Father of the Esurient Child Read online

on this side, only deeply grooved scratches from where Kayla had clawed at the wood during her confinement. He couldn’t get a telephone signal, either.

  “No! No, No!” Frankie screamed hysterically. Panic took him and Frankie pulled his gun; he fired the entire contents of his magazine at the door, hoping to break the lock. The blasts deafened those inside the chamber and filled it with the pungent smell of gun smoke.

  Frankie scrambled around frantically, trying to open it, but the barrier held tight. He rammed himself into it; he kicked it; but there was no way to put enough force into his blows. For a long while he examined it, scratched at it. Finally his phone beeped and its battery died. He was without light, except for where dim illumination seeped though the bullet holes and through a tiny crack under the door.

  Kayla merely sat still and watched him. She moved listlessly, and only seldom. Having been trapped for nearly two months, her patience was resilient.

  Eventually, Frankie collapsed against the door in defeat. Despondent, his eyes focused on the areas where miniscule light crept in; it revealed few details about the room that contained them. It was small, and painted red. The old latex covered everything with red: the floors, the ceilings, and walls.

  Finally, his sanity took hold again. Eventually, he would be rescued; their department had already been notified. It might only be minutes: hours at the most.

  “Kayla? What happened here?” he finally asked. He could piece the mystery together while he waited.

  “Screaming… Lots of screaming. I am his daughter. He is my father. The old woman once told me so.”

  “She told you… Ms. Woodson?”

  Kayla nodded.

  “Why you were locked in here? Ms. Woodson did it, didn’t she?”

  “Yes. Ms. Woodson. That was her name. She caught me, me and Casey. I faked the flu… skipped the church services that morning. She’d only leave me behind if I was ill—but she came home early and found us in bed. ‘Spawn of the Devil,’ she called me. That was the first time she punished me. The old woman made me paint it scarlet—locked me in until it was done. But I found the tunnel, Father’s tunnel.”

  “She locked you in here more than once?”

  “I don’t know for how long. I heard Casey argue with her outside. Eventually she let me out. Casey and I wanted to run away. I stole money from her so we could escape and move to Vegas; we got caught again and she locked me in. I went to the tunnel right away and found him.”

  Frankie raised an eyebrow. He was back in full detective mode. “Wait. Show me this tunnel,” he said, ignoring anything else she tried to tell him.

  7

  “Follow me.” Kayla said in her sing-song voice. She crawled to the back of the room where she slid between some old, vertical ducting and the wall. Stony, plaster lips exposed themselves as they neared. She squeezed between the old lathe strips; the rough underbelly of interior walls clearly visible.

  With his larger frame, the detective barely made it through. Plaster caked him with dust as he rubbed against the inside of the walls, breaking little plaster ledges away as he wriggled down the trellis pattern of lathe which the old plaster adhered to. Frankie pushed against the wooden strips, trying to break through the wall, but it was too strong and he didn’t have enough leverage to do anything more than crack the plaster and cake his face with more pulverized fragments of the stuff.

  After pressing on for several more feet, another path yawned open. It was low and flat, but spacious enough to accommodate the larger man’s build. A tiny ventilation grate allowed a little light in. Frankie looked through and saw the kitchen below. The burner was lit again, flames licking at the air. With an uneasy feeling in his gut, Frankie kept moving. He wasn’t claustrophobic, but he wanted nothing more than to get this girl out of the hellish old mansion which had claimed his best friend and her innocence.

  Kayla led him to another opening. This one led down again. The girl showed him a pattern of lattice-like boards that made a kind of ladder.

  He clambered over the edge and went after her. On the way down, he noticed a change from wood slats to fieldstone. They had moved below grade and entered some kind of chamber that ran parallel to the foundation.

  The mason-laid stone ended and they continued going down, below the house, now. Wriggling stiffly through the fissure in the bedrock they went lower, yet.

  They came to a rest in a cave deep in the earth. Moisture trickled through, pooling in muddy deposits. It was tall enough that Kayla could stand, albeit hunched-over. She pointed down the crooked corridor. “That is where I met him: my Father.”

  Frankie peered into the distance, his eyes had adjusted and he was able to see surprisingly far despite the lack of light. He meandered through the subterranean tunnel until it ended.

  A narrow shaft of light poured through the ceiling, cutting across the burrow at a slight angle. At ground level, a tiny crevice allowed a small amount of light into the channel.

  Looking around, Frankie sank to his knees. Early American artifacts were piled against one wall. The wall was a sheet of bare brownstone, which had been carved down to make a flat panel. It was an early cult’s tapestry.

  Frankie sat and took the mural in, examining it for a long while. The cave drawings depicted the coming and preaching of early puritan settlers. In graphical form, it showed the conversion of droves of the Natives and the banishment of their early gods. They were driven back to their master, depicted as a demon with a bison head and man’s body.

  He picked through some of the items nearby. Mostly, they were more writings similar to the Anaye one he found inside the Key of Solomon; another parchment had a relatively newly scrawled word in the header, wendigo.

  The detective glanced back at the mural, then more closely at the walls. They were pocked with the sorts of tunnels he’d just come through—the same kind that emptied into the old cellar where old lady Woodson’s brother had been devoured.

  As he turned, Frankie touched his cheek which stung from the wound. “Kayla? Let me see your hands.”

  He only caught a fleeting glimpse of her as she stepped backwards into the darkness. Her fingers on the right hand ended in jagged, bloody claws sharpened for months against the secret doorway. A chill ran down his spine and then he heard Kayla speak.

  “Don’t you see my father, Detective Franklin? He is right there.” Only her arm was visible in the beam of light; a ragged, clawed fingertip pointed to the cave drawing.

  He looked back at the mural, his eyes drawn to the central, demonic figure. About to turn and ask her a question he felt a blinding pain at the back of his skull. Otherworldly laughter and the sickening, echoing thud of stone impacting bone filled his ears. Pain flashed against the back of his eyes and Frankie toppled over.

  He rolled to his belly and drew his gun, pointing it into the darkness. The barrel wavered as he searched for her silhouette. “Kayla! I came to help you. Where are you?”

  The gun was empty, but he’d reracked the action and hoped she didn’t know any better. Panic ratcheted his heart tight and his legs felt cold.

  “You will be of service,” the darkness replied in Kayla’s voice—but altogether not hers, too. “Only my father helps me, now.”

  Despite the numb sensation, he managed to stagger to his feet. Another painful blow struck his cheek, just below the eye. A smaller rock this time.

  “Don’t make me shoot you!” Adrenaline made him shake, adding tremolo to his voice.

  “Oh, please. If you had any bullets left, you would have kept using them on that door.”

  Frankie cursed as she called his bluff. Targeting her voice, he clutched the barrel and swung a desperate roundhouse. Kayla screamed as the side of his Glock cracked across her the temple in a pistol-whip. She reeled into the shadows.

  Frankie lunged forwards and  tackled her, taking her down by the legs.

  The girl screamed and snarled like an animal—that same hungry sound he’d heard in the basement. Kayla wriggled one l
eg free and kicked the detective in the face with her heel.

  Frankie held tight, but she continued kicking, over and over, until he relented, falling limp and blacking out.

  A sense of the surreal dogged him as his consciousness returned in spurts like arterial bleeding. The world seemed cloudy and he winced against the pain that came back to him as a side-effect to regaining cognizance. He tried to reach for his head and brush away the tickle where blood leaked from his brow and made a rivulet down the side of his face. He couldn’t move!

  “Thank you, Father Anaye.”

  He could barely make out Kayla’s words. He heard a plinking noise: rocks clicking against each other.

  Pain. Hot pain in his head, stiffness in his extremities, he immediately recognized it as paralysis. Panic overcame him! No—not paralysis: restraint. She’d piled rocks on top of his arms and legs and pinned him down!

  “Thank you, my father. I prayed for food, and you provide it. You alone have shown me love and given me the power to overcome my enemies.”

  Frankie shouted. It only came out as a groan. “Kayla! Please don’t. It doesn’t have to be this way!”

  A flash and dull cracking noise—more pain as the feral girl broke his jaw with a large stone. Hot sticky fluid trickled down his neck line.

  “Do not interrupt me when I commune with my father. He is the only one who cares for me!”

  Tears accompanied a sense of finality. He was powerless. He did not possess the