Page 34 of The Chain House

“But he told you of his previous murders?”

“He was a bit of a braggart once he came out of his shell.”

“And he told you where he buried eighteen victims?” asked Warden Wren.

“Yes,” said Sal. “And that was before I was incarcerated. There’s no telling how many he’s killed since then.”

“Wait,” Warden Wren said. “Are you telling me he’s still out there?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I believe that’s who has taken Mrs. Bethany Hawthorne.”

Sam felt like his throat was constricting, and his nerves had returned tenfold. “And how do you know this?”

“Because he’s Mallard Malone’s biggest fan.”

CHAPTER14

BETH HAWTHORNE AWOKE, groggy, on a hardwood floor.

She wasn’t inside the garage anymore, but she couldn’t remember being moved.

She was inside a large room with a tall, coffered ceiling and a single globe light. By the size of the spacious room, she guessed it was the master bedroom inside an actual house. A large house. From the view of the trees out the lone window across the room, she guessed she was on the second floor, perhaps even a third. The window had six vertical bars on it, spaced just wide enough so no prisoner could slither through, and beyond it, there was no glass.

No windowpanes; just a tease of freedom out there.

Breeze circulated freely into the room and ruffled the pictures that covered every square inch of the walls like a collage.

Beth stood with a painful grunt. Her legs and back were sore, and the bullet wound on her right calf, covered with fresh gauze, still burned like fire, although not as badly as before. The wound seemed to be on the mend.

He was keeping her alive for a reason.

Her vision was blurry. She wobbled as if drunk. Drugged, more like; he’d made her take antibiotics to stave off any chance of infection, but she felt sure that wasn’t all she’d been given, wasn’t all she’d been forced to take—she recalled, vaguely now, him forcing pills down her throat, forcing her to swallow the water he poured into her mouth.

It was apparent now that he needed her alive, and the mere notion worked to calm down her racing heart. The question was why? And finding the answer motivated her.

She managed to balance herself in the center of the room, her eyes more focused now. She was still in her running clothes from … she didn’t know how many days ago. Maybe only one, or two, yet the time spent under this man’s control had felt like a lifetime of hell already.

Where was he?

Where was she?

These walls … those weren’t pictures attached to them. They were book covers. Hardcover book jackets removed from the books and attached to the walls. All of them Mallard Malone novels, from baseboard to ceiling, every inch had been covered as if the book jackets were wallpaper. Covers from all seven books. Covers from different editions and covers from different translations and the bizarreness of it all nauseated her.

The heavy chain around her left ankle clinked as she turned in a slow circle, noticing two things immediately on the wall behind her. One, the chain around her ankle not only ran directly toward that wall but disappeared into a dark hole in the middle of it. A hole no bigger than one on a golf green. Big enough for the chain to fit through but not an arm. But the wall itself, from corner to corner and floor to ceiling, instead of the book cover collage that concealed the other three walls, was a painted mural of the United States. But it wasn’t the United States she knew. It wasn’t the fifty states she’d become accustomed to and had taken pride in visiting throughout her lifetime. On this wall, the United States’ boundaries had been divided into what appeared to be eight different sections, or zones, two of which reached well into Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. It reminded her of a map one might see at the beginning of a fantasy novel, showing the land of whatever world the reader was about to devour, page by page, chapter by chapter. This was a fictional rendering of the United States years in the future, the world of Oliver Crown. The world of Mallard Malone.

And this man—if it was the enigmatic Justice Minks—was a true psychopath.

A psycho fan.

The thought kickstarted her into a panic. How did she get here? She didn’t remember being moved from the garage, certainly not walking on her own two feet. She backtracked mentally, to the last minutes she remembered, him rolling the television cart inside the garage and making her watch the Sal Batise interview with that poor young man, Sam Harper, who looked barely older than her two sons. And the young woman with him had looked like a kid herself. What were they doing in there with that monster, Beth remembered thinking during the interview, knowing that monster had orchestrated the nine murders inside the Hawthorne mansion that night, and no one knew his true motive. Of course, the interview had nearly ended before it truly got started, because of the horrible thing Sal Batise had said about the young woman. Have you fucked her yet, Sam Harper? Beth’s captor, still in his Guy Fawkes mask, had found enjoyment in what Batise had asked. The pig, Beth had thought then, and again now. To ask that question of him, with the girl sitting there like … like she didn’t matter. Like she was a mere sex object.

And in the end, as soon as Batise made the wild claim that he was the mysterious writer Mallard Malone, her captor had stood from his seat and clicked off the TV, seemingly not surprised in the least bit by the revelation, and in fact nodding like he’d known all along. Or, even more, like he’d been hoping Batise would admit it. And that perhaps his only goal in bringing the television in was to make sure she knew too. To make sure she heard the news that was now, no doubt, spreading like wildfire across the globe.

And here she was now inside a room that could have doubled as a Mallard Malone shrine, held captive by a man who called himself Oliver Crown.