Bones Like Breadcrumbs

“I have reason to believe that my mother is dead.” It was blunt and to the point. It was the type of statement that someone like me envisions when they get into this type of profession. The reality of it, while frequently seedy, is often far more mundane. This was anything but.

“What makes you think that something has happened to your mother?” I was trying to establish a baseline for what it was that I would be looking into.

“A little bird told me.” She said.

The evasive answer threw me for a second. I’m sure there are plenty of reasons that someone might not want to volunteer that information, most of them meant trouble. It was likely not in my best interest to fight over this first question, so I moved on. “What can you tell me about your mother?”

“I haven’t seen my mother in over a decade, she is what polite people might call reclusive.” She volunteered.

“What about not-so-polite people?” I’ve done this long enough to know that polite people can be every bit as dangerous as the rude ones, but the rude ones often give you more information.

“My mother didn’t have much use for people, polite or not. Believe me when I say that her aversion to people was extreme. It’s possible that she hasn’t encountered another living soul in years.” This was another evasive answer, though a more subtle one. There was something about all of this that she didn’t want to tell me, and I would be lying if I said that it didn’t make the whole thing more attractive.

“What is it exactly that you would like me to do for you?” It was a question that she couldn’t dodge if she actually wanted to hire me. If I’m being honest, she had the hook in me from those very first words, and I was ready to be reeled in.

“It’s simple, I need confirmation that she really is gone. I said that I had reason to believe it, but I need to know that it’s true. Nothing more than that.” She said.

“You don’t need to know how it happened? If there was any… foul play?” I was doing the cliched private investigator thing, and I knew it, but I was disappointed that she didn’t want more.

“It’s callous, I’m aware of that, but I don’t care what happened. I just need to know that she’s dead.”

#

I took the case because of course I did. The money was good-ish, and something about her blunt disregard for her mother left me thinking that there was more to all of this than she had told me, even if all I was doing was searching for a body.

She was able to provide me with a GPS location for the house, but not much else, she had never been there herself. It was truly remote. Her mother apparently lived in the literal middle of a forest.

The road that I found myself on, once paved but long since turned to gravel and potholes, with actual streams crossing it at some points would be seen as sufficiently remote for most people. The few houses set back off the road looked like they were rotting on their foundations, in most cases with a roof in one state of collapse or another. The faded flags of long ago wars, which they still insist on backing the wrong side of, drooped on the twine that lashed them to front porch railings. The assumption that they were abandoned was instantly rebutted by the rusted bicycles in the driveway and plastic toys piled and littered through the front yard.

The road wound through the mountainside, pinned between jutting rocks from the hillside and a steep fall to the stream bed below. It was the type of road that constantly threatened to throw a car coming in the opposite direction in your path, a prospect that at its worst could result in tragedy, but at the very least promised comedy. The road finally dead-ended mercifully at a turn-around that had once served as part of a now abandoned coal mining operation, the infrastructure of which was left to rust away and attract the attention of the occasional gawking hiker.

A pre-existing trail suited at least the beginnings of my purposes, having been cut into the woods for the benefit of the aforementioned hikers. There were other signs of its previous life as a place of industry as I passed the foundation of an old building overgrown with weeds, the crumbling stone the only evidence left, the wood rotted away, any metal either taken as scrap or having long since burrowed itself into the earth.

At this early point of the trail, little shrines had cropped up seemingly honoring nothing much more than this place’s previous life as a dumping ground for the locals. Among the shattered brown glass of beer bottles rose makeshift sculptures constructed of old mattress springs and bottomless pots having long given up on their fiction of being constructed of stainless steel. Perched upon a boulder along the path, was an old car mirror, the glass miraculously intact, but the chrome old and pitted with rust.

These artifacts of the frayed edge of society that I was leaving behind quickly thinned, and left me with a trail that had started to become overgrown, evidence that it had been largely abandoned by the weekend adventurers that it had hoped to attract.

The trail dwindled to nothing far sooner than I would have expected, leaving me to make my own way, periodically checking my bearings on the maps app on my phone, a detail that I was self-consciously aware was anachronistic in the tale that I seemed to have been dropped into.

I was hours into the woods before I noticed it, but though it was mid-afternoon, the forest seemed to grow darker with every step. As the way darkened, the trail started to reappear, almost as if the house I was seeking out was drawing me in. The type of feeling that you would assume might go through the mind of a mouse when they miraculously stumble upon a large chunk of delicious cheese.

I emerged into what qualified as a clearing in this dense section of the deep forest, the trees crossing their limbs in the canopy, in a conspiracy to keep this place in a perpetual state of twilight through the brightest hours of the day.

In the middle of the clearing, was a house.

#

House was perhaps an exaggeration, it was a small cramped looking structure. The only real thing that set it apart from a simple hunter’s cabin was its one concession to ornament, the trim of the house was embellished with curling details along the roofline, mimicking the look of clinging vines. The part of my brain that I often associate with a tingling sensation on the back of my neck felt it important to note that these details were called gingerbread.

There was an aura about the house, or more particularly, a lack of aura. Something about this house lent the overwhelming sensation that it had been alive, but that same intuition assured me that whatever life had previously inhabited the house had left it some time ago. The house was clearly deserted.

Circling to the back of the house, I encountered animal pens, maybe for dogs or chickens. The interior of each was scattered with small bones and in the corner, a metal pail filled to the top with a putrid filth that I dared not disturb. The pen was open, so whatever had been inside was now long gone.

Another pail, this one empty, lay on its side thrown casually aside before the back door which was standing wide open. The overall sense of the scene in front of me was one of abandonment. The sense that I was being lured into a trap remained, but was now paired with the feeling that anyone who ended up trapped here would be willing to gnaw their own leg off to get away.

I stepped into the now verifiably vacant shack, that first step introducing a resonant creak into the single room of the house, sending more than one creeping or scurrying creature into hiding. A small bed sat moldering in one corner, and a small square table was home to an old rusty bird cage, its door hanging open, mimicking the evident fleeing in the rest of the house. The opposite side of the house constituted the kitchen, dominated by a large old-fashioned iron cooking stove.

After taking a quick inventory of the room, my eye was drawn to a dusty old wooden box beside the tiny table in the corner. Several small items were splashed across the floor surrounding it. On closer inspection, my interest in them was validated, they were roughly cast coins about the size of a silver dollar. Picking one up, I rubbed away the dust and grime that now so thoroughly coated it to find that they were gold, of a vintage that I could hardly guess at.

I opened the chest, my mind smoothly transitioning from the word box to the word chest once there promised to be treasure inside, and it gave way with a light whine of the hinges. The inside was less impressive than I had hoped, though the corners still sparkled with quite a few additional gold pieces, stray pearls, and even a number of large jewels. Something about the state of the chest led me to believe that this was the remnant of a much larger fortune. The coins on the floor, the remaining treasure heaped in the corners painted a picture of someone having made off with the majority of what had been contained within this box.

I was here for the simple act of confirming the end of someone’s life, but the questions surrounding what had happened here and why were already starting to mount and despite my client’s apparent disinterest in details, I was starting already to crave them. I needed to search the room, and the sparseness of the habitation meant that there was very little searching that was going to take place before the part that I had been hired for was over.

I decided to check under the bed first, it was as dusty and spider-ridden as you might expect, and also turned out to be the home of most of the owner’s few meager possessions. There was not, it turned out, a discarded body under the bed. The feeling of relief was quickly chased by the foreboding that I was one step closer to locating what I was looking for.

I crossed the room and made a cursory search behind the curtains hanging from the counter that were serving as cabinets, a doubtful flick to the side knowing where my more likely target lay. As I stood in front of the iron cooking stove, I let myself think, just for a moment, that my intuition of what had happened here might have been entirely misguided. My client had never given me any concrete reason that she was sure that there was a body to be found. I was going to open that door, and at worst, I was going to scare a family of mice. There had been no murder here, just a little old lady who had abandoned this old shack when life in the woods had gotten too hard for her.

With a deep breath, I kneeled down to have a direct sight line of whatever it was that I was about to reveal. The stove itself had been well-maintained over the years, it wasn’t new, but it showed little of the neglect that had overtaken the rest of the house. When I turned the bar to unlock the door to the wood-fired oven within, it gave the slightest grind of metal on metal as the clasp released, and the door swung heavily but smoothly on its hinges.

I’m not sure what I expected to find, the charred remains were startling, horrifying even, but the blackened bones within were in a relaxed pose, arms crossed at the chest, shoulders resting on one side of the oven, and knees tucked up on the other.

A figure resigned to its fate.

A closer inspection showed signs that this state of repose was not easily come by, several finger bones lay in her lap, knuckles shattered, a valiant effort to free herself before deciding that dignity in death was the last gift that she could give herself.

I pulled myself out of the crouch that I had relaxed into and strode to the back door to catch my breath. I don’t think that there was any part of me that thought that I was going to find a kindly old woman who had passed in her sleep, but the nature of her death was shocking and the furthest thing from natural. Nothing about this felt natural.

A sick sensation hit the pit of my stomach. It would have been easy to tell myself that I was reacting to the gruesome nature of this woman’s death, but there was no one here to lie to. The feeling was disappointment. I had done that job that I had been paid to do, and the only thing left was to snap a few pictures and hike back out, but as much as my client purported to not care about what had happened here, I did. There was a puzzle to piece together, a knot to untangle, and I could never resist either of those things.

It was there, leaning against the door frame, pining for the mystery laid out in front of me, that I saw what I had missed when I had first come inside. Sitting there, in the dust of the path that had been worn by many years of exits and entrances, were two gold coins.

#

The body. Just confirming the death of my client’s mother. That was the only reason I am here. I was explicitly told that she had no interest at all in finding out what had happened to her. That was an attitude I would never understand. Though, I suppose, I never knew the woman’s mother. I have seen my share of fallings out among families in my time in this industry and callous disregard would hardly be the worst that I have come across.

The mostly empty chest inside. The scattering of coins just outside of it. These two coins. My intuition was telling me that this looked like a robbery that turned into a murder, or maybe the other way around. The whole scene gave the impression of someone trying to flee from it as quickly as they could, and people who move quickly tend to be sloppy. If there are two coins here, I might find more elsewhere. If I find enough, I might just have a trail to follow.

The area surrounding the house appeared to have been largely kept clear through simple foot traffic, so that with no feet remaining to traffic it, it was quickly being reclaimed by the forest. I hadn’t missed anything in my initial search around the animal pens, just the small bones and the bucket. My search of the front of the house didn’t turn up anything other than some glass that had been broken out of a window. If I didn’t know any better I would have said that someone had been gnawing on the corner, but in any case, no further dropped treasure.

The far side of the house finally gave me another data point to consider, but it wasn’t in any way what I thought I was looking for. A heap of tangled thistles stood right at the edge of the forest that no one had ever considered taming. On closer inspection, the heap was not the thistles at all, but something that the vegetation had chosen to grow among.

It was a pile of bones.

The heap of skeletal remains did not in any way give me the courtesy of being ambiguous about their origin. They were human bones. Many of them had broken down into shards and further to dust, but there were several skulls in the mix. Some of them were clearly from full-grown adults, some of them… were not. The smallest of which fit comfortably in the curve of my hand, reminding me completely against my will of holding a softball.

That was the point at which my stomach decided to evacuate everything inside of it. I had my wits about me enough to avoid vomiting directly into these haphazardly discarded remains, but as I was coughing the last bit of bile out of my throat, I spotted a curious smooth shape in the weeds. I wiped off my mouth on the sleeve of my jacket and crouched down for a closer look.

It was a ruby. The deep red color had largely hidden itself in the leaf litter of the forest floor, but it couldn’t help but reflect the scant light that was struggling to make its way through the canopy. There was the slightest hint of what looked like a deer path just a few yards in front of it.

It seemed like a cruel trick. One mystery stacked right on top of another. The one headed into the forest, while the other didn’t seem to lead anywhere from here. If I’m being honest, there was a part of me that didn’t want to find out where that pile of bones had come from. It lent some extra weight to the feeling of that mystery being a dead end.

I turned back, being careful not to step in the mess that I had just created, hesitated in the agony of having to choose, and set off into the forest.

#

Discipline was required in the early going. My enthusiasm to chase after those who fled the house could have easily led me to pursue a wrong trail, triggering the need to retrace my steps and start over. I went slow, eyes combing the ground on half-formed paths or in the direction where the trees and undergrowth allowed the least resistance. It turned out to be easier than I had anticipated. The search was aided by a thinning in the tree tops that allowed more daylight through as I created distance between myself and the house. If it had been a fresh trail, I might not have even needed to pause. They had either taken far more than they could carry or whatever it was that they were carrying their newfound riches in had a sizable hole in it.

Jewels and pearls and gold coins were dropped at regular intervals, it was almost like following a trail of breadcrumbs. A phrase that stubbornly resisted revealing to me how it was that it had entered into the common vernacular.

I spent the better part of the afternoon following the trail and filling my pockets with treasure. I was able, with effort, to keep the image of that tiny skull out of my mind.

I spent the better part of the afternoon following the trail and filling my pockets with treasure. One obstacle eventually presented itself, a duck pond where the trail seemed to end. Right on the muddy bank was a roughly cast gold coin, covered in muck but clearly pointing to a trail that had gone into the pond. There wasn’t a boat, on this side or the other, yet all evidence pointed to them having crossed.

One of the ducks, an enormous one, started giving me his attention, a certain hostility in his eye that did not seem entirely duck-like. He lunged in my direction, all wings and beak and naked aggression, and I admit, I ran. I ran for my life from a pissed-off duck.

I stopped as the quacking and flapping died away in the distance, gulping air and trying to avoid thinking of how ridiculous I must have just looked. The pond was large, as far as ponds went. It would have been far preferable to cross if that had been an option, but it wouldn’t be an unreasonable departure to just walk around it.

I was wet and dirty and not a little miserable by the time I reached the spot opposite where I had started, the most likely spot where they would have ended up if they had crossed, but I didn’t find gold or jewels or pearls. I did see duck prints. In the muddy earth that led away from the pond was a trail of webbed feet. It was ridiculous, but I followed them.

Being much more consistent, fresher, and still easy to see, I sprinted in the wake of the duck. It must have heard me because it came, once more flapping out of the trees trying to chase me off again. I stood my ground this time, and frustrated in his attempt, he spit a mouthful of treasure at my feet.

Had the duck been trying to cover over the trail? That’s ludicrous, right? Ducks generally do not fall into the category of accessories after the fact in potential murder cases. Possible criminal activity aside, the duck was staring up at me, what could not possibly be a threat behind his eyes. Something in my own expression must have communicated that I had understood the gist of what that glare had meant because he walked past me and returned himself to his business on the pond.

#

In the end, as odd as it was, the encounter with the duck was not as big a hindrance to my search as it might have been, as I am curiously positive that the duck had hoped that it would be. I found myself tracking webbed footprints, then the disturbance of the undergrowth that resulted from a duck shuffling through the woods. As well-suited as they were for the water and the sky, their skills on land, and particularly in this environment were limited.

It wasn’t long before I was once again searching the ground for flashes of gems and the glint of the sun striking gold on the ground in front of me. Back in the flow of the hunt, I found myself falling into a rhythm of ducking under low branches and pushing through thorn bushes until I once again came into a clearing.

It looked like it had been used several times over as a base camp of sorts. They were the remains of a not-small fire near the center, and the trees in the area showed signs of being thinned for firewood. Next to the burnt-out section of the forest floor that marked the former site of a bonfire was a length of tree trunk, roughly as long as I was tall, that had evidently served as a bench. I took a seat, deciding that this was as good a time as any to take a break. My pursuit thus far had been unbroken, and it seemed like it was about time to collect my thoughts.

It was hard to escape the thought that my client’s mother had been a monster, no matter how nasty her end had been. There may have been another explanation for what I saw there, but my imagination was failing me in what that might be. Was I pursuing murderers or potential victims? At this point, I think I was just pursuing answers. Maybe if I found them, I might even get some clue as to what was up with that duck.

I found myself absently running my hand along the grain of the bench beside me. The was a deep groove in the wood, probably just an errant blow with the axe when they were bringing the tree down. But when I shifted my gaze down to where my hand was examining the groove, there was a dark stain on the wood as well. Not a small one. It wasn’t new, and maybe my mind had been prepped by the day to jump to the conclusion, but this was almost certainly blood. It was hard to tell if there was enough to indicate an accident or a fatal injury, the ground would have drunk most of the blood in either case, but again, conclusions were well within jumping range.

I circled the clearing, trying to locate anything that might point me in the direction of what had occurred here. Nothing.

A thought circled my mind. I’m not sure if it would be fitting or ironic, but it seemed too right to not check.

I returned to my spot near the fire pit. I pushed the largest log out of the ring of ash with the toe of my boot. I brushed aside some of the smaller pieces, and there they were… bones. For the second time today, I had found what was left of a human being burned to nothing but ash and blackened bone.

It was difficult to make solid conclusions from the burnt remains but it appeared that the clavicle, one hand, and a vertebra in the neck had been crushed. I picture flashed in my head of this person, propped on the log near the fire, hands raised in meager defense from an axe that would sink its head into them twice before it blessedly came to an end. At least they were dead when they were burned, not a blessing I ever thought that I would consider.

It could hardly be a coincidence that this body was here, right along the path that I was following, just another of the breadcrumbs that I was following to my ultimate destination. That was how my mind had to categorize it, at least. There was no room in my head to actually process the things that I had seen today. I could almost feel my brain protecting itself by turning anything but the facts surrounding these two bodies into a blind spot. Processing was something that I could set aside for later, must set aside for later, I needed to press on.

It took a few minutes to find the trail again, a sapphire at the far side of the clearing. The sun was starting to get low in the sky, and the natural darkness of twilight imitated the unnatural gloom that had fallen over the shack where this trail had begun. I took a flashlight from the pocket of my jacket, deploying the tiny searchlight across the likelier gaps in the trees. It wasn’t long before my precious breadcrumbs led me out to an area well-traveled enough to qualify as a proper path. The jewels and coins continued, but they were now following the well-worn trail as well, until at last, the forest spat me out on a gravel road, directly across from a house.

#

If anything, this house may have been worse off than those that greeted me on my drive in. The house sat at the bottom of a steep hill, a stream running along the base of it. On a rainy day, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see some of the jutting rocks on that hillside turn into temporary waterfalls. The house itself was almost more mildew than house at this point, the roof was essentially a sheet of thriving moss. The structure was being devoured by the surrounding moisture, it was hard to believe that anyone lived inside of it.

For a moment, I nearly allowed myself to believe that the house was empty. Oh well, no one was home, I’ll just have to make my way back to the city and report my findings, no need to dwell on this any further.

It was just a moment.

I took the three steps up to the front porch, concerned that it might give way beneath me. For good reason, to the left of the door was a roughly foot-sized hole in the lumber. Taking the opportunity afforded by the hole to locate a support beam to place my weight on, I stood and knocked on the door.

One more time, I let myself entertain the fantasy that no one was home, that there would be no answer to my tapping on the front door. The fantasy quickly thwarted, a head of dirty blonde hair appeared about chest high in the doorway. A pair of pale blue eyes looked up at me, or more accurately, past me, close enough to eye contact to be seen as acknowledgment but not a bit more. I dug in my pocket and pulled out a handful of gold coins.

“Umm… I think these may belong to you.” I hadn’t given much thought to how any of this might play out if I actually did come face-to-face with the subject of my search. To his credit, the boy at the door was able to mostly conceal his startled reaction to the proffered treasure before him.

A girl, very clearly his sister, appeared behind him and stared not just right at me, but through me, with those same pale blue eyes. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

“Well, I just, well…” The girl was unnerving and had caught me off-guard. The day had stripped away more of my reserve of calm than I had realized. I took a deep breath and dipped into what was left of it. “There was a house in the woods. I found a woman there. The remains of one. The trail led here.”

“You a cop?” She had the look of a rubber band that had been pulled back in preparation to snap someone.

“No, not a cop. If you know what I saw in that cabin, and I think that you do, I’m sure that you can understand my interest in what happened there.” I saw the slightest amount of slack return to her posture. The boy was barely there, the silent stare that he had greeted me with was just as vacant as when I first knocked.

There was still no indication that they were about to volunteer any information, so I continued. “I saw something else there, outside the cabin…”

“The bones?” She interrupted me quietly but firmly. The tension had almost entirely fallen away from her, and she looked like a child for the first time since she had stepped in to speak for her brother.

“Yes, was she…”

“She was going to eat us.” There was relief all over her face. This stranger who knew what they had done, wanted to know what had been done to them.

It was shocking, but it also fit the information that I had available to me. She went on and told me the rest of the story. Some of it almost had to be trauma-induced nonsense, the bit about the house being constructed of candy in particular, and their own encounter with a duck, but the core of the story, lost in the woods, taken in by an old woman who turned out to be some sort of cannibal, jumping on the only opportunity they had for escape. It was a harrowing tale.

The rumble of an engine accompanied by the crackle of shifting gravel and the thunk of an unavoidable pothole came ricocheting off the hillside. An old rust-eaten Dodge Caravan with faux woodgrain came to a skidding stop in front of the house, the driver’s side door popping open while the car was still swaying on its suspension. A blonde man with an impressive mustache emerged from the van shouting.

“Get the hell away from my kids!” The imperative was immediately made half as difficult as the boy shot off of the porch to the man’s side. He wrapped an arm around the boy’s shoulder, a protective and calming gesture. “What are you doing here?”

“He came from the house, dad. We told him what happened.” The girl jumped in, answering for me.

“Is that so? You made quite a hike to get all the way out here from there.” Some calm seemed to be seeping into the man’s demeanor, perhaps realizing that I had no ill intentions toward his children. Maybe also catching on that I am all by myself and in no real position to be a threat to anyone. “Why don’t we go in the house, you look like you could use a drink.”

I feel the tension go out of my muscles along with the tension that drained from the situation. The man came up the steps and motioned for me to go in first. As I turned to go through the door I felt the momentary sensation of him making contact with the back of my head and heard the load crack of my face being driven into the doorframe before everything went black.

#

When I come to, my hands and feet are tied, and I’m laying face down in the dirt. The impulse to check the throbbing gash in my head is overwhelming, but again, no hands. I let out a frustrated grunt, and give a token struggle against the ropes that I know will be fruitless. A pair of well-worn boots appear in front of my face long enough to see the kick to my stomach coming.

“You aren’t taking my children away from me.” The voice comes out as a snarl. My mind conjures up pictures of wolves, not men, at the sound of it. “I will never let that happen again.”

The boots keep coming in and out of my line of sight as he paces back and forth, working himself up to something. The something that he is working himself up to is plain, and I am not currently seeing a way to avoid it. In a bid to get a better look at where I am and what is going on, I wriggle myself onto my back, a move that earns me a kick in the side.

“Your kids were safe. I was half convinced the woman had it coming before I even heard their story.” I think most of those words actually got out. My mouth was dry, my head was swimming, and the fresh pain of what might be a couple broken ribs was radiating through my side. “I just needed to know.”

The pacing continued, though it had taken on a slower less manic pace. From experience, this generally meant that actual contemplation was taking over for the bombardment of thought that had preceded it. Given how dire the situation had looked, a return to reason should work in my favor.

The pacing stopped. He kneeled down next to my bound body and I let myself hope that he was about to set me free. Instead, he leaned in close and said, “and the other body, do you expect me to believe that you don’t know anything about that one?”

He motioned over my shoulder to what I suddenly realized was the bonfire I had stopped at in the woods, the charred logs… and bones having plainly been disturbed. It was then that it hit me.

“Your wife.” It wasn’t a question, and he knew that it wasn’t, but the man gave me a nod in acknowledgment. He grabbed me up by the arm and dragged me over to the log that had served as his chopping block. He propped me up in a sitting position and got to work making a fire of the wood that he had gathered while I was unconscious.

“I would never have hurt my children.” He said as he worked. “Not if she hadn’t talked me into it.”

I nodded, doing the math that it might be in my best interest to not contradict the madman who was about to kill me.

“She just kept picking and picking and picking.” He continued. “She was hungry, we were all hungry. She convinced me, talked me into it. Said we would all starve if we didn’t do something about it.”

I made my face do the thing that was supposed to convey understanding, sympathy. Perhaps not in an entirely convincing fashion.

“The first time, when they found their way back, I was so relieved.” He added.

“The first time?” It came out of my mouth before I could think what I was saying.

He turned a cool look in my direction. “Yes, the first time. We set them out in the woods, here, in fact. We left them here, but they found their way back. The boy had left a trail of flints to follow back.”

“But you did it again?” I replied, apparently committed to abandoning my play at sympathy.

“Well, nothing had changed.” The man went on. “We didn’t magically have more food just because I was happy that my kids had come home. Besides, that woman just got right back to picking. She wore me down. I couldn’t even look at her when we got back. She was a monster.”

“She convinced you twice to march your own children into the woods and leave them there, but none of this is on you?”

That seemed to be it, the pouring out of his heart was now at an end. I could see in his eyes that I was no longer a victim or circumstance in his eyes, someone that he regretfully needed to get rid of to protect his family. The truth of that last line had hit home, and some men will be able to see wickedness in everything, but in themselves.

He crossed from the far side of the bonfire that he has set up, grabbed the rope where it was tied between my ankles and pulled. My head cracked off of the log that I had been propped against, sending another shock through my still ringing head. When I gathered myself again it was to find him with his boot planted on my chest, pinning me where I was, so that I couldn’t squirm away.

There is the old cliché where in your last moments your life flashes before your eyes. Maybe my brain was too concussed to conjure up those images for me, or maybe that whole thing was nonsense, but in those last moments I thought about those kids. Both of them had been scarred by this ordeal, probably forever. The boy had been turned into a victim. How do you recover your sense of dignity when someone has decided that you are food. The girl was a killer now, not a murderer like her father, but someone who has to live with the knowledge of what it is to take a life. There is a strength in her that gives me some hope that these kids might make it, but they are going to need it. These children were born into a house of horrors, and I can’t convince myself that this will be the last horrific thing that visits them.

I see him as he raises the axe high over his shoulder and I wince away from it as I see it fall. My brain doesn’t have enough time to register pain as the blade of the axe tears through my…