Page 2 of The Executioners Three
The branches were cold and damp in his grip with a few leaves still hanging on. They rattled with each of his steps—faster, faster as he jogged, then practically ran toward the street. Headlights swamped over him. The trees and fog fell away.
And Theo’s breath whooshed out with relief. He felt immediately safer here.
Which was silly. Really silly.
Again, his phone buzzed.
“Piss off,” he muttered. “The beer will get there when it gets there.”
After snapping the branch in two—a feat that required several grunts and several snarls—Theo crouched behind his left front tire to wedge the branch under rubber. It smeared dirt all over his jeans.
It also seeped cold right into his bones.
Once the second branch was also firmly in place, Theo hurried for his driver’s door, dusting dirt off his hands as he moved.
That was when a bell rang.
It pealed out, echoing over bare tree branches. Riding the lakeshore wind. A sharp, clear sound, much too close to be from any of the churches in Berm’s downtown.
The hair on Theo’s arms pricked up. On the back of his neck too, and without thinking, his eyes snapped to the forest. Toward the general spot where he’d seen that weird, glistening intestinal thing.
Click, clickwent his emergency lights. Noisy, bright.Click, click.
The smell was stronger, and the fog—had it gotten thicker?
Theo swallowed, eyes still latched on the enshrouded trees. He almost thought he saw a person in there. A hazy, grayish figure walking this way.
“Hello?” he shouted at it. “Is someone there?”
The figure halted, and Theo was hit with an overwhelming sense that he was being scrutinized. Judged. As if every misdeed he’d ever committed was being siphoned up to the surface and weighed on some unseen scale made of dead things.
And, god, it really reeked of rotting corpses now. Theo couldn’t stop imagining intestines and blood and ropes cutting into his neck…
In fact, every paranoid nightmare he’d ever conjured as a kid was searing through his mind. Murderers at the window. Demons in the closet. Ghosts under the bed.
Theo lifted his hands. They were shaking. “If you’re, uh, not okay, let me know because I’m… I’m leaving now.” He pivoted and bolted for the car.
“Please work,” he muttered once inside. “Please work, please work.” He was overreacting—he knew he was being a wuss about absolutely nothing. But that wasn’t changing the fact that he could hardly breathe. That his neck felt like it was being squeezed by someone’s dead fingers.
Ropes. Axes. Knives.
He revved the engine and shoved into reverse. His foot hit the gas, harder than was wise.Spin, spin, spin.The tires took to the branches. They crunched over maple wood. The Civic veered back onto pavement.
And Theo got the hell out of there.
The last thing he saw before he cranked into drive, his emergency lightsstill flashing, was a figure in the fog. Tall, broad-shouldered, and blurry around the edges, it hovered only feet from the witch hazel.
Flash. The figure stood there.Flash. The figure was still there.Flash.The figure was gone.
1
Freddie Gellar hadn’t meant to get half the student body of Fortin Prep boarding school arrested. It wasn’t like she’d woken up that morning and thought,You know what? I feel like ruining lives at the rival high school today.
Not at all. She’d simply heard shrieks coming from the woods near her house, so she’d called the cops. Like anynormalhuman with anormalconscience would do.
Freddie stabbed her broom halfheartedly at a swarm of daddy longlegs who’d taken roost on the ladder inside the old schoolhouse. She was supposed to go into the cupola, with its broken bell, and string up fairy lights.
But so far, all she’d managed was to open the schoolhouse door, sweep around the benches that would soon get moved outside for the Lumberjack Pageant… and then cough dramatically at the gathered dust and cobwebs on the ladder.
