Author: Priscilla
Chapter 9: Unfolding Truths
Janet's eyes fluttered briefly as she fought to regain consciousness. When she managed to open her eyes she was greeted by semi darkness. As they adjusted to her surroundings, she realized she knew where she was. Jane sat on an elegant shield-back chair in the front hall of the main house of Jeremy's estate. Her wrists were bound to the arms of the chair with strips of white silk, as were her feet to the legs. She wanted to scream, fought to scream, to alarm someone of their capture and impending doom but she couldn't. The ball of silk shoved into her mouth soaked up all her saliva like a sponge, making her gag.
"I don't like compromise as a rule, but one has to be flexible in times of emergency." Jeremy looked up at her from his place on the floor kneeling next to Gerard's unmoving form, working at binding his arms and legs as if he expected a response to his statement from her. He had taken the time to change out of his dirty blood and sweat soaked clothes and bandage the hand he'd cut during his fight with Gerry. Jeremy had spread a blanket out on the floor as to not get Gerard's blood on the oriental hall runner and he re-checked the tightness of the bindings he'd placed on the unconscious prisoner making sure that they were tight, but not tight enough to leave marks on his wrists.
After all, the River Side Strangler's victims were the ones who were supposed to have bruises and marks on their wrists, not the Strangler himself. Janet's eyes kept slipping back to Gerard. She wasn't sure he was breathing and he had been unconscious for half an hour, not counting how long it had taken to drive up here. Blood sticky and a brilliant red matted his hair and glazed his temple like melted caramel on an apple. She couldn't tell if he was still bleeding though, dead men don't bleed after all.
"I would rather have brought him to trial, that was my intent all along. A psychopathic murderer on a killing spree in New York and the small suburbs surrounding it, until he met me. The conquering hero putting his life on the line to save his beloved, next on the murderer's list. That was why I left the bodies where they could be found. There are many ways to dispose of a body in New York Jane. A man can get away with murder over and over again if he is careful, intelligent, coolheaded." When he didn't get a response, Jeremy sighed and hauled Gerard off the blanket and into a fireman's lift.
Without another word he walked down the hall towards the kitchen. The back door opened and closed then silence. God, she thought, he'd left six bodies to be found between New Jersey's Rockaway River banks and all the way up to Willowemoc Creek because it suited his plans. There could be dozens more, gone without a trace because they were carried off by the currents never to be seen again. The numbness inside her soon turned to fear. What was he planning to do with her? She already knew what he planned to do with Gerard, frame him for multiple murders under the pretense of Psychopath.
The slamming of the back door soon broke the silence, footsteps sounding in the kitchen and the long hall. She closed her eyes and tried to regain some sense of control over the emotions running havoc in her Psyche. When she opened her eyes, Jeremy was in front of her.
"All right, Janet. We're going for a little drive." He said kneeling down to untie her ankles from each of the chair's legs. He looked up at her and smiled, the wide knowing smile of a person in complete control over someone's life and knew it. "To my little place in the 'country'." He explained further when her eyebrows knitted together in apparent confusion. She knew it was foolish, down right stupid, but she kicked him anyway. Her bare foot caught him in the diaphragm, sending him sprawling wheezing to catch his breath. The look he sent her was worth whatever price he would make her pay later. Pure, cold, hate glinted in his eyes and Janet smiled, savoring what no doubt would be one of her last victories.
"Defiant little bitch." He snarled while straightening up, one arm banded over his midsection. Jeremy brought his face directly into her line of vision, centimeters apart.
"Just like Annie. My fifth. She defied me right up to the end, dared me. And she laughed, laughed while I took my blade and cut her breasts." He said all this never blinking, keeping her eyes locked on his as he relayed his gruesome tale. He smirked as he brought his right hand up to cup her breast, testing its weight, running his thumb around and around one taught nipple, smiling all the while. Then, his face became a stone mask once again and his hand began to tighten until Janet could no longer hold back the whimper of pain. Jeremy closed his eyes and tilted his head up to the ceiling, his face holding a pleased expression, almost euphoric.
Janet shuddered, trembling with revulsion as much as fear. She had expected retaliation, but being told of someone else's untimely end, to know they'd died at his hands.....a man that had shared her life, her heart and her bed. She was so lost in her own thoughts she didn't notice when he untied her hands.
When Janet snapped out of it, she was shaking uncontrollably as he hauled her out of the chair and tied her hands behind her back. Janet looked back at her life, the decisions she'd made, the things she would never be able to say, feel or have. She would never get married, have children or know happiness. But it didn't do any good to dwell on the past, the present held a much more clear and imminent danger.
She was going to need all her energy, both mental and physical to come out of this alive. And she would come out of it alive. Jeremy guided her out of the house the back way towards the house that now served as a garage. He chose the old, dirty Chevy truck instead of the Jaguar, stuffing Janet in the passenger's side and shutting the door. While he walked around the other side of the car, Janet twisted her body at an awkward angle, looking at Gerard's still unmoving form in the back. In minutes they were driving out of the city, onto wooden New Jersey roads.
When they were well out of the city limits, Jeremy took a left turn up into the Pine Valley woods. The locals say that those woods were haunted by something evil, by the Jersey Devil, but Janet suspected their devil had just arrived. Jeremy pulled over and opened her door, untying the gag. Janet spat the thick ball of fabric from her mouth, glaring at him.
"You won't get away with this Jeremy." She charged hoarsely, her throat scratchy and hoarse from misuse. Jeremy smirked at that, and quirked his left brow up comically and he slid the Chevy into gear and drove them deeper into the thick brush and weeds that made up the woods, giving them a dreamlike cloak,
"What a clich�d line Janet and ridiculous. Of course I'll get away with it. I've been getting away with it since I was sixteen."
I'm twisting, turning
In a bed of roses that are burning
Drowning in this lake
Crowning myself with thorns of hate
Crying for this fire that burns
Acts of defiance, she never learns
Take my hand, the time is ny
Will she choose to live or will she choose to die?
Title: Across the Tracks....
Author: Priscilla
Chapter 10
Jeremy sort of chuckled at her gasp, like an amused adult at the na�vet� of a child. He didn't really know why he felt compelled to tell her of how he became what he now was, a calculating and precise wolf in Armani suits. Without giving it another word he began telling her how his second coming came to be.
"I was in high school, a great student naturally, with a fantastic future ahead of me as you well know. There was only one problem though, I had certain sexual appetites that required discretion." He chuckled as an old memory came to him suddenly. "I once followed my father to a visit to his mistress, watched them through the window as they played their bondage games. Followed quite a few times before he knew, but he wasn't mad. No, in fact, when I turned 18, he let me visit her myself, to be properly initiated into the dark side of sex. Through my father, I learned the privileges of wealth and the wisdom of discretion so I knew better than to get involved with coeds. Whores are better at pleasing a man anyway. I got carried away one time, strangled her in the throes of passion. When the body was found in a wooded field off the Jersey shore, no one suspected me. Why would they? I was an intelligent, handsome, properly bred son of a prominent family and she was another dead prostitute who fell victim to a professional hazard."
Jane was listening but not only to his words, to the way in which he said them. He was completely without remorse, completely devoid of conscience. All thoughts of trying to find his sense of mercy or humanity instantly faded, he didn't have any. Their only chance at survival was escape and that hope was so slim it was almost nonexistent. She couldn't leave Gerry, couldn't take him with her in his already weakened state even if he did wake up. And what possible chance did she have out there with her hands tied behind her back and barefoot. She cringed as branches scratched the side of the car; they were very deep in the woods now.
Jane tried memorizing landmarks, turns taken but it was no use, soon enough whatever daylight broke though the dense foliage would be gone in a matter of hours. Her arms hurt, shoulder blades ached from being bound in such an unnatural position. Glancing to the back at Gerry, her heart did a summersault as his left eyelid twitched. He was alive! That was something to hold onto.
She tuned back to Jeremy's sick tale, suddenly wishing she was deaf. Jane wanted to berate him for acting like life and death were a game, wanted to rail him for playing the system he had sworn to uphold but there would be no point in it. He believed he was above it all, the laws, the rules of society and to date he'd found no reason to believe otherwise.
"What will you do with us?" She asked blatantly, deciding it was better to know than to image what he could do to her, to them. Jeremy slowed the truck down to a crawl, and turned his amused face towards hers.
"I will lead my very good friend, New York's Chief of Police Antonio Silvagio, to the site of a grisly murder-suicide which I heard about through an anonymous phone call to my home in the middle of night. Me being so in love with you, didn't waste any time in coming to check it out. Seems poor Gerard Butler went over the edge and then couldn't deal with what he'd done to you. Took a gun and shot himself in the head. I'll be crushed of course."
Thereby obliterating the head wound he had previously given Gerry and she would die like the others, only tying Gerry to the murders. Jeremy had seen to every detail and no one would question the outcome.
"Not quite the glamour of a trial Jeremy."
"No it isn't and I do regret that. But there will still be quite a deal of national news coverage and as a prominent attorney I will act as spokesman for the city. Earning myself a nice cushy job as District Attorney."
"Naturally." He looked at her bored expression and frowned, "Don't take it so hard love," He stopped the car and faced her, "You couldn't have stopped me anyway." Then he got out of the car. Jeremy hauled Gerard out of the back first out of Jane's line of vision. Jane struggled against the cloth that bound her hands, looking around the cab of the car for a weapon of some sort, useless.
Jeremy was back in seconds it seemed, pulled her out of the car and down a muddy bank where a small boat bobbed among reeds. Jeremy sat her down next to Gerry on the flat bottom of the small boat. The engine roared to life and they glided away from the shore. The black water gleamed like glass in the light of the full moon, how appropriate. Thunder rolled and flashed pink in a distant bank of clouds.
A storm, Gerry thought dimly. God his head felt like an overripe melon that had met the business end of a hammer. He forced his eyelids open and tried to figure out where he was. A boat. He could hear the rumbling of the motor. Fighting against the impulse to yell, Gerard turned his head an inch, trying to make out the image above and next to him. Two women. Two, no one. The image blurred, and then multiplied. Trying to clear his field of vision drained his strength and he slipped back into unconsciousness.
"I find running water so calming Jane, don't you?" Jeremy asked from his perch at the front of the boat. Jane. Gerard struggled to full consciousness again. The fight came back to him in broken pieces. The man had hit him on the head. He had a concussion at the very least. He tried to move his fingers, flexing them slowly. They moved--he thought. He rested then, the conversation coming to him in bits and pieces.
"...sadistic son of bitch....." Gerry almost smiled at that. Jane's courage never ceased to amaze him. She would spit in a tiger's eye before it had her for lunch. Jane would stand up to Jeremy and he would kill her just the same. Gathering all his strength, Gerry made one effort to push himself up, but at that moment the motor cut and the boat bumped against the dock. Knocked off balance, he slumped back down and groaned when his head bounced off the bottom slightly.
Jane fought back against the urge to look back. If Gerard was coming around, she didn't want Jeremy knowing it. They would need all the edge they could get. She moved her head from side to side and groaned, looking as if she were stretching out her sore neck. Jeremy flicked a glance at her as he tied off the boat. They storm was overhead now. The sky was rumbling and as the first flurry of fat raindrops hurled down on them, Jeremy grabbed Jane by the arm forcefully hauling her up to the dock beside him. The old boards groaned and dipped under their weight, but they held as he turned and herded her towards an old decrepit shack that teetered on stilts a few yards away from the dock like the old fashion swamp houses in Louisiana.
The "cabin" was pitch black inside, the scent of blood wafting out to assault her nostrils instantly. Human blood. Jane closed her eyes trying to rid her mind of the images that came to mind, of all the women that had probably met their untimely end there. She heard Jeremy shuffling around, and then he struck a match.
"Well it ain't much, but at least it's dry." He said playing the part of humble host. He walked over to her then and cupped her face. "C'mon now, open your eyes. I know you're not the sort to hide. Face your destiny head on like the Jane I know and love."
He had lit candles, about half a dozen or more. A small dresser stood along the wall to her left, directly in front of her was a wooden chair, and behind that was the bed. Adorned with small knives and what looked to be like scapuls were two small tables, one on either side of the bed. A drape of sheer white silk adorned the mattress, but dark stains glowed through like shadows, bloodstains. Panic rose in her throat. Thunder rolled above them as the rain poured down mercilessly. Beyond the cabin were miles of what could only be described as wilderness. No one to help her or to hear her cries for mercy.
She thought of Gerard and what might have been if fate had chosen a kinder path for them. Then Jeremy's hand closed on her arm and he led her to the bed.