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  She shook her head. It was all too weird to be true, but here she was seeing it.

  The butler led her through an enormous formal dining room, where dishes and other piles of trash littered a table that was at least twelve feet long. A true king’s table if ever there was. Electric candles brightened things just enough so she could see where she was going, but the butler remained draped in shadow as he rounded the corner into the next passage. Any vestige of hope that he might be a real person drained away as he bumped his shoulder on the edge of the doorway while turning into the hall. He jittered but didn’t react, like an inanimate object. Despite the cold terror dripping down Nina’s spine, she felt an insatiable laughter bubbling up from inside her. She cut it off hard. Anything to screw this up now could very well get her killed.

  She followed him into a wide hallway lit by more of the orange flambeaux. Crooked frames on the walls that once held artwork were now nothing more than ripped up canvas. The ones not slashed were spray-painted over with various designs. Nina saw one that looked like a white spiked penis jetting a red spray of blood from the tip, and she quickly looked away only to see a decayed small animal nailed to the wall. A cat, judging by the size and the tail. She put her fist to her mouth to hold back a scream.

  “Just a little further, good girl . . .” Nina looked up again toward the source of the voice and a bar of moonlight briefly illuminated some movement along the ceiling. Something climbing along a crisscrossed network of ropes. A giant spider. No, that was ridiculous. It was a person, of course, but a very strange person, bone white and inhumanly limber. Before she could make out more, the shadows swallowed him up again.

  It could have been a design in the ceiling, she reasoned. Some sort of artistic or architectural element that was creating an illusion in the poor light.

  But it was moving. Didn’t you see it? Can’t you hear it breathing even now? Use your goddamn ears. Her mother’s voice again. A pillar of common sense was Janie Quick, even if she was often cruel. Over the echo of her heels on the dirty black and white tiled floors and the squeaky rumble of the cart rolling in front of her, Nina could now hear shallow intakes of breath. Wheezes, really. A few drops of water fell on her head and shoulder and she reached up to wipe them off. The salty smell on her fingertips told her a different tale. This wasn’t water. It was sweat, dripping off the man above her.

  The cart stopped suddenly, and she nearly ran into the “butler’s” back. Another shiver wormed its way through her at the thought of touching it. This close, she could see the thin strings attached to its arms and shoulders running up to the ceiling. Another one connected to the top of his head. It was indeed a human sized marionette. Nina’s stomach turned.

  They were now standing before a pair of enormous double doors. More graffiti marred the delicately carved wood. No strange symbols this time. Just nonsensical yet horrifying words in white spray paint: DADDY FUCK MEAT. Nina tried to swallow, but her throat felt sticky like fly paper.

  The arm of the butler fell against the door in a clumsy attempt at a knock. “Hello, sir. Your goody good girl is here.”

  The human spider above her giggled again, a sound that was sure to render her certifiable if she had to hear it many more times. Nina came to a decision right then. Forget the money and the plan. Even if it meant roaming around the country with a giant target on her back, it would be worth it just to get far away from this place. She would endure anything just to avoid seeing what was behind that door. Before these thoughts could reach her feet and carry her back the way she came, the cart with the puppet butler wheeled around.

  Her horror was as immediate and searing as a branding iron. The laughter from above entwined with her screams in a ghastly braid. The man-shaped thing in the cart was no dummy. She could sense that now. It was once a person, now fashioned into a freakish life-size toy. His skin was old leather stretched over bone. Instead of eyes, he had a pair of white ping-pong balls with black diamonds painted on them. Decomposition had long since reclaimed his nose, leaving a gaping hole in its place, and his mouth was a permanent rictus of teeth filed to sharp points. With a yank of the ropes from above, its hands were suddenly on her shoulders. They felt like giant bird talons.

  Nina screamed again.

  She tried to push the hands away, but with a deft motion from above, they wrapped around the straps of her dress. The thing above her head screeched laughter.

  “Come along, good girl. Daddy has to eat,” he said.

  Daddy has to eat. Daddy has to eat. The last words Ramón ever heard his beloved Angela speak. Now Nina understood why.

  “No! I want out! I don’t want to do this!”

  The thing only laughed louder, and her dress straps would not come free of the brittle fingers holding them. She started beating against its arms, hoping to splinter the bones, but its head shot forward and knocked against hers with a hard clack, reminding her of two billiard balls colliding. Nina rocked backward. For a moment, she saw stars in her vision. Then she felt a cold piece of metal slide up her back, lifting her dress and exposing her back to the cold air before grabbing her bra strap. A hook. This isn’t happening. Please God tell me this isn’t happening. She choked out a sob as the fabric ripped and the chill enveloped her.

  The double doors parted down the middle and the corpse-puppet butler rolled backward, pulling her into the room. She went without protest, because she feared what might happen as punishment. Her hope that she would find a way out of this dwindled she saw the source of the flickering blue glow she’d noticed from outside. It wasn’t a television, but a pair of bug zapper lights, a fixture of every redneck porch, as she’d learned growing up. One hung near the room’s cavernous fireplace. Large mounds of bug corpses were piled up beneath it. Next to that sat a tall wing chair pointed toward the end of the bed.

  Nina heard the freak overhead wheezing and grunting as it moved around. Then something stung the back of her neck and she cried out. A few seconds later, her muscles went completely limp and she hit the floor, breaking free of the corpse butler’s grip. She willed her mind to detach and float away like a balloon cut from its string. But this wasn’t that kind of drug. Evil in its refusal to provide mercy, she still felt fear, still knew exactly where she was and the horror awaiting. The way she landed, her head was pointed in the direction of the wing chair and she could see someone sitting in it. Or at least a shoulder of that person illuminated in the blue light. She wondered if this was “Daddy.”

  A cold pair of hands slid her useless arms up over her head and tied ropes to her wrists, elbow joints, and shoulders, and she soon realized it was her turn to become the puppet. She couldn’t see the thing doing the work, but only smell a putrid mix of body odor and other waste.

  “Lie very very still,” he whispered. “It’s time for you to dance for Daddy.”

  If she could do more than grunt, she would have asked how that was even possible.

  She heard the thing shuffle back up to its web and then with an immense grunt of effort, he hoisted her to her feet. Nina heard and felt her shoulders pop and she let out a loud moan, which was all she could manage. The pain was dull and distant, thanks to the drug in her system. At least she had that going for her. He pulled the ropes from above, and her arms flailed around as she turned and twirled under no direction or volition of her own like a drunken ballerina, her head flopped back and forth. The ropes dug deep into her skin, but she could only dimly sense the pressure. Later, assuming she survived this, the pain would be enormous.

  Finally, he dragged her toward the bed, her useless bare feet, dangling from her equally useless legs, scraping along floor. She passed the wing chair as she went. “Daddy” was mercifully shrouded in darkness, but she knew she’d see him soon enough. This sideshow would continue until it consumed the last of her mind. That’s how it had worked for all the other good girls. Nina understood now that she would be no different. The plan she’d so brazenly constructed on the way up here to rob him and run never had a
hope of getting off the ground. She wondered if Ramón knew this all along.

  Finally, she reached the bed where one of the bug zappers hung from the post on the headboard. With a hard yank, the freak hoisted her up onto it and let her fall back with a heavy thump. The crispy corpses of dead flies and other bugs slid down the pillow, piling up against her neck. Then the freak lowered himself down by his legs like a well-trained acrobat on a trapeze. He was a hairless specter of a thing with long, muscled limbs and knobs of spine prominent beneath skin so sun-starved it was almost translucent in the light.

  “Please . . . please,” she whimpered, knowing it was useless but unable to stop herself. “Don’t do this. Whatever it is you’re going to do, please . . .”

  He turned around to face her, and another chunk of her eroding sanity fell away. His eyes were wide black pools that showed no whites at all. It could have been makeup or a trick of the light, and her mind latched to that idea like a castaway to a piece of driftwood. His cheekbones looked sharp enough to tear through his skin, but it was his mouth that frightened her most of all. Like the butler, his teeth were filed to sharp points. He licked them, and blood spilled from his mouth, running down his chin. A pleasured moan escaped him, and she knew her pleas from this point forward were useless.

  Nina couldn’t turn her head, but the drug didn’t appear to affect her eyelids. The imprint of that horrible face remained on her retinas, however, and she had a feeling she would be running from the image of him for a very long time if she somehow made it out of here, just like the women before her who lived the rest of their lives trapped in a looped nightmare of this place.

  She floated off into a state of fevered semi-consciousness as the thing spread her legs apart and bound them by the ankles to the bed. A sharp slap to her cheek forced her to open her eyes, and she cried out again. His upside-down face hung mere inches from hers, bathing her with rotten breath from which she couldn’t recoil. Burning bile rose into the back of her throat and she nearly choked as she swallowed it back.

  “Daddy’s ready to eat now. Be a good girl and don’t close your eyes, or he’ll be very angry with you.”

  He wiped the tips of his fingers across her eyelids before climbing back up the rope, giving Nina a full view of the horror standing at the end of the bed, bathed in a blue wash of light. His face was like the butler’s, withered skull covered in a wiry cap of gray-black hair, though thankfully his teeth weren’t filed to points, but they gleamed a shade of white that could only be paint. His eye sockets were also filled with white plastic orbs, except instead of diamonds, they were painted with actual irises that glowed a hateful green in the ultraviolet light. He wore a suit that looked like something he might have been buried in a long time ago.

  Then something occurred to her. “Daddy” must be Hank Ballas. Was this puppeteering freak his son, then? Hank’s wife had apparently disappeared while pregnant. What sort of horror show unfolded in this house that this is what that child eventually became? But as the corpse of Hank Ballas rose higher at the end of the bed, all of Nina’s questions fell from her mind, along with the one flagging remnant of her calm. There was a thing jutting from the open fly of Hank Ballas’s pants, an instrument of pure torture and mutilation, long, white, and covered with spikes. It would ruin her. It would likely even kill her. But not right away. No, it would be a slow, rending horror, like being flayed from the inside out. This is what happened to all those other girls, and now she was next.

  Nina tried to close her eyes despite the warning to keep them open, but she realized with a panicky dread that when the freak brushed her eyelids a minute ago, he was gluing them open. Now, like her, they had no hope of release. Not without suffering major damage. As the demented son of Hank Ballas lowered the corpse of his father onto her, Nina did the only thing she could do. She found her voice and just enough air, and she screamed until she knew nothing more.

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  CHAPTER 2

  Ramón Takes a Detour

  He sat in the Town Car in front of the Ballas estate, waiting as he always did for the deed to be done. The last of his coffee gone from his thermos, he was now flipping through the paper when the screams inside started up again. They used to upset him, those screams, but he’d heard them so many times over the years they now washed right over him, becoming nothing more than a sign of business as usual.

  He had always given the girls a chance to run before they got here, but every one of them refused. After so many years, they’d learned to suffer for their money and couldn’t see life any other way. Ramón knew from personal experience what that was like. He’d been young once. But a few of them were like Nina had been too. Fiery and arrogant, thinking they could go in there, grab the cash and go without a scratch. Even though he’d never ventured further into the house than the foyer, he knew that was a fantasy. He wasn’t exactly a religious man, but he knew evil when he was in its presence. Had witnessed it and even dealt out enough of it in his time working for the likes of Victor Cassini, but he’d never felt so small and powerless as he did when he was out here at the Ballas place.

  But Nina had seemed smarter than the others, and aside from Angela, had been the closest to convincing him they might finally get out of here. Of course, if he’d really believed it, he would have gone in there with her and taken down that sick Ballas fuck alongside her. Instead, he let her go in and face the monster alone, just like the rest. He was too damned old to fight and run now, too tired for romantic notions of freedom that infected the heads of the young and later crushed most of them with disappointment. The Cassinis had always made sure he was just comfortable enough to sit tight and not risk the generosities they’d afforded him. Comfort had a way of killing the romance in just about everybody.

  He tried not to think of his latest failure to act when her screams began. Best to just let it go, old man. What’s done is done. We all have our place in the order of things. There were lions and there were gazelles. Only one of them had the illusion they could run away, and it was the one who always got eaten. Ramón didn’t know where he belonged in this particular metaphor. He was definitely no lion. Not anymore. But he had no desire to run, either.

  To his credit, he did spend the first several years of this gig actively planning his escape. The girl had been right about him knowing a few people who still owed an old thug a favor. Enough to help him hide for a bit, maybe even get him passage out of the country. Then, about six years ago, Victor delivered the news that Ramón’s estranged son, Alejandro, had become a father, making him officially a grandpa. The boss then broke out the good scotch and the illegal cigars and asked Ramón if he was truly happy in his position within the family business. The subtext was quite clear. If he ran, there would be one less little girl in the world. Even though Ramón only ever got to see his granddaughter on days when he was driving by their house and happened to catch them outside, he was satisfied with his status as an honorary Cassini.

  If Nina had been able to get that money, though . . . That might’ve changed some things. He could have bought protection for his family, maybe even convinced them to come with him. But that wasn’t going to happen now. The ordeal was nearly done. He could judge the end of the ritual as much by the intensity of the screams as by the growing light in the sky. As always, he hoped she would be dead when he picked her up. Better that than to live in the condition the others had, but more than likely she would prove tougher than she had any right to be. Ramón pulled an old silver pocket watch from inside his jacket and checked the time, like some ghastly train conductor. It was just shy of five o’clock, right on schedule. He decided to wait out the last couple minutes on the porch. Stepping out into the cool, dewy morning, he adjusted the cuffs of his jacket and walked up the steps, listening for the cues. There would be a rolling sound followed by a heavy thud and a weak couple of knocks signaling it was okay to open the door and collect both the girl and the cash.

  When nothing happened after a few m
inutes, he checked his watch again. It was three minutes past. Unusual. Ballas was normally as dependable as a Yellowstone geyser. Ramón shuffled his feet and tried to tamp down his mounting impatience. The Madam had never laid out a contingency plan for what to do if Ballas either stiffed on the money or decided to keep the girl longer, but Ramón supposed he would have go inside and collect. The thought of venturing any deeper into the oversized crypt turned his stomach, but not nearly as much as the thought of coming back to the Weeping Willow empty-handed.

  The knocks from the other side of the door startled him out of his thoughts so hard he jumped back and nearly toppled down the steps. Okay, good. Better late than never. He cleared his throat and turned the old-fashioned doorknob. The hinges squeaked loudly in the early morning silence as he pushed it open, letting a wedge of sunlight into the gloom. The shadows seemed to almost scurry away from it, like a mass of beetles when someone lifted a rock. Motes floated through the stagnant air, and he stifled a series of sneezes.

  Something was very off this time. Instead of a single briefcase just inside the door, there were two. But there was no girl. A fountain of acid splashed up in the back of Ramón’s throat, which he swallowed back with a groan. First time for this. If he was here to pick up a girl, there was supposed to be a girl, end of story. And only one suitcase. Never two.

  He looked around. Ballas couldn’t have gone far. A skeletal staircase spiraled up to a second floor, but the risers were so heaped with debris, the rail and posts so shrouded with thick strands of cobweb, it didn’t appear anyone had used it in years. He looked down instead. In the dirt, he saw wheel tracks leading from the foyer to an adjacent area that looked like an equally neglected dining room. He also saw a set of fresh shoeprints that belonged unmistakably to a pair of high heels. Nina’s, he supposed. His stomach wrenched, and he felt a sudden urge to vomit. For some reason, seeing those footprints was worse than seeing the actual ruined girl at the end. It was the real start of her descent to a horror she would never escape.