Page 93 of The Player
On the one hand, I didn’t want to dredge it up, but at the same time, I felt like I needed to know, even though it was none of my fucking business.
“Is that why you slept against the door? Were you abused in that place too?”
Adam’s body went rigid.
“Do you really expect me to answer that?”
I shook my head. I guess I’d got my answer anyway, only he’d never admit it, and now, I felt like an ass for asking.
“I dealt with that place years ago,” Adam stated, his expression cold and hard as he stared past me into space. “I burned that fucking house to the ground and made sure the ones who needed to attend that cremation were still locked inside.”
“But you didn’t get everyone,” I replied. “Not the ones that Isaiah had on his list.”
“Then let’s go back there and hear from the man himself. He came here for a reason, let’s find out what that reason is.”
We both turned to head for the door. Colton was standing to the side of it, talking on his phone, and when he saw us approaching, he held his hand up to let us know he’d be with us in a minute. As we entered the hallway to head down to the chapel, we heard footsteps behind us, and turned to see Devon and Tyler coming towards us.
“I take it it’s showtime?” Colton asked, ending his call and pocketing his phone.
“It’s gonna be some fucking finale, all right,” Adam seethed as we stalked down the stone-lined corridor, our steps echoing to announce our arrival. The sound of Isaiah’s fate grew louder, more sinister as we approached the wooden door to the chapel.
The shouts and taunts from earlier had stopped, the chapel was silent, just like the boy who’d sat in the window of Clivesdon House all those years ago. A boy who’d escaped the prison of the children’s home, but never the prison in his mind. Not until he’d completed what he’d set out to do, what he’d told me all those years ago. That he was going to have his revenge.
I was the first to push through the door into the chapel, and what I found in there waiting for us was complete and utter carnage.
I stopped in my tracks, standing frozen to the spot, my mouth hanging open as I took it all in.
What the hell?
How the hell had this happened?
The others gathered around me, the sight in front of them eliciting the same reaction from them as it did from me.
“Fuck me, what the hell happened?” Colton gasped. “We were only gone for ten minutes.”
I took a step forward, peering into the red plastic bucket and spade that’d been left on the floor. The kind of bucket and spade a kid would use at the seaside. But this one was filled with hearts, human hearts, bloody, veiny lumps of meat that looked freshly harvested. No prize for guessing whose hearts they were.
There were pools of blood on the floor, and I side stepped them as I moved further into the chapel, glancing up at the chains on the walls. The chains that we’d shackled Isaiah to, but now, there was a mannequin hanging there, a boy with stitches drawn over his mouth in black ink.
Silent boy.
But there was no Isaiah.
He was long gone.
And beside the mannequin, written in red spray paint over the walls of the chapel were the words,
God put a smile on my face
But the Devil poured joy into my soul.
Empty spray cans were scattered on the floor, the cans he’d used to leave his message.
Colton stood underneath the shackled mannequin. “Who the fuck are we dealing with here, Harry fucking Houdini?” He lifted one of the cuffs to inspect it, then dropped it and cussed, “Fuck me.”
“Whoever he is, he’s a fucking weirdo. What the hell is this?” Devon asked, and I turned to see him staring at something that’d been left on the altar.
Approaching cautiously, I stopped dead in my tracks, my body going rigid when I saw the wrestling figure I’d given him almost twenty years ago standing in the middle of the stone altar. All these years, and he’d kept a hold of it.
