Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories Read Free Page B

underside.
    The police brought her home and she wanted to go back under the bed, but again I wouldn’t let her.
    “Please, just talk to me. Tell me what’s going on. How can I help you?”
    She won’t look at me. There is no possible way for me to catch her eye.
    “Meagan, I love you so much. I’m so happy you’re home. I’m so sorry for what you’ve been through. I want to make it all better. You still have a whole life ahead of you to make up for those terrible years.”
    When she talks now, it’s in a kind of mumbling Morse code.
    “Nothing . . . can be . . . done.”
    “Honey,” I used to call her Mug-Head, “that’s not true. I know it seems like that now, but it’ll get better over time.”
    “Everyone’s watching . . . I hate . . . when they look.”
    “I know it feels that way. But no one around here even knows who you are. You’re safe now. I promise you.”
    “You’re . . . watching.”
    “Yes, but—”
    “I don’t . . . like it when . . . you look at me.”
    She’s shaking, she’s bone white. Terrified or freezing cold, the look is the same. Her chin is tucked deep into her chest trying as hard as she can to hide her face. From me.
    I turn and leave the room and listen as she crawls underneath the bed.
    She refuses therapy. Doesn’t talk when she’s there, doesn’t want to go. I can’t pay $175 for two people to sit in a room in silence. The therapist says she’d like to bring in a specialist who charges twice as much. “Wouldn’t we all,” I tell her.
    I try the beach, find a place that’s fairly private. Just one other family a few hundred feet away teaching their toddler son to fly a kite. We walk along the shoreline and the water feels refreshing against my bare feet. Meagan lets it soak her Converse shoes without seeming to notice. I spread out a large blanket and set down the picnic basket containing the combo meals I got from Quizno’s. Meagan starts digging in the sand. Slowly, at first, then scooping out large handfuls with both hands. I see what she’s doing, and decide to help her. Working together it only takes five minutes to have her buried up to her neck.
    “Cover my head,” she says.
    “No, honey. I can’t.”
    “Please.” Her eyes film with tears of anger or frustration.
    “Honey, I can’t.”
    “Please!” she screams. Her face is shaking, staring at the ocean with a desperate rage.
    I’d brought a beach bucket with us. I grab that and place it on her head and pat it down until it covers her face. Now it just looks like I’m sitting by myself with an overturned bucket beside me. I can hear her crying, for the first time, and it sounds faraway within the hollow inside of the bucket.
    “Better?” I ask, as tenderly as I can.
    The bucket rocks back and forth as she nods her head. Soon the crying stops, and we sit in, what feels like, comfortable silence. This gives me an idea.
    The pervert’s name is Derrick Patterson. He’s a white guy in his fifties. Short, skinny except for a watermelon size beer gut. He had lived with his cousin, and my daughter, in a ramshackle, piece-of-shit house. Guy probably lives more elegantly in prison. For all I know, he may even have a new sex slave. I don’t know whether or not to be surprised that he agreed to meet with me. I don’t know what I expect to feel when I see him.
    My therapist would not recommend this. No one would.
    They have me in one of those rooms with little phone booths and a reinforced window separating the people on each end of the line. A door opens and the man who kept my daughter in a box between rapings walks through. Oh, right. One detail I forgot to mention. He doesn’t have a neck. It’s all just withered scar tissue from the surgery he had to remove cancerous tumors. Stupid fuck still smokes, even though his neck barely looks strong enough to support his stupid head.
    I’m already holding the phone. He sits down and picks up his. Raises the voice box to his scooped out throat. He