Unreal Part 3 - FREE AND DISGUISED: (THRILLER ROMANCE AND MYSTERY) Page 23

  Quickly, she ducked through the rest of the apartment. Empty, empty, empty; all of it was empty.

  Maybe he went out to get a hot breakfast. Maybe he’ll bring back donuts. Maybe we were out of eggs. The easily stomached possibilities soothed her apprehension for as long as it took her to end up back in his bedroom and find his wallet and car keys. He wouldn’t have gone out without them. And, as she continued to wander blankly through her home, Dawn also found the front door bolted and locked from the inside.

  Dawn began to shiver, and called for him as she hugged herself. For a lack of better things to do, she sat and she waited, but as the hours ticked on and her mind grew restless, she picked up the phone and cycled through his acquaintances. No one had seen him that morning. No one had any plans to meet with him.

  He was simply gone, without word or cause or evidence, and Dawn Peck was alone.

  When the sun began to set, Dawn picked up the phone again, called the police, and burst into tears.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The officer who had responded to Dawn’s distressed phone call was a wide, droopy man who took up most of the couch. Sometimes he would write things down in his pad of paper, but mostly he just looked at her in a way that was half disbelieving and half pitying.

  “You’re sure he didn’t tell you anything?” He scratched at his soft chin, looking tired.

  Dawn wanted to scream at him. She had told him everything she knew and everything she had done. She had told him about their argument the night before and that all of his things had never left his room and that the door was locked from the inside when she woke up and found him gone. Taking a deep breath, she rubbed her face and cycled through her story for the umpteenth time.

  He clearly thought she was exaggerating. He told her as much without mincing words.

  “It sounds to me like you may be exaggerating the details in your distress.” He closed his notepad and leaned forward so his big elbows were resting on his big knees. “But in any case, I suppose I should bring you down to the station. I can’t let very well leave you alone here under the circumstances, but it’s too early to file a missing person’s report—especially with so little to go on. But that’s what will do, if it comes to it.”

  “And then what?”

  The question seemed to take him off guard. Dawn knew she was still just a kid, but she wasn’t one to beat around the bush; her father had taught her better than that, even if he hadn’t been able to nail down tactfulness.

  “I can’t stay at the station forever, can I?” She shrunk backward, into her chair, and brought her knees up to her chest. “If my dad doesn’t show up, if he really is missing, where am I supposed to go?”

  Aside from never having met her mother, Dawn didn’t know of any extended family on her father’s side—and all his close friends he’d left behind years ago when they packed everything up and moved, and moved, and moved again. Here, in a city inappropriately named Good Folks, she had no one.

  The officer gave a thoughtful bob of his head. “We’ll get to that when the time comes,” he said as delicately as he could manage.

  Before they’d even made it to the station, Dawn vowed that she’d never let them get to that, no matter how swiftly that time might come—and come it did. She was old enough to know where they’d put her. If they couldn’t assume her father had been mugged or kidnapped, then his absence suggested negligence. They’d hand her over to child services—and, by extension, the foster care system.

  When they told her as much with soft words that were meant to be gentle, Dawn feigned ignorance. “We have a wonderful family that’s happy to meet you,” the slight woman who represented the organization told her. She picked at a loose thread on her blazer as she smiled sympathetically. “They’re more than happy to take you in for as long as it takes to find your father. You’ll be very happy there, with them.”

  The woman said the word happy too much. It made Dawn frown. “What about my things? I left it all at home.”

  “I’ll drive you back home so you can pack anything you’ll need for the first few nights. If there’s still no sign of your father by then, you’ll have a chance to go back for more.” She hesitated, realized what she said, and reached over to put a hand on Dawn’s shoulder. “Of course, I’m sure he’ll turn up before there’ll be any need for that.”

  Dawn responded sweetly. That way, when she pulled a modestly-sized suitcase out from their hall closet and lugged it to her bedroom, the woman wouldn’t suspect it of her to ease the door closed and force a chair under the handle.

  The moment she was alone, her heart began to pound. She flexed her palms, feeling them begin to grow slick with sweat, and slapped them against her cheeks to keep herself focused. It wouldn’t be long before the woman came by to check on her. She needed to get everything she needed and get as far away as she could before that happened. Dawn didn’t want to be a runaway, but she had a bad feeling about this. Nobody else seemed to think her father’s disappearance was strange, and because of that nobody seemed to think there was any real reason to properly investigate it.

  There was something about the jarring suddenness of all of this that made her uneasy. Could nobody else see that this was unnatural? Or did nobody want to?

  Stop wasting time, she reminded herself, and launched into action, throwing her favorite clothes into her suitcase. She had a bit of money shoved under her mattress, but it wouldn’t last her long. Ideally she’d like to take her father’s wallet with her, but it was in the other room and she doubted she’d be able to get to it without being seen.

  She was nearly finished when she heard the laugh that sent a sharp chill down her spine.

  “What’s your hurry? Nobody’s going to bother us until I let them,” someone said behind her.

  Dawn turned slowly, her heart in her throat. There was nobody behind her—nobody else in the room at all. She was just imagining things. She laughed to calm herself. “I’m losing it,” she chided. “Keep yourself together, girl.”

  But as she started to turn away, the laugh came again.

  “I’m right here!” The voice was partly amused, partly annoyed, and completely haunting. “Are you blind, or have you really forgotten me? I look exactly the same, unlike you.”

  This time, Dawn narrowed her eyes as she swept them across the room. There were no feet peeking out from behind her curtains, nobody hiding in the closet or under the bed. She moved forward, one slow step after another, until she found who had addressed her.

  Or what had addressed her, more accurately.

  The doll was resting limply against her pillow, its stitched mouth grinning from ear to ear. For a single, blissful moment, Dawn didn’t recognize it. She picked it up, felt the weight of it pushing down on her palm. The thing was hardly larger than her hand, its plush skin coarse and stained. The black button eyes were dull and scratched, and when she turned it over to view the mediocre stich that ran down its back in red thread, she could feel the uncooked rice grains that filled it shift.

  She remembered—not how she found the doll, but how it gave her solace and friendship on those long nights where her dad would be out working and she would be at home all alone. She remembered, too, how it had suggested they play a game together. How the knife felt against her palm and how her blood looked in the bathwater. How she had put the doll in the water with the kitchen knife and ran to find a hiding place on the other side of the house.

  They had had a house then, before her father had gotten the job that would bounce them from apartment to apartment every few months.

  She’d waited in the kitchen cupboard that she had squeezed into, her hands over her mouth and her knees shaking. Dawn remembered hearing the pitter patter of soft, wet footsteps on the ground and the clink-clink of metal hitting the kitchen tile. She’d heard giggles, too, sometimes near and sometimes far away.

  When the cupboard door was shoved open, it was her father who stood there, his eyes wide and horrified. He held the sopping
doll in one hand and shook it around violently after forcing her out of hiding. “What were you doing?” he’d asked. “Do you think this is okay? Do you think this is appropriate?”

  He threw the doll away, and they never did find the knife.

  Over the years Dawn had convinced herself that she’d made up the whole thing, or at least most of the more fanciful details; she always had had an overactive imagination. Eventually she had forgotten it altogether.

  And yet, here was the doll again, halfway across the country from where she had last seen it, hardly worse for wear.

  “You don’t seem very happy to see me,” it said.

  In a fit of sudden terror, Dawn let out a screech and flung it across the room. It made a sickening sound as it hit the wall and dropped to the floor. She brought her hands up to hold her head. The only reason she took her eyes off of the thing was to look toward the bedroom door that she had barricaded. The woman from child services didn’t come knocking, alarmed by her outburst.

  The only sound came from the doll as it laughed again, and straightened itself on its unsteady stuffed legs. “That wasn’t nice,” it said. “And after I came all this way to find you. It took me so long; you kept moving and moving all over the place. I thought we were friends?”

  Dawn stumbled backward, her tongue thick and useless in her mouth. The doll didn’t seem to mind her silence. It kept smiling its smile and talking in un-mouthed words.

  “We are friends,” it said, swaying from side to side but never coming closer. “We never finished our game.”

  “I don’t want to play anymore,” Dawn said. The words had burst forward through her lips unbidden. “It’s been years. It’s over.”

  The doll’s eyes glinted with a hint of danger. “Those aren’t the rules. You hide and I seek. There has to be a winner.”

  Dawn licked her dry lips. “You found me, then. You win.”

  “I thought you might say that,” it said. “That’s why I took your father.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The doll sat across from Dawn on the mattress as she tried to focus on her breathing. She had nearly fainted when the doll shambled forward and reached her, pawing at her jeans with tiny, fingerless hands. It was all she could do not to kick it—but when dark spots started blooming across her tilting vision, she knew she didn’t have the energy left for even that much. So she sat, and it sat, and for a moment she felt her wits return to her.

  Dawn was speaking to a doll. The doll had kidnapped her father.

  “This is blackmail,” she said. “What do you want? This isn’t about a game anymore, is it?”

  “Of course it is,” the doll chided. “You must start what you finish, Dawn. You asked me to play, and it’s my responsibility to see it through to the end.”

  And the doll would do anything to see it through; it had already proven that much.

  Dawn gulped, hating how hoarse her voice had become. “But why?”

  “I want to win,” it said.

  The doll laid out its terms. They were quite simple, though it took Dawn much longer than she would have liked to process them. The doll didn’t seem to mind; it suffered her confusion and anxiety with enduring patience.

  They were to pick up where they’d left off. Dawn would hide, and the doll would try to find her. Because the apartment had been compromised by adults who wanted to take her away (and the doll claimed it could only keep them at bay for a short amount of time), they would use the entire city as their playground. Aside from that, there was only one major difference in the game that they had started a decade prior:

  “If you can find where I put your father before I find you, you’ll win.”

  “And what does the winner get?” Dawn asked, unable to help herself.

  The doll gave a laugh.

  “You asked me that last time, silly,” it teased. “Try to remember.”

  Dawn couldn’t remember, no matter how hard she scrunched up her face and concentrated. All she remembered was the game itself—not the words that the doll had spoken to her.

  “Do you have any more questions?” The doll stared at her. It no longer shifted and moved as if it were trying to escape its skin. “I want to start! Let’s play, Dawn!”

  Her calm began to fail her as she looked around the room, her heart starting to thump quicker and harder in her chest. She didn’t have any more questions, not really—only fear, and only disbelief. There was no real way that this could be happening, but it didn’t seem like a dream. I’m hallucinating, she decided. I’m hallucinating in my panic, because I don’t want to be taken away.

  Maybe this game, and the doll, was all a product of her imagination just as it had been when she was younger. Maybe it was a way of coping with her father’s disappearance. None of that changed the fact that her father was gone, and she was going to get put into the foster system unless she did something very stupid, and quickly.

  Still, Dawn didn’t move. At least not right away. The idea of starting this game, fictional or otherwise, was just as scary as being put into a home with strangers. The only thing it wasn’t scarier than was the idea of never seeing her father again.

  Stalling for time, she asked the first question that came to her.

  “What’s your name?”

  “That’s mean,” the doll whined. “You’re the one who gave me my name. I won’t tell you! You’ll just have to remember that, too. Now, I’m tired of waiting. I’ll give you a head start, so don’t waste it.”

  There was a knock at the door. Startled, Dawn tore her attention away from the doll for a second—and when she looked back, it had disappeared.

  “Are you alright in there, sweetheart?” The social worker knocked again, but thankfully didn’t make to open the door. “I don’t want to rush you, but it’s getting dark…you don’t need to worry about packing too much.”

  Then, before Dawn had a chance to respond, she added: “if you need to cry, I have a handkerchief.”

  Dawn took a deep breath to quell the tremor in her voice. “I’m fine,” she called out, rising carefully to her feet. “I’m almost ready. I just need a couple more minutes, please.”

  She waited until she heard the woman’s footsteps retreating down the hallway before sliding off the bed. She threw a few things from her desk into her suitcase and slid the screen out of her window as quietly as she could. The suitcase barely fit, but in the end Dawn managed to place it carefully down on the ground outside and lowered herself out after it. She was thankful that their apartment was on the first floor. Otherwise, she might not have had any choice but to stay and be dragged along like a child.

  But I’m not a child, she told herself, feeling her fear and her stubbornness flare together. Dawn was her father’s daughter—and she was going to find him.

  CHAPTER 4

  The winner gets to live.

  The words came back to Dawn as she was falling asleep in the park, curled up behind a solidly-backed bench. She was resting her head against her suitcase and using her largest sweater as a blanket. They startled her awake with a shudder that rocked her core.

  She had spent the better half of the night ducking down the darkest roads she could, scaling fences and cutting across backyards she could only hope didn’t have watchdogs. Her heart had never left her throat, but eventually the adrenaline had to wear off and she had to find somewhere to rest.

  But despite her exhaustion, Dawn couldn’t find the peace of mind to get back to sleep.

  Somewhere not too far off, a siren wailed.

  Dawn wondered if it belonged to someone who was searching for her, and struggled back to her feet. It was too soon to rest, anyway. If she didn’t keep moving, someone was bound to find her. If not the police, then worse: the doll.

  The more time went on, the more Dawn was certain that she hadn’t been imagining things where it came to the doll’s appearance and proposition. She couldn’t explain why or how her doll could have found her—or could have conscious thought to begin with—but
she was certain, now. Her doll was something more than just a doll and it was something sinister. It was something that wanted her dead.

  But why, she wondered. Maybe figuring out the answer to that question could help her somehow.

  Dawn frowned. How was she ever going to figure out its motivations when she couldn’t even remember the name she had given it? Somehow, she had a feeling that was just as important to figure out.

  When she first started browsing Internet forum boards, her father was adamant about her never giving out her information--not even her name. Dawn had rolled her eyes, complaining that she wasn’t stupid enough to tell people who she didn’t know anything that would help them find her. He had given her a hard look that confused her.

  “That’s not what I’m worried about,” he’d said. “Names can be dangerous.”

  He’d never given her an explanation about what he meant, and until now Dawn hadn’t ever thought she needed one. It had stuck with her for being such an odd, cryptic statement, but didn’t seem important enough to give any merit. Now, she wasn’t so sure.

  Of course, her father was gone now, and she might never get the chance to ask him. She needed to find her own answers.

  Somewhere behind her, a squirrel darted up a tree, chattering unhappily at a rustling bush beneath it.

  Dawn’s breath caught. As she quickly gathered the last of her things, she swore she saw a glint of metal within the leaves. That was all she let herself see before she turned away and moved.

  It didn’t take long before she had left the park completely. Pulling her hood up over her head, Dawn ducked her head and prowled through the shadows, clinging to the walls of the sloping building that were pressed together throughout downtown like rows and rows of jagged shark teeth. The cover of night didn’t make her feel any more secure than she had behind the park bench. In fact, the deeper she wove into the back alleys of the city, the more persecuted she began to feel.