solving a mystery to Frankie than it was about completing the original task of locating a DCS runaway.

  Tracing his fingers along the thin outline of the hidden door. He came to a stop where a decorative, wooden plaque engraved with Ten Commandments broke the contour. He took it from its hook and looked at it. Two of the commandments were scratched off, but the detective could still make them out. He would’ve known them anyway; his catholic upbringing guaranteed that. “Thou shall not steal. Thou shall not commit adultery.”

  “What?” asked Frankie. “Oh.” He took the decoration and examined it, then looked at the wall where it came from. “Lookit this. It was hiding a lock.”

  Hugo bent over to inspect the keyhole. It was old with distinct markings. Excitedly he began rummaging for the old key. He pulled it from his pocket and said, “It looks like—”

  Suddenly, Hugo was gone. With a deafening crash, his body erupted in a cloud of dust and splintering wood; the key flinged across the room. The momentum knocked Frankie backwards and to his rump as a massive granite slab smashed through the floor, crushing his partner underneath. An overhead bracing had given way releasing the stone to plummet through the floor, all the way down to the cellar, tearing his partner to pieces as it went.

  Frankie laid there in stunned disbelief, wordlessly working his jaw. He sat there for long minutes, mind reeling from the near-miss and sudden loss of his long-time partner. His brain didn’t know how to process it except by cold indifference and matter-of-fact logic.

  Finally, Frankie inched his way to the edge of the hole. Hugo’s shoe had been thrown nearby. Trembling and in shock, the detective picked up the shoe, not even noticing that his partner’s foot was still inside it, and cradled the bloody stump against his chest.

  His thoughts skewed irrational. He had a family! They might need this.

  He peered over the edge and down into the wreckage; the mangled sight confirmed that Hugo could not have an open casket, provided they could even find all of him.

  Darkness crept in at the edges of his sight. Emotion replaced the robotic detachment he’d been trapped within and overcame his senses, but Frankie didn’t know whether to scream in rage or cry with anguish. All he could manage to do was shake his head, bewildered.

  He slumped like a sack filled with grief. Everything stopped in that moment. And in the stark silence that followed came a lilting voice. “Father? Is that you?”

  6

  The faint words broke the detective from his painful reverie. It was the voice of a girl; the sound came from behind the wall.

  “You have sent me what I’ve prayed for?”

  Frankie pressed his ear to the wall, trying to make out her words. Grief fueled him. “Are you there? Can someone hear me?”

  There was a skittering noise, like the sound of knees crawling on the floor. It ended with the thump of a body against the secret door.

  “Kayla? Kayla Adams?”

  “My father! You have saved me! Just as you promised me you would.”

  “No. I’m not your father. My name is Detective Franklin; I came here to find you.”

  “Did you bring God?” the voice asked matter-of-factly.

  The question slapped Frankie in the face. He didn’t understand. “What? What do you mean?”

  “How did you survive this house if you have not God?”

  “I managed,” he said sourly, eyes downcast into the bloody hole where his partner met his grisly end. His friend had been the religious one—for all the good his faith had done him. “But for now I’ve got to find a way to get you out of there.”

  “The axe,” she said bluntly. “There is an axe.”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “It was the last thing Casey told me about. He tried to save me, to get me out. I slid him and Jeff the Anaye parchment. But I wish I didn’t; they’re all dead now. Casey told me he’d found an axe. I heard him chopping on the door, and then… I heard screaming downstairs. Then Casey screamed. And it was quiet. So quiet… for so long.”

  Frankie retrieved the key from where it had landed and inserted it into the lock. It fit perfectly; with a full turn, it released the mechanism.

  Creaking, the door swung inwards. Kayla scooted back to let the door hang open.

  The detective ducked through the door. Inside, he found a girl, wild eyed and emaciated. She wore ratty shorts and a t-shirt. Her knees were either calloused or skinne
d depending on the part; Frankie quickly realized why. There was not enough room to stand and so the detective bent, doubled over.

  “Kayla?”

  “Yes?” She brushed the long, snarled hair away from her face, revealing prominently Native American features that softened around her cheekbones and suggested only one parent had tribal heritage. “You brought Jeff’s Grimoire.” The girl noted the book that he’d taken from the dead boys; Frankie still held it in his hand.

  Frankie recognized her from the outdated photo in the county files. “Are you strong enough to walk?”

  “I think so, but I’m so hungry,” she complained.

  “Well, let’s get you out of here.” The detective dropped the tome and scooped her up in his arms; he slid to his knees so he could carry the girl out.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Away from here,” he replied, confused.

  “Father?” she questioned the air.

  Frankie looked at Kayla. She had obviously lost a part of her sanity in that tomb-like confinement.

  A cold breeze rushed through, blowing from the rear of the room. It gave Frankie a disconcerting chill; suddenly the door slammed shut. It gave an ominous, distinct ‘click’ when it closed

  “No!” he screamed. He put the girl down and scrambled to the hatch. He gripped around the edges, finding the seams to the portal, nearly breaking his fingernails trying to pry at the edges.

  With one hand he grasped the key, with the other, Frankie took his cellular phone from his hip pocket. He opened it and used the LED glow to look at the door. There was no lock