Seed (23 page)

If you lead a man into a fog-covered field and tell him to walk straight, he’ll walk in circles instead. The further Jack walked, the more disoriented he became. He swore he was passing the same landmarks, seeing the same scars on tree trunks. He knew that if he was lost, he’d stay lost whether he kept going forward or tried to go back. And if he wasn’t lost, he’d eventually come across the thing he was seeking. His instinct assured him that the second was correct, to disregard the first. And so he did, because there was nothing left to do.

And he did find what he sought. Spotting Charlie in a small clearing, Jack stopped dead. Something about finally setting his eyes on her while knowing what she truly was felt like a miniature death. The part of his heart that Charlie once owned shriveled into a black, brittle husk. She stood with her hands at her sides and her hair hanging limply around her face—but the face wasn’t hers. Her smile was jagged, her eyes had lost their spark, and her skin had turned a fetid grey-blue—the color of a bloated, half-buried corpse. Her lips twitched when she saw him stop. Jack couldn’t control the emotion that washed over his face. There was his little girl, his angel, a monster.

“Oh, Daddy, I knew you’d find me,” she said with a perverse grin. “We’ve been waiting for you for a
very
long time.”

“Where’s Abigail?” Jack asked, and for a brief moment he was surprised he remembered his purpose for wandering into the woods at all. Staring into the twisted face of a six-year-old was enough to make any mind go blank, but Abby pushed through, reminding him that he needed to find her. If he was going to lose one he couldn’t lose the other.

Charlie’s crooked smile twisted down at the corners, her mouth taking on a grotesque angle of over-exaggerated disappointment. “Is that all you came for?” she asked, her large eyes now disturbingly huge.

“Give her to me,” Jack demanded. “You have no right.”

The frown disappeared, and for a moment Charlie’s expression went frightfully blank before blooming with vicious glee. She exhaled a screeching laugh and clapped her hands together in amusement,

“No
right
?” She hissed, her laughter suddenly gone. “No right? How dare you tell me what right I have,
chief
.”

Jack wanted to run. The look on Charlie’s face, the warped tone of voice, all of it screamed
Get the fuck out!
And yet Jack stood frozen, half in fear and half in stupid defiance.

“I want Abigail,” he repeated. He tried to sound as imposing as he could—but his tone betrayed him. He knew he wasn’t going to win this one. Abby was lost. She had been lost as soon as she had ducked into the trees.

Charlie picked up on that ghost of defeat, and rather than rushing him and putting him out of his misery, her face settled back into its perfect composition. Her big eyes were bright and doe-like again. Her cheeks were touched with pink. This time the look of disappointment was heartbreaking.

“Oh, Daddy,” she said in a voice that made Jack’s heart swell. “Aren’t I still your favorite?”

Jack looked away. He cringed at the question and clenched his teeth against the answer. “No,” he said with a surprising force. “You’re not my favorite. Abigail was always my favorite.”

That malicious smile returned to her face.

“That’s what I was counting on,” she hummed in her chest, like a dog growling right before a bark. “Maybe you’ll figure out how to get her down.”

Jack narrowed his eyes at the statement, then blinked when something wet dripped onto his cheek. Slowly tipping his chin upward, he pulled his fingers across his face. Blood. Above him, a pair of feet swayed in the breeze.

Abby rocked back and forth, the movement making it hard for Jack to see past his panic. After a moment he realized what he was looking at; Abby hung fifteen feet overhead, her small intestines looped around her neck in a makeshift noose.

A sob tore itself out of Jack’s heart, punching through his chest.

“So sensitive,” Charlie sang with a smirk. “Funny, you weren’t that sensitive when you feasted upon the flesh of your own mother and father.”

But Jack didn’t hear her. She could have said a thousand terrible things, she could have screamed it into the sky; he wouldn’t have heard a word over the deafening thud of his own heart. His face felt hot and vertigo kept him low to the ground. He dug his fingers into the earth, scooping up decomposing leaves, trying to steady himself despite the nausea that rocked him back and forth. He didn’t see her shift, but he sensed that Charlie was on the move. That gut instinct assured him that he had to pull it together, that he had to gather up the broken pieces of his heart and his mind and glue it all together in some sort of semblance of sanity.

He looked up to where Charlie had stood through the blur of tears. She was gone, and he found himself stumbling forward, spinning around like a spooked animal, searching for the predator that was most certainly hiding, waiting for the perfect moment to pounce.

“Charlie,” he said, her name cracking with desperation. “Charlie, don’t let it take you from me…”

A part of him knew Charlie was lost; that whatever had wrapped itself around her soul had squeezed the life out of her long before he or Aimee ever knew she was gone. But he couldn’t help but hope. Charlie had always been strong. He refused to believe his little girl would simply give up and disappear.

And then he saw her standing next to a tree with her chin tipped upward, her expression as sad as he’d ever seen. Remorse radiated from her eyes. She was looking up at Abigail, her bottom lip trembling as her sister swung overhead. But Jack wasn’t convinced. He had been strong-willed as a child as well—sharp as any kid in Rosewood—and the darkness had swallowed him whole. He had murdered his parents and forgotten it ever happened. Seeing Charlie standing like that—her expression grave—he knew that even if she
was
seeing Abby, she’d never remember disemboweling her sister, and she’d never recall how she got Abby’s body up into those trees.

Jack pulled the bag he’d brought toward him and reached for its bottom. Groping around until he found what he was looking for, his fingers wrapped around the handle of Aimee’s best kitchen knife. He drew it out of his bag like a knight drawing his sword, desperate for it not to come to this, but he saw no other way. It was a cycle: left unchecked, Charlie would be in this very same position in twenty years time—standing in front of her own child, devastated by the knowledge that her baby was lost. He loved her too much to let that happen. He loved her too much to let her live.

“Daddy?” Charlie was jolted out of her daze by the glint of the blade. She regarded the knife, her face puzzled. Jack held the knife at his side, the long blade pointing straight toward Hell. He waited for Charlie’s expression to shift again, waited for that monster to show itself once more, but instead of Charlie’s face going cold with rage, she stood dumbfounded and scared just the way Jack hoped she wouldn’t.

“Daddy, what are you doing with Momma’s knife?” she asked.

It isn’t her,
Jack told himself.
It’s a trick, like David fucking Copperfield.
When his eyes snapped open, he half-expected Charlie to have disappeared again—but she was exactly where he had left her, spooked and confused.
It’s an act. It isn’t really her.

But it
looked like her
. So much like her that it twisted what was left of his heart into a knot.

You have to do it.

Jack pushed on against the throbbing in his chest. He stepped forward even though his ears rushed with blood. Charlie let out a muffled gasp and pressed herself against the base of a tree.

“Please don’t hurt me,” she whispered, her eyes wide and glittering in the moonlight. “I’m sorry if I messed up,” she told him. “I’ll make it up, Daddy, I promise I will.”

Jack’s grip wavered on that blade.

“It isn’t me,” she whimpered. “It’s just like when you were little.” Her chest heaved, her breaths shallow. “Do you remember, Daddy?” She began to wheeze. Charlie hadn’t had an asthma attack in years, and here was the relapse, appropriately timed as her father held a knife at his side, ready to plunge it into her six-year-old chest.

Nothing could have been any more disarming than watching his little girl struggle to breathe. Her hands pressed over her t-shirt as she tried to gulp air, and all those thoughts of demons and curses and never-ending cycles faded into obscurity. Jack let the knife slip from his fingers as he moved forward, catching Charlie by her shoulders, saving her as she gasped for air. He left her to search his bag, dumping out its contents onto the forest floor, looking for a solution he knew wasn’t there. Even as the wheezing slowed, Jack continued to rack his brain on how to help her, panicking at his own uselessness.

“Daddy?”

He jumped at the sound directly behind his ear. Veering around, he saw her standing next to him, her face flushed from the effort it had taken to catch her breath.

“Are you mad at me?” she asked.

Jack exhaled a breath. He didn’t have an answer. He didn’t know where to begin. But he shook his head anyway.

“I’m not mad,” he told her, crouched on the leaf-covered ground. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

Charlie smiled, and at first Jack managed a weak smile in return. But her smile kept growing, inching up her face until his heart fluttered to a stop. It was the jagged grin that had haunted him for so long, the smile he saw in the darkness of his bedroom, perched at the edge of his mattress, watching him sleep. Before Jack could react, a burst of air pushed through his lips as though he’d been punched in the gut. He pinched his eyebrows together and his gaze trickled down to his abdomen. Charlie’s hand was wrapped around the handle of the butcher’s knife, its blade buried in Jack’s belly up to the hilt.

A cold sensation bloomed outward into his arms and legs. He swayed a little, away from Charlie at first, and eventually toward her. Instead of pushing her away, he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close; and as the pain began to slither from the blade and into muscles that were beginning to spasm with shock, he let out a cry that made the leaves of the surrounding trees shiver. It wasn’t a moan of pain, and it wasn’t the cry of a father coming to grips with the loss of his children—one hanging above him, the other sneering into his chest. It was the cry of a child, frightened and tormented, scared by the eyes he saw in the secret graveyard behind his house.

Holding Charlotte close, Jack wept for the things he hadn’t allowed himself to weep for until now. Now he understood why he hadn’t been allowed to remember the horrors he’d inflicted upon his mother and father. He understood why he had run away from Rosewood despite not knowing what happened. With pain flaring from the center of his body, hot as the sun, and the soft pitter-patter of blood pooling around his knees, he finally came to terms with why Charlie had been so perfect—why she had seemed like an extension of his soul.

She had been made for him; made for this.

Like a villain putting on a disguise, that wickedness had waited in the shadows, its eye on the finishing move.

This was checkmate.

Jack never had a chance.

When the knife twisted, a gasp escaped his throat. He looked into his baby girl’s eyes as she pulled the blade from his belly. The slow drip of blood was replaced by a thin, steady stream. The pain that shot through his head was enough to sway his attention from the cold ache of his stomach.

He felt himself slipping. His knees gave out. He collapsed onto his side in the rotting leaves. Struggling to right himself, all he managed to do was cover his hands in his own blood, leaving his palms slick and warm with the assurance that this was really the end. The hot iron pressed against his brain, blinding him with pain, but not before he spotted the headstones that surrounded him—the rusted wrought-iron fence that caged him in as he died. In a final moment of clarity, Jack looked up to the six-year-old standing above him, that knife held tight in her right hand, and he asked her the first thing that came to mind.

“Why?”

It seemed so stupid, so cliché, but Jack suddenly understood why all of the dying characters in all the movies asked that very thing. It was the last grasp for an answer, the last chance for understanding. Everyone, it seemed, whether they were a hardened criminal or a father of two, wanted to find some semblance of peace before they exhaled their final breath. Jack was no different. He closed his eyes as Charlotte leaned in to him, her lips brushing the shell of her ear, and heard her whisper,
“Because I love you,”
before that blade plunged into his heart.

But Jack had been mistaken. She hadn’t whispered,
“Because I love you.”

She had whispered,
“Because I can.”

The next morning, Louisiana State Troopers came across a grizzly scene during their second sweep of the area. They gathered around the crumpled body of an adult male, early to mid-thirties, who had been stabbed eighty to ninety times around the face and chest. The wounds had been caused by a serrated knife, but they came up empty on the murder weapon. It was only after they called the coroner that one of the troopers stumbled backward, nearly falling ass-first into the victim’s minced body. Overhead, they found Abigail Winter. Officer Marvin recognized her from the tiny photograph tucked in the front pocket of his shirt.

Officer Marvin found himself standing on the front porch of that quaint Southern home for a good ten minutes before putting his knuckles to the door. There was no answer. He knocked again but received no reply. After a third attempt he started for his cruiser, but something made him pause. Squinting at the glare cast by the front room window, he cupped his hands around his face and looked inside. Nothing seemed out of place.

“There’s nobody home here,” he reported through his walkie, trudging back to his patrol car. “I’m swinging by the in-laws to see if the wife is there.”

In a few more hours, the blood that had pooled on the kitchen floor would crawl across the threshold into the hallway. The police would spot it through the window on their second trip back. They’d kick the door in, and with their guns drawn they’d hug the walls of the hallway until they made it to the kitchen. That’s where they’d find Aimee Winter face down on the floor. Except she wouldn’t really be face down, because they’d find her head in the sink, staring blankly, her wide eyes asking what took them so long.