Mara

When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.

~Alexis de Tocqueville

______________

The girl was sitting in front of a window, quiet and still, her face turned towards the sunlight.

She hadn't spoken since they'd brought her here. She seemed to have withdrawn into a catatonic stupor; her face had been vacant, her eyes almost lifeless. She hadn't shown any resistance or hostility towards them, but the way she had complied with their instructions had been unsettling. She moved like something mechanical, something inanimate that had been programmed to obey whatever commands had been given to it, to comply without voice or expression.

"How is she?" Erika asked, the sound of her footsteps echoing sharply in the empty hall, and he glanced at her as she came up beside him.

"The same, as far as I can tell." He replied, and she nodded like it was what she'd been expecting to hear.

"Her blood test came back." She said. “Positive for White Dahlia, and a lot of it. These levels can only result from prolonged dosage over a short period of time.”

“They've been drugging her.” The words were like ash in his mouth. Wondering why they'd done it, what they'd done to her, made him sick to his stomach. He had a feeling he already knew both. The doctor had given him something, too, whenever she took him to the white room with the bathtub or the red room with the altar. "The room I found her in...it was some kind of ritual chamber. They were using her for rituals."

"That's very possible." Erika hesitated, and all of a sudden he got a feeling that she was saying that to humor him. "But that passageway, that room you found...there was nothing in there, Jacob. Both were empty." She continued, and he turned to face her, taken aback. "The markings, the altar, the symbol...we didn't see anything that you described."

"They must have stripped it clean before we got back there." He replied sharply. Whoever these people were, it was like they were playing some twisted game, like they were allowing only him to see glimpses of the truth. To isolate him, to make him sound like a lunatic. "I know what I saw, Erika."

"I believe you." But she didn't sound like she did, not completely. "But we don't have any evidence to make that claim in a court of law." She continued, sounding just as frustrated as he was now. "We have enough to detain a suspect, but that's it. Everyone in the lodge has lawyered up, and they're all claiming innocence, that none of them knew the girl was there. I think that's a crock of s**t just as much as you do, but these people have deep pockets. They'll bankrupt the damn department in legal fees. We have no way of proving who the kidnapper or kidnappers were beyond a reasonable doubt, and no one's talking."

"What about the server?" He replied, a pit growing in his stomach. She was right. Without solid proof, they weren't going to get anywhere. "The one who reached out to Councilman Hollander? We know they've been moving drugs, and with her testimony, we can at least get the lodge owners on that."

"They're claiming the girl you described was never a server there." Erika's face went dark. "My deputies talked to all of the servers. None of them matched your description."

The silence that followed felt heavy, like grief and guilt mixed together. He never even knew her name. He could have helped her. He'd watched her walk away, and did nothing.

What had they done to her? Made her disappear, like Andrea? Maybe she was already dead, at the bottom of some icy river deep in the woods. Or maybe she was still alive, being kept somewhere no one could reach-

"Then all we have is Mara." He said, cutting off the rising tide of thoughts before they could drown him. "I'd like to try to speak with her now, if you don't mind."

Erika nodded in silent assent, and he turned back towards the door, opening it and stepping into the room. It was a warm, comforting space, with soft colors and furniture that reminded one of a home bedroom rather than some foreign place. Erika had told him Councilman Hollander had built this rehabilitation center a few years ago, that it had helped a lot of people, and he could see why. He had been a good man, he thought. Too good to last long in this town.

The girl did not move at his entrance, did not turn. He approached her, taking a chair from the nearby desk and pulling it over to the window before sitting down next to her.

"Mara?" His voice was gentle, and her face turned away from the sunlight towards him. Something was starting to stir in her eyes, and it reminded him of the moment he'd found her. It had taken a while for him to coax her out of the pit. A numb terror had seemed to paralyze her, making her face and body go rigid. But then some life had flickered in her eyes, like it had risen from somewhere deep inside of her, and she'd reached up and grabbed his hand. "Mara, can you hear me?"

It took a moment for her to nod. The drug's grip had yet to fully wear off.

"I'd like to ask you some questions about what happened to you, if you don't mind. Is that okay?" The nod came a little quicker this time, like the stimulation was helping her sharpen her focus, and he continued. "Can you tell me the last thing you remember before you were taken?"

"I was at school. In the bathroom." Her voice was quiet, shaky and raw. "Someone...a man, I think, grabbed me. I tried to scream, but I couldn't. His...his hand was over my mouth. He was holding a cloth that smelled like...something sweet. That's all I remember."

"And then what do you remember next?"

"A...a room. It was dark." Her body was starting to tremble. "There were men. I don't remember their faces, but I remember...voices. An altar. And..." She trailed off like her voice was a dying flame.

"I saw your drawings." He prompted, after the silence had hung there for several long moments. "The things that you drew, did you see them in the dark room?"

She did not answer, lowering her head. When she looked up again, there were tears in her eyes.

"Yes."

"And have you seen these things all your life?'

She nodded. "They said...they said no one would believe me."

"I believe you." He said, feeling a dreadful certainty now. "Those things that you saw, I've seen them too." He continued, and she stared at him, astonished.

"I...I thought they weren’t real. That I was the only one who saw….”

"So did I.” Jacob replied softly. For so many years he’d thought he was alone, that the horrors were nothing more than a private madness. "Is there anything else you remember?"

"There was somewhere else…somewhere in the woods. A cave. They took me there before they took me to the dark room."

"Do you remember anything else about where you were?”

“Before they took me inside, I heard water.” She paused, as if trying to focus. “Running water, like I was near a river.”

“Do you remember what happened after they took you into the cave?”

"There was a room with stained glass windows. They did something to me there." Fear spread across her face like a mask. "They...they made me do things. Everything got cold, and…" The tremor in her voice got worse the more she spoke, like it was harder and harder to get the words out.

“You don’t have to talk any more if you don’t want to, Mara.” He said, putting a hand over hers. It was shaking. “What you said is very helpful.”

She nodded. Her trembling calmed a little as her face turned back to the sunlight.

He rose to his feet and left the room. Erika was waiting in the hall by the door. "She doesn't remember a lot." He said. "But she remembers enough. They used her in rituals, I'm sure of it."

"I believe they did, too." Erika replied, but her eyes were still troubled. "But what judge is going to allow her to get on the stand and make that testimony after hearing she was drugged with a hallucinogen? The defense is going to immediately demand she be excluded as an unreliable witness, and they'd have a rock-solid case for doing so."

He was quiet for a moment, a sharp frustration building inside him again. Ever since he'd found her in the pit, he'd felt a deep attachment and obligation to the girl, like she was his own child. No one had been there to believe him all those years ago. Maybe he could give her the hope and help he never had.

"What if I could corroborate her testimony?" He said, once he'd finally found his voice.

She paused, caught off guard. "How?"

"These people that took her...they've done this before. When I was a kid, I stayed in a psychiatric facility for a few years. Because of the things I saw, my mom thought I was sick, that it would help me.” It was a struggle to get the words out, like they were weights deep inside of him, refusing to move. He'd never talked about it before. Not even to his mother. "But the doctor there…she said I had a special gift, a special perception.” His voice got quieter, shakier as the woman's voice echoed in his head again. Let it take you deeper. That voice had lived in his bones for far too long. "What Mara talked about, what they did to her…it happened to me, too."

Erika did not say anything for a while, and the silence was piercing. But when she finally spoke, her voice was warm, compassionate. "I'm sorry." There was no doubt on her face this time. It meant more to him than she could know. "But I don’t think that’s a good idea. The defense would want you excluded due to a conflict of interest. Unless you have evidence of what happened, you’ll likely be disqualified as a witness too.”

The spark of hope inside him deflated as quickly as it had come. Again, she was right. She was looking at things logically, not letting the emotions of a case cloud her judgement. That had never been the side of police work he'd been good at. She would have been a good partner.

"We'll find another way." Erika assured, coming up to him and placing a hand on his arm. “Every crime leaves a trail. We just need to know where to find it."

"Yeah, you’re right.” He nodded, but was unable to shake a cold sense of foreboding. “Mara said she was taken to the woods.” He continued. “To a cave.”

"That’s something.” Erika said, frowning as if deep in thought. “But mapping those woods is going to take a while. Let’s call it for today. I need to head back to the morgue to go over Adam’s autopsy results. We’ll head out there tomorrow.” She continued, a shadow of concern on her face now. “Get some rest. You look like you need it.”

“Thanks.” He said dryly, and she gave him a flicker of a smile before turning to head back down the hallway.

He’d stood there for a while after she’d disappeared around the corner, staring at the door to Mara’s room. The hall was silent in Erika’s absence, the kind of quiet that pressed in on him and made his thoughts too loud. 

The air felt colder now. Or maybe it wasn't the air. Maybe the chill was coming from within. Above, the hum of the lights faltered. Briefly, for only a moment. But enough to feel wrong.

A memory surfaced, sharp and uninvited; of a long, dark stairwell and a red door. The doctor’s voice, her cold fingers on his skin. This is what you were meant for. 

Then the lights steadied. The cold ebbed. The fear faded to a painful echo. 

Everything was quiet again.

__________________

Sleep did not come to him.

He'd been lying in bed for a while, staring up into the darkness at the pale ceiling, before finally deciding to give up. He'd had nights like this before, nights where a particular case settled in his mind and wouldn't let it rest. But he’d never had a case like this one before. Ever since he’d gotten here a part of him wanted to walk away and leave it all behind. But something deep inside wouldn’t let him, compelling him to continue for Mara’s sake. For his own sake. To finally face the things that had been buried in fog for so many years.

Jacob got out of bed and walked over to the desk by the window. The motel room was sparsely furnished, smelling faintly of disinfectant and old smoke.

There was a single lamp on the desk. When he turned it on, it cast a tired, soft glow. 

Mara's drawings were still sitting where he'd left them earlier that evening, spread out in careful rows. He went through them again, more slowly this time, picking up each one and staring at it for a moment in the dim light. Some of them were of places he recognized, even though they had that familiar bleak, empty look and strange pale or red color. 

Not all of them had figures. But he recognized some of the shadows in the ones that did. They weren't the same, not exactly. But close enough to make his skin crawl. 

He put most of them aside for the moment, picking a few out of the rows and laying them closer in front of him. He didn't recognize the places depicted in these drawings. 

One was of a grey, featureless ceiling and hazy figures in the background, like she had been lying down and they had been standing over her. It was hard to tell, but these figures looked almost human, lacking the misshapen outlines of the other figures. Their skin seemed to blur together with the pale light around them, as if their skin was made of the light itself. But their faces were those of men with dark eyes. 

A chill passed through him. Had she been taken before?

The other drawings he selected all had a similar depiction; the room was different, but the scene was the same. This isn’t the first time she’s been hurt, he thought, looking away. He felt sick to his stomach again. Maybe it’s been happening for a long time.

The box of her drawings sat open at his feet, still half-full. When he reached in again, his fingers brushed something different. 

Not sheets of paper. Thicker. A notebook. 

Its cover was a light shade of grey, and his pulse sped up as he opened it and flipped through the pages. Mara's handwriting was uneven, restless. 

I don't like it here. It doesn't feel like home.

I saw one of those things again this morning. The walls changed, too, and the other girls all disappeared. It's happening more often now. It's been worse ever since the fire. 

Mrs. Sybil asks me about it a lot. She says she wants to help me, but it feels kind of weird. Everyone working here is kind of weird. They're always staring at me, like I'm different. I guess I am.

She wants me to write down what I see and feel. She says it will help, that it's therapeutic. I still don't like it. I don't even want to think about it, why would I want to write about it?

He skipped through a number of pages before settling on another entry. 

I had a nightmare.

It wasn’t like the others. I don’t know what this one means.

I was lying down somewhere in a grey room. There was a light. Voices were saying things I didn’t understand. My body felt cold and heavy and I couldn’t move. I couldn’t talk.

It didn’t feel like a dream at first. It felt real. Maybe I’m crazier than I thought.

He kept going. A few pages were missing, torn cleanly out of the book. Maybe someone didn't want whatever was written in them to be read, he thought. He didn't know that for sure. But it still made him uneasy. 

I had a bad episode today.

Everything was worse than usual. That cold feeling under my skin, the way things changed. The monster I saw.

It was the same one from the fire. The thing that killed Mom. No one believed me. They'll never believe me.

But I know what I saw.

He closed the journal and set it down on the desk, exhaling slowly. Something about the entries had cut too close. He’d lost his mother too when he was her age. She'd gotten sick not too long after he'd been released from the sanitarium. 

Maybe it was just from reading Mara's words, but those memories felt particularly sharp now. The cold stillness of the hospital room. The way she’d looked up at him with empty, sunken eyes. The bone-white pallor of her face and skin. The dark, jagged marks on her neck.

Her voice, a raspy, rattling sound. I’m sorry, Jacob.

He'd never understood what her apology was meant for. He'd used to imagine it was for a lot of things. That her passing would leave him an orphan, perhaps. For not being there. For the sanitarium. But thinking back on it now, he wondered if she had known the truth. If she had known that what was happening to him was not the conjuring of a delusional mind but something very real.  

But if so, then how long had she known? And why hide it from him?

He remembered how his skin had crawled when he'd seen those dark marks on her throat. The nurse had told him it was normal. Blood clotting. A symptom of her illness. Had someone done something to her? A shiver passed through him at the thought. Had her illness been caused by something else- 

Something moved near the window, interrupting his thoughts, and he looked up.

The hotel curtains had stirred, as if picked up by a gust of wind, but the window was closed. Outside, the lights were flickering dimly in a wall of fog that hadn’t been there just moments ago, and he got to his feet and approached the window.

Beyond the glass, everything looked quiet and still. The fog and darkness made it difficult to make out anything besides shapes and outlines.

Then he saw the shadow.

It was standing on the pier near the lake, just where the light fell away, its silhouette blurring at the edges like a hazy reflection.

A familiar cold was settling in him now, and he looked away. The motel room was different now. Emptier. Paler, like the color had been bled out of the walls and furniture. The silence felt heavier, too, more…wrong. 

It was happening again.

When he looked back out the window, the figure had shifted. It didn’t look like a monster. It looked human.

Then it turned and disappeared into the fog.

More on impulse than thought, Jacob grabbed his coat and flashlight and headed out the door into the hall. The corridor looked just like his room, wrong and desolate, with greying, faded walls. Those snow-like particles hung in the air like drifting ash.

He walked out the motel door and headed into the night. The fog seemed to swallow all sound, muting the echoes of his footsteps as he made his way to the spot on the pier where the figure had been standing.

He saw it again as soon as he’d stepped onto the dock, a dark flash in the mist to his right, before it disappeared into the woods near the motel. He followed, heart pounding as he stepped past the treeline and entered the forest.

The air was cold and damp. Fog seeped between the rows of trees on either side of him, giving the forest an eerie, dreamlike glow in the light of the moon.

He walked for a moment, his flashlight cutting a narrow path through the darkness, before stopping. He couldn’t see the shadow in front of him anymore. 

The forest was still, dead quiet, and a shiver ran down his spine. Something was watching him. He could feel it.

The sound of rustling branches came from somewhere behind him, and he spun around, sweeping his flashlight out in front of him.

Nothing. Then a flicker of movement, a shape in the mist. The shadow didn’t look human anymore. It was too thin, too long. It didn’t have a face-

Fear gripped him, hard and sudden, and he turned and ran. He wasn’t sure where he was going, but every fiber of his being was screaming at him to run, to not look back. The trees felt like they were closing in on him now. The fog was suffocating, the dark endless.

He kept going until the trees thinned and he entered a wide clearing. It was empty except for a willow tree that loomed in the center, tall with hanging branches that stretched far and wide. As he got closer to the tree, he noticed signs of activity around it, odd markings in the grass. 

Some were tracks. Others were remnants of melted wax and debris that didn't look natural to the area. A set of round, heavy stones were positioned in a circular pattern near the base of the tree. 

In the middle of the stones there was a dark patch of grass, black with ash and traces of blood. Buried beneath the ash was white flecks of what looked like bone. 

Something had been burned here. Or someone. 

He glanced over his shoulder, but the trees were quiet and the shadowy figure was nowhere to be seen. When he looked back he noticed a symbol carved into the trunk of the willow tree, and he approached slowly, making his way past the stones. 

It was a half-open eye, similar to the ones he'd seen in the passage in the lodge cellar, and he looked away. His head was starting to pound, nausea building in his stomach. 

It felt like something was staring back at him. That same presence. But this time it felt sharper, like it had in the red room, bringing up all those memories to the surface.

Flickering candles. Cold stone. A voice, familiar and terrible-

Then the world tilted and everything went black.