gaze up to the closet door beside him. “Then he’d drag me into that closet. Slam the door.” Luke swallowed hard. “Then he’d nail the door shut.”
Shannon followed Luke’s gaze to several bent, rusty nails scattered on the floor, then along the edge of the closet door, where she saw a dozen holes where nails had once been. Nausea crept through her stomach. She couldn’t imagine it. She couldn’t imagine any human being treating a child like that.
“Sometimes he left me there for two or three days,” Luke said. “No food, no water. Every time I heard him pound that hammer, I thought I was going to die. I cried…I screamed…”
For a few sickening moments, Shannon felt as if she was right there in that closet with Luke, hearing his cries, feeling his pain. “My God,” she said, horror snaking along every nerve. “He did that to you? Your own father?”
Luke reached back inside the hole beneath the floor and brought out something that made Shannon’s blood crawl to a near halt. A knife. Long and wicked, tarnished with age. He turned it over, and it glinted dully in the faint light.
“One day I stole this from the hardware store. I hid it under this floorboard. I told myself if he ever touched me again, I’d kill him.”
Shannon felt light-headed, her mind reeling. What if he’d done it? What if he’d murdered his own father? His life would have been over. Over, for doing something he was driven to do by a force he felt he couldn’t stop any other way.
“He never knew it was there,” Luke said. “But he knew something was different. Knew I wasn’t taking it anymore. He never touched me again. But I was still afraid. Every single night…so afraid…”
Luke slammed the knife back into the hole again and stood up, his eyes glistening. When he spoke again, his voice was clogged with emotion.
“I couldn’t stop him! No matter what I said, what I did, he kept coming at me! Over and over and—”
She reached for him. “Luke—”
“Don’t touch me!” He jerked his arm away, holding up his palms, and Shannon drew back as if he’d slapped her.
“I-I didn’t know,” she said helplessly, her voice trembling. “I was a kid like you. I couldn’t have known!”
“Yeah, but what about everybody else? How could somebody not know? How in the name of God could the people in this town not know something was wrong? They saw him. They saw me, dirty and bruised and scared. I was just a little kid, and they left me with that monster! Why didn’t somebody do something?”
She didn’t know. She’d only been a kid herself. Luke’s age. Sleeping in her Barbie bed in one of the biggest houses in Rainbow Valley at the same time he’d been living this nightmare. In that moment, any problem she’d ever had in her life seemed so horribly, painfully insignificant that she couldn’t even imagine them anymore.
“So next time you tell me to just get over it,” Luke said, “you think about that, okay? You think about—”
“Luke—”
“Get out.”
She shook her head slowly, the horror of the moment leaving her jaw slack and her hand at her throat.
“Get out of this house.”
“But—”
“Get the hell out of this house!”
She backed away one stumbling step, then two, her hand still at her throat, the image of Luke’s father looming in her mind like a creature in a nightmare. She’d had no idea. No idea at all, or she never would have come there and said the things she had. Now she understood. She understood that whatever she thought Luke had endured back then, it had been nothing compared to the reality of what had happened inside these walls.
She hurried to the door, yanked it open, and ran down the steps to her truck, Luke’s furious shouts still reverberating inside her head. She opened the door and jumped inside, her body still trembling. The wind had ripped strands of hair loose from her ponytail, and she had to shove them out of her face before she could start her truck. The horror of it all was too much for her, the injustice, the terrible guilt she felt that she’d been living in heaven while he was going through hell. To Shannon, this place was just a dirty old house. To Luke, it had been a prison where his childhood had been held by the throat and flayed until it was bloody and lifeless.