Drawn Into Darkness Read Online Free PDF Page B

mouth. Finally he removed it.
    â€œStand up,” ordered Stoat the Goat.
    Clenching my teeth against the pain and stiffness in my lower back, I tottered to my unreliable feet.
    â€œMove.” Stoat nudged me in the ribs with the gun barrel.
    I stepped out of the room and toward the back of the house as directed, and my brain got going also, starting to try to think. Escape. How? Bathroom window? Surely Stoat wouldn’t come in there with me?
    He didn’t, but the bathroom offered no back exit. Its window was boarded up, and not just with plywood either. Two-by-fours. And not from the inside. Not so that the boards could be levered up, pried off, nails pulled out. They completely covered the window glass and screen from the outside. I saw not even a knothole to peek through.
    This place had been altered to serve as a prison long before I came along.
    â€œHurry up!” yelled Stoat.
    I decided to stall him as long as I could. Get my arms and legs back to life. “I need to wash,” I called back. “There’s beer all—”
    All over me, I was going to say, but a loud bang interrupted me. The gun. Aimed low, the bullet ricocheted off the base of the toilet and zinged around the bathroom, so fast it was over by the time I jumped and screamed.
    â€œJust pee in the damn pot,” Stoat said with patience that menaced worse than a shower of obscenities. If the man didn’t mind putting a bullet hole in his bathroom door, he wouldn’t mind kicking it in either.
    I had peed, but not in the pot. Unfortunately, the bathroom was as obsessively tidy as the rest of the house. Using toilet paper, I cleaned up myself first, then started on the floor.
    â€œWhat’s taking so long!”
    â€œAlmost finished.” I flushed the toilet I had not even sat on, ran water as if washing my hands (or maybe getting a drink and spitting), said “Oops” as if I had splashed myself, stalled by spraying with raspberry Glade, then discovered I could not take the next step. I could not open the door.
    â€œI’m scared to come out,” I said.
    â€œYou come out or I won’t shoot low this time.”
    It’s amazing how brave terror can make a person. I opened the door and stepped out. Justin was nowhere to be seen. Stoat motioned me back to my room and onto the bed with his oversized pistol. “Justin!” he hollered, and the kid came in and cuffed my wrists and ankles without looking at me. Stoat nodded and stuffed his weapon all too appropriately into the front waistband of his pants.
    â€œOkay. Bedtime. Nighty-night, sleep tight,” he said, and I thought he was tormenting me, but there was a sort of genuine warmth, maybe eagerness, in his tone, and he put his arm around Justin, pulled him close, and kissed him on the lips.
    I gasped in shock. This was probably what Stoat wanted, because he looked straight into my horrified eyes and grinned. Justin’s face, what I could see of it, had gone crimson, and he kept his head turned against Stoat’s shoulder.
    With his arm still around the boy, Stoat left the room and flicked off the light.
    When people say they spent a sleepless night, usually they’re exaggerating. Usually they have at least dozed a little.
    I spent a sleepless night, no exaggeration. The dark hours became one long panic attack. My heart raced, and my mind, and I ached all over with sheer helplessness.
    But I, myself, was not the only one I felt helpless about.
    Of course I felt terribly afraid as the captive of a psycho. I didn’t want to die. I needed to escape. But even more urgently I needed to rescue Justin.
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    Sometime in the dead of night—that’s what they call it, the dead of night, uncomfortable thought—I thought I heard stealthy movements somewhere in the house. Holding my breath to listen, despite the blathering of summer insects all around the shack, that plus the pounding