The Restless Ones: A Novel by Abe Moss

Author:Abe Moss [Moss, Abe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grim Heart Publishing
Published: 2024-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

14

THE NIGHT OF THE MASSACRE

“Whitley!”

Suddenly Nora was there. Her arms encircled Whitley. She pulled her away, pulled her off the killer’s body, away from the disfigured thing beneath the mask. In her sister’s arms, they shuffled off the porch steps and collapsed together onto the gravel. Whitley let the garden gnome go. It plopped into the gravel with a light thud, its once cheery face now wearing a red mask of its own.

Whitley looked onward, to the body on the steps. The killer didn’t move. He would never move again.

You did this to yourself…

Nora panted tiredly beside her. Whitley tore her gaze from the body. She regarded her sister beside her, and found her entirely pale in the face, as white as the moon. She too observed the body on the porch steps, a certain horror in her eyes. Then her gaze flickered to Whitley. Even as she saw her, the look in her eyes didn’t change one bit. The horror remained. Her mouth hung open, speechless. When she looked once more upon the killer’s body, she seemed to swallow down whatever held her stunned.

“I… I think he’s dead,” she said.

Without a doubt, Whitley thought.

Then Whitley twisted to see the other body—the poor girl in the gravel behind them. She scrambled toward her. The hatchet remained planted in her spine. Whitley bent over the girl’s face, turned against the ground. Her half-lidded eyes told the whole story. There was nothing left behind that gaze.

“Is she dead?” Nora asked.

Whitley nodded wordlessly. Her mind was simultaneously blank and yet stampeding with thoughts, or at the very least feelings. Feelings she couldn’t process yet.

She couldn’t help but look at the man on the steps again. The masked killer.

I killed him.

“I killed him,” she murmured aloud.

Nora crunched the gravel as she climbed to her feet. Whitley craned her neck to see her sister, who now offered her a hand to help her get standing. “Come on. We should go.”

Whitley’s car was still idling across the clearing. Nora offered to drive, but Whitley insisted she could do it. They each climbed inside in silence. Whitley shook uncontrollably as she buckled herself in, and proceeded to pull them around in a wide arc through the yard, where she glimpsed the two bodies one last time before heading off in the opposite direction.

She took them back down the mountain, casting the house of blood away in the rearview. For a time, her mind was entirely quiet. Thoughtless. Numb.

Halfway down the mountain road, they were stopped by the approach of flashing lights. Blue and red. Whitley pulled over and watched the officers climb from their vehicles. As they approached, and as she waited, she glanced to her hands wrapped to the steering wheel, knuckles strobing in those flashing lights, covered in someone else’s blood.

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