Chapter 54

54

Neither of them speak for a moment.

Elin's breathing is shallow, her heart pounding.

On autopilot, she moves the beam of the flashlight lower, but she already knows what she's going to find.

Two more stones, positioned beneath Bea's and Seth's photographs.

"What the hell do you think this is?" Steed can barely get his words out.

"Well, either someone's keeping score for fun, some kind of macabre tally of people killed on this island, or the two cases... they're connected. This setup... it implies a continuation of what was started when those teenagers were killed..." Her voice drops away as her eyes lock, once again, on the stones below the images.

"You think that Bea Leger's and Delaney's deaths might be connected to the Creacher case?"

Elin nods, moving the flashlight between the two sets of photographs. A generation apart, but together on the wall. "Yes, and if they are, I've called this all wrong." She fumbles over her words. "I'm pretty sure whatever the motive is, it has nothing to do with drugs."

It's about something more profound, she thinks, related to the rock looming large over the island. Had the killer hooked on to the curse, the island's history—the very topography—and used it to construct some kind of deranged motivation?

Steed shines his flashlight on the images of Bea and Seth. "They look recent."

She examines them more closely and it becomes clear that they've been taken at the retreat. The main lodge is visible in the background, the blurred shapes of the surrounding trees. Like the pictures of the Creacher victims, Bea and Seth hadn't known that they were being photographed. A zoom lens.

"But I don't understand how," Steed continues. "Creacher's in prison, isn't he?"

Elin nods. "Put away for life, but..." Her mind churns it over, memories of the case, rumors that she never thought of as important until now.

"What is it?" Steed prompts.

"I don't know many details, but I remember the headlines. All the ‘have they got the right man?' stuff. Since then I've heard more. Talk at work. Creacher's always maintained his innocence, but people definitely had their doubts about his conviction." Doubts she's taking a whole lot more seriously now.

"If they got it wrong with Creacher," Steed says, "and if Bea's and Seth's deaths are related to the murders of those teenagers, then why now, all these years on?"

"I know. Pretty big gap." Elin looks around the cave again with a growing sense of apprehension as she realizes how much they'd miscalculated.

Steed moves in closer to Seth's photograph, scrutinizing it. "And why choose Bea and Seth specifically? You think there's a chance they knew the teenagers or that there are other parallels between them?"

"Maybe, but there's no echo in the MOs. Those teenagers were slashed, had stab wounds."

"What about a copycat?" Steed says. "Someone fixated with the Creacher case? Or like you said before, someone fetishizing what's happened on the island."

"Could be." Yet her gut is telling her that this isn't the work of a copycat. "But this space, it's clearly been a while in the making. These photographs of the Creacher kids have been here for years, and the stones—it's telling how they've been placed."

Steed frowns. "Beneath the photographs, you mean?"

"Yes, and the fact there's one for every photograph. They resemble the rock, but it's as though"—she tries to find the right words—"as though they're being used as some kind of tally, or a trophy, celebrating each killing. Would you really go to those lengths if you weren't involved?"

"And this powder everywhere." Steed gestures around him. "The fact that there's so much of it. I wonder if this room is being used as a workspace."

"To shape the stones?" She swallows hard, her gaze once again locking on the stones.

"Yes. That's deliberate. Someone with a task in mind."

Elin turns, about to take another look, when she feels her foot snag on something, material of some kind. She directs the flashlight at the ground, the handle damp with sweat, slippery between her fingers.

The dull glow of the beam illuminates heavy folds of fabric, all coated in a fine layer of dust. The tiny particles she's disturbed are aglow, swirling under the light. As she steadies the beam, more of the fabric is revealed; a hood, clearly visible on the left.

Some kind of cloak.

Her stomach lurches, her mind catching up with her eyes. Elin realizes what she's seeing: this cloak, what it's suggesting, it's tied to what's around her.

The Grim Reaper.

The Grim Reaper is usually depicted wearing a black hooded robe. A metaphor for death and the darkness it brings.

Could this be part of the killer's delusion?

It's not unusual in serial murders—the killer assuming the role of a powerful godlike figure, convinced that they have the right to decide between life and death.

Bile rises up in the back of her throat as the horror of the space strikes her: the realization that someone using this cloak, responsible for all of these deaths, was in here recently, not only painstakingly taping photographs to the wall, but creating macabre shapes from stone to place below them. She thinks about the powder they'd glimpsed near Seth's mouth, that Mieke found on Bea's body. The killer hadn't actually put the stones in...

Her hand, which had been holding her flashlight steady until this point, starts trembling, making the beam dance across the fabric. The more she looks, the more it seems like the cloak is moving. Her flesh crawls.

For a moment, she believes every word of what people whisper about this place.

The rumors. Curses.

She can feel it, taste it in the air, the evil at the very heart of this island. What Michael Zimmerman said was right. There's something rotten here .

Whatever it is doesn't want them here, and will stop at nothing until they're gone.

Overwhelmed by a heavy, visceral dread, she can feel her heart thudding in her chest, her throat.

Out. Out. She needs to get out.