It was Claire.
“Unit Twelve, this is Dispatch,” Claire’s voice echoed loudly through the quiet room, sounding hollow and deeply shaken. “I just finished reviewing the enhanced audio from the preserved 911 tape. I boosted the levels when the phone was dropped on the stairs.”
“I’m here, Claire,” I whispered into my microphone, my voice trembling as my eyes remained fixed on the steel loop. “I found it. I found where he kept her chained up.”
“Maria,” Claire said, her breath catching over the radio. “Listen to me. Right before the line went dead, the little girl was whispering to herself. I thought she was just praying to God. But she wasn’t.”
Silence stretched across the radio for three agonizing, suffocating seconds.
“She said, ‘The snake always hides under the bed.’”
The blood in my veins turned to ice.
I looked back down at the heavy steel cable.
One end was bolted firmly to the bed leg.
The loop rested across the carpet.
But there was another cable.
It extended from the iron ring and disappeared directly into the deep, impenetrable darkness beneath the mattress.
Then a sound came from those shadows.
It wasn’t a child.
It wasn’t a whimper.
It was the same slow, rhythmic metallic clinking described from the 911 recording.
The unmistakable sound of a heavy brass belt buckle dragging slowly across the floorboards.
Something else was beneath that bed.
I leveled my sidearm directly toward the darkness underneath the bed frame, my finger tightening near the trigger as my heart thundered inside my ears.
Then a low, slow, melodic whistle began drifting upward from the shadows.
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