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The building groaned like its life was being squeezed out of it as the unseen figure shifted its weight. Abby glanced at Rhys and knew he was thinking the same thing. A person shouldn’t sound this heavy.
“He was going to Snap Decision.”
Ha maybed he was being ironic . Guy knew he was being followed so made a "snap decision" to throw Conner off his trail.
The more he watched Vickers, the more convinced he became that Vickers’s glinting glasses weren’t pointed at the screen. That they were aimed toward Connor himself. Fixated on the phone, watching Connor just as closely as Connor was watching him.
“I know you’re following me.” The fingers twitched, just hard enough to hurt. “I know what you’re doing.” Connor didn’t dare speak. He didn’t even dare breathe. Vickers’s lips peeled back into a smile. He was so close that Connor could see the screws in his glasses and the staining at the edges of his teeth. His voice was velvet and poison. “She’s not coming back.”
“Why don’t they arrest him?” “Him?” Nick’s thin gray eyebrows rose. He seemed to consider her question for a second. “I suppose you mean Charles Vickers.”
“The Stitcher is Charles Vickers, isn’t he?” Nick clasped and unclasped his hands. He chuckled, nervous. “That’s a complicated question. No, he’s not exactly. But you’re also not terribly far off the mark.”
“Knowledge does not always equal wisdom,
To this day, no one has been able to explain the tapping noise that persisted until the tunnel was opened, and then immediately ceased.
Neighbors believed she was trying to make him presentable for the funeral. They tried to dissuade her, telling her to at least not use red thread, but Florence was adamant. Her son had worn red nearly every day of his life. He would wear red now. His body was reformed over the course of three days. Scant reports from curious visitors describe the results as horrifying, macabre, and brutal.
The table was bare except for a bloodied sheet. Silas’s body was missing. When asked where he had gone, she simply said, back to the mines.
The creature that was once Silas lived in the mines, killing anyone who strayed too close to his new domain. His body was malformed, however, the skin shriveled and rotted in the damp. Either with his mother’s help or by his own hand, he began taking replacement body parts from his victims to repair the sections of himself that were failing. When the mines were closed up, his source of supplies was lost, and so his mother granted him access to the town through a tunnel she had carved into her own home.
The monster disrupts technology. The sirens failed the moment the Stitcher began hunting, and none of the cameras were able to catch it on film.”
We’ve since discovered that the monster has been able to dig new entrances for itself. They’re little more than holes, and they’re difficult to find. For every one that’s sealed, another one is formed.”
“Charles Vickers is the last descendant of Silas Wright. He has a bond with the monster that defies understanding. I haven’t fully been able to grasp his mental state toward it, but he seems to treat the creature’s presence as something precious, like a family heirloom. He watches over its activities. And, in return, he’s kept safe from harm.”
“So he can control the monster?” Abby asked. “From what I can gather, yes, sometimes. It’s a symbiotic relationship. Vickers shields and enables the creature; the creature can be persuaded to take certain people in return.
You wouldn’t remember me, but I was at your family’s funeral, Mr. Weekes. And I can tell you there weren’t three complete bodies in those caskets.” Rhys’s face was pale. He refused to make eye contact with any of them. “Wait, three?” Jen asked.
His mom was pregnant?!
All of this time, we thought Vickers would have to leave his home to get to Hope. He’s had access to her the whole time.
As I had predicted
Mrs. Bridge’s gaze trailed over the heaped supplies, and her face seemed to deflate, the smile vanishing under heavy sadness. “Oh,” was all she said. She lifted her eyes to meet each of them in turn, then she reached forward and pushed the piles of money back toward them. “No charge,” she said. “Not for you.” They whispered muffled thanks as Mr. Bridge helped them pack the supplies into bags. “Good luck,” he said as they left, and to Abby, it felt more like a goodbye.
Hope’s abduction had overwhelmed her so thoroughly that she’d stopped caring about the people she treasured. She’d stopped asking herself what was best for them, what they needed, what they wanted. She’d hurt so badly, she hadn’t seen the wounds she was inflicting on everyone around her.
“This is my family, and it’s going to be my journey,” Abby said. The words cemented it in her heart. “I’m going into the mines alone. Let’s get everything into a backpack.” “Two backpacks,” Rhys said. She stared at him. His warm eyes met hers, unblinking, unwavering. Nothing in her life had ever been as dependable as him.
Aww !
Stick to your plans; get out of Doubtful. And don’t ever, ever regret anything that happened today. Because I won’t.”
The placid expression had vanished. Now, the parts of his face that had always seemed rounded and soft had turned hard. His glasses reflected blank light as he moved, slowly, back to the door and unlocked it. Stepped through. Shut it behind himself. They were too far away to hear the locks being fastened, but Riya could see the door shiver as the bolts were turned. After a moment, lights began to turn on. One room at a time, the glow gradually spread through the building. Riya had the distinct impression that Vickers was searching the house.
When he tells the story of the day his family was taken, he only talks about his parents. But there were four people in the car that day.” “Yeah?” Jen prompted. “His parents, Angie and Hugh Weekes. And his younger brother, Asher, age six.”
“Two people who have lost everything to the Stitcher.” Jen stared toward the house. The lights were starting to switch off again. “Two people with nothing left.” She said it as an observation, not a question, but Riya still nodded. “I feel like having nothing left is the only way you could go down there.”
They were happy. And she tried her best not to let them see how much she felt like death on the inside.
“Just spent the last couple of days stalking the Stitcher,” he yelled into a house that wasn’t listening. “Turns out you were right, Mom, and he’s a monster after all. Sorry.” The TV channel changed. The tumble dryer rattled. Someone yelled for Connor to keep it down, they were trying to focus.
It was as though they’d been put on display. A museum to death.
Bridgette Holm and Nicholas Rigney had been telling the truth. Doubtful was haunted by a monster.
Sometimes things happened too close together for her to believe there wasn’t a connection.
“No,” Abby whispered. “No, no, no.” At the arrangement’s center was an arm. It was pale, thin, and horribly familiar. The fingers were curled slightly, as though the owner was resting. Two of the fingernails were chipped. The palm held the remnants of lines of ink. The patterns Hope had drawn on herself at the fireside, faded by washing but not entirely gone. There was no body attached to the arm.
Well let's be a little optimistic . Finding an arm doesn't necessarily mean she's dead. Afterall, Bridgette escaped without both her legs.
His last words had been to tell her to get out of the mines. She couldn’t do that. Not when the two most precious people in her life were still down there.
It turned out a person could make the correct choice, and still feel strangled by regret.
And that was what hurt the most. If she thought Abby and Rhys had died overnight, she could begin to mourn. But the Stitcher didn’t always kill quickly. There were odds that her friends were both still alive at that moment. And that they might continue to be, for days.
Two glowing disks shone from inside its head. They fixed on Abby, and she felt every muscle in her body seize before going limp. Conscious thought drained out of her. So did her emotions. The fear, and the anger, and the desperation all faded into an easy numbness.
“Abby,” he said again, and his voice was rough and frightened and raw. “Abby, turn away.” The sharpened fingertip dipped into Rhys’s skin just above the ankle, and fresh blood flowed.
A sound rose from the cave. It was distant and distorted by echoes, but terrifyingly recognizable. Screaming. Horrible, horrible screams. They stretched out longer, and longer, until every nerve in Jen’s body was keyed tight with a primal, urgent need to flee.
Rhys didn’t even make a noise as the Stitcher cut into him. He turned his face toward the floor, his teeth grit, perspiration beading across his skin. Abby screamed instead. She screamed loud enough for the both of them.
A figure stood behind the Stitcher. It was soaked in dripping crimson. A wooden stick swung from its right hand as it advanced into the room. A cloth had been tied around the stick’s end and flames licked across the fabric. “Don’t look it in the eyes,” Hope yelled. She raised her weapon and swung again.
Yess Hope lives. And what a badass entrance!
“You’re right, this isn’t our fight,” Jen said. Her mouth was dry. “But you always, always taught me to do what was right, and to help the people who needed helping. And that’s what I’m going to do right now.” A choked laugh broke out of Thompson. “No, I thought I was very clear on this. If you’re in a bad situation, I expect you to cut and run and live another day. It was your mother who instilled this horrible noble streak.”
She thought she understood why the Stitcher only took victims when they were alone. Its eyes could freeze its prey like deer in headlights, but it could only focus its gaze on one person at a time. A second party might be able to scream, or attack it, or run. And the Stitcher had long ago learned to avoid that.
“He just…let me free. He didn’t try to tie me up, like he did with you. I guess because he didn’t need to. He found me pretty easily when he wanted my arm.”
Victims were taken when they were alone, because the Stitcher’s paralyzing lights could only be directed at one person at a time. No one heard them scream, because the moment they looked on the unblinking eyes they lost their ability to make noise. It operated mostly at night, because its targets were more likely to look at the only bright objects in a dark world.
The Stitcher’s sustenance, called to him by some unseen force. The same force, she thought, that made it so difficult for people to leave the town.
They never answered her questions. But they kept calling unmatched phrases from just out of sight, drawing her deeper into the maze like a lure she couldn’t turn away from.
It was like listening to a bad recording of a voice. A memory of the way words had sounded. A recreation of the phrases the Stitcher had heard screamed again and again through the tunnels.
Then a voice rose. It wasn’t a word, but simply a scream: full of anger and horror and fear and finality. Connor appeared from seemingly nowhere. He had a torch. He held it straight ahead, like he was brandishing a sword, as he charged toward the monster.
Sarah Ward felt as though she could breathe properly for the first time in years.
