99 Souls Read online

  99 SOULS

  GABRIEL BURNS

  Relax. Read. Repeat.

  99 SOULS

  Gabriel Burns

  Published by TouchPoint Press

  Brookland, AR 72417

  www.touchpointpress.com

  Copyright © 2021 Gabriel Burns

  All rights reserved.

  eBook Edition

  PAPERBACK ISBN-13: 978-1-952816-37-6

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events are fictitious. Any similarities to actual events and persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental. Any trademarks, service marks, product names, or named features are assumed to be the property of their respective owners and are used only for reference. If any of these terms are used, no endorsement is implied. Except for review purposes, the reproduction of this book, in whole or part, electronically or mechanically, constitutes a copyright violation. Address permissions and review inquiries to [email protected].

  Editor: Sheri Williams

  Cover Design: Colbie Myles

  Cover images: Stocksy, woman and kid running away by Evgenij Yulkin; Adobe Stock, Horror scary movie alphabet from the darkness, Soul of the number nine, Vector illustration by mehmetselim

  Visit the author’s website at www.authorgabrielburns.com

  @ AuthorReaganKeeter @ ReaganKeeter

  Second Edition

  I would like to thank my family for encouraging

  me to follow my dreams.

  I would like to offer my sincere thanks to Ashley Carlson, Sheri Williams, and the entire team at TouchPoint Press. I would also like to express my immense gratitude to Leslie Fears, my family, and, of course, my readers. To all of you, I extend my deep appreciation..

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Prologue

  BEHIND A LOCKED DOOR IN AN OLD Victorian house, nine-year-old Jessica Mallory awoke to a pounding headache. She opened her eyes slowly. Light shifted on strange yellow walls as she tried to focus. The queen bed on which she found herself was dressed with white silk sheets and a thick cotton comforter. A simple floor lamp by its head cast a soft light through the room, throwing long shadows across the polished wood floor from the bed’s four oak posts.

  Squinting, she turned her head to the left and saw through two large windows that night had come and brought with it a hard rain.

  She sat up, swung her feet over the edge of the bed, and crossed her legs. As she did, the throbbing in her brain intensified. Propping her elbows on her knees, she dropped her head into her hands. Then, thinking through the pain, she tried to recall how she had gotten here.

  The last thing she could remember was modeling a lacy yellow gown in front of a dressing-room mirror at Macy’s while her mother applauded the selection and she made yucky faces. It was, without a doubt, totally the worst item her mother had selected for her on their winter shopping trip. Then, after her mother had told her to wait right there while she chased down the saleswoman to ask about sizes, a thin, distinguished man in a gray suit appeared from around the corner. Kneeling before her, he asked her name.

  “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” she said.

  He smiled. “You can talk to me.”

  And then she awoke here.

  That interaction and the missing time that followed tied her stomach in knots. She suddenly felt an urgent need to find her mother and ask her what had happened. Though she dared not think it, she also wanted to find her mother to know she was safe.

  Certainly her mother was downstairs, she told herself. Hadn’t she mentioned a cocktail party or some other adult nonsense planned for the evening? Yes, she definitely had. Jessica could remember it clearly now. She hadn’t wanted to go, but her mom said they couldn’t get a babysitter and to buck up because she’d have a good time.

  Yeah, right.

  That must be where I am. At some stupid adult party.

  But as rational as this train of thought seemed, it didn’t ease her discomfort or loosen the knots in her stomach. Only finding her mom could do that.

  She slid off the bed and made her way to the door, stepping over the dolls and G.I. Joes, Transformers and stuffed Muppets, all of which seemed carelessly strewn across the floor.

  She told herself that such a vast assortment of playthings promised a large and loving family owned this house. A family who liked to eat tiny order verse, she amended, remembering the food her mom said would be served tonight.

  She turned the doorknob and pulled, yet the door didn’t open. Her heart rate quickened ever so slightly. The throbbing in her head intensified in equal measure. Why wouldn’t it open? Was she locked inside? Turning the knob several more times to make sure the latch wasn’t stuck, she simultaneously pulled the handle toward her. The door still didn’t open.

  She was locked inside. But that didn’t make sense. Why would her mom, or anyone else at the dinner party, lock her in this room?

  She pressed her hands flat to the wood and called out: “Hello? Mom? Is anyone out there?” When there was no answer, she spun around to see if there was a phone nearby. It didn’t matter to her if it was the cell she kept in her purse or an old fashioned rotary. Her mom had made her memorize her number “just in case.” So any phone would do.

  Immediately, she could tell there were no landlines. After looking under the bed and in the nightstands’ drawers, she became certain that her purse, and thus her cell, was not here either. The panic she first felt upon realizing she was locked in simmered to a boil. Her hope that she was in the house of a loving family vanished. She returned to the door and pounded feverishly. Every noise she made worsened the pain in her head. “Mom! Moooommmmm! Somebody let me out! Pleeeaassse!”

  Suddenly, it occurred to her that drawing attention to herself was a terrible idea. She immediately stopped banging on the door and backed away from it. She watched the knob fearfully, waiting for it to be turned from the other side. In her imagination, every storybook monster she’d ever read about began closing in on her. They gathered in whatever space existed beyond that door, and they were coming...

  She trembled. A lone tear eased down her cheek, but she promptly wiped it away. She bit her lower lip, telling herself that her fear was irrational. But then a stuffed bear squeaked underfoot and she jumped away,
screaming.

  Once she got control of herself, she saw the toys strewn across the floor for what they were: unloved, unused, purchased at random. She now understood in a way most nine-year-olds wouldn’t that they had been left here for her.

  Having read the whole series of Harriet the Spy, and any other detective book her father deemed appropriate for her age, she knew she needed to escape. Even if there weren’t storybook monsters hunting her down, there was something bad on the other side of that door. Why else would someone have taken away her phone and locked her in a room? Perhaps it was her imagination running wild, but she was certain her situation was somehow related to the distinguished man she saw in the mall.

  Instinct suggested she open the window and jump to the tree that was surely just out of arm’s reach. In so many of her books, there was always a tree just out of arm’s reach. Since it seemed like as good a plan as any, she scrambled across the room to the window. Unfortunately, while the latch gave easily, the window refused to open. The frame didn’t appear to be painted shut. Jessica saw no evidence that nails had been pounded into it to secure it in place. Yet she could not part the window from its sill by even a fraction of an inch.

  The second window proved no easier.

  She sniffled and wiped new tears away. Her breathing had become ragged from exertion and worry, but she refused to call out for help again. She considered herself lucky that the earlier calls had brought no one.

  The night and the rain limited her visibility of the outside world. She saw no streetlamps or neighboring houses. A flash of lightning revealed a dense forest. Whether those trees divided her from help by only yards or miles, she couldn’t be sure.

  In that brief flash, she couldn’t identify if a tree was near enough to reach. But, she told herself, that didn’t mean there wasn’t one. Heck, the window was her only option for escape. There had to be one.

  She grabbed a half-truck-half-robot Transformer from the floor. Optimus Prime, she thought its name was. Using all her might, she slammed the toy against the window pane. She kept her eyes closed tight and her head turned away, expecting glass to shatter toward her from the impact. Instead, her blow came to a sudden stop when the toy connected with the window. The jolt of that sudden stop reverberated up her arm and thumped across her aching head.

  She opened her eyes, surprised that she didn’t even see a crack. Her fragile confidence wavered. Desperately, she slammed the toy into the glass again, this time without closing her eyes. Still, it didn’t break.

  With strength fueled by adrenaline, she did it a third time.

  And a fourth...

  And a fifth...

  Every blow was harder than the last. Every blow was fueled by more adrenaline, more desperation, until what broke was not the window but her hope.

  When it was clear her efforts were futile, she dropped her arm to the side, letting the toy slip from her grip.

  Taking a few steps backwards, she collapsed onto the bed. Then, giving up, she dropped her head low and sobbed into her hands. She wanted her mommy. She wanted to be back at the mall trying on dresses she didn’t like. She wanted to be home. She wanted to be anywhere but here.

  To get herself as far away from the door as she could, she lifted her feet off the floor and crawled back on the bed until she was surrounded by pillows and could go no further. Then she pulled her knees to her chest, making herself even smaller.

  She couldn’t be sure how long she stayed like that, head pounding, looking at the door. Without a watch on or her cell phone, she had no solid sense of time. All she knew for sure was that when she finally heard footsteps outside the door, enough time had passed for her sobs to subside into a much weaker cry.

  The door opened without the creak she expected and in stepped the man she’d met at the mall. He still wore the pants, but had removed his jacket. His pressed white dress shirt was unrolled at the sleeves and unbuttoned at the neck. He was trim. His dark hair had wisps of gray at the temples and was neatly parted.

  Her lower lip trembled as he approached. The ornate lamp that hung from the ceiling dimmed, buzzed, and dimmed again as if the electricity was unreliable.

  The man sat down in front of her on the bed, waist tilted so that one leg hung off the side of the mattress. In his hands, he carried a ceramic doll.

  At first, she didn’t look at it. She kept her eyes turned away. There were so many questions she wanted to ask, but she couldn’t manage to get the words out. She wanted to know why she was here, if her mom was safe, what was going to happen to her. At the same time, she was certain she didn’t want to hear the answers.

  “Shhhhh,” he said. “There’s no need to cry. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  He had a gentle voice. He sounded sincere. The bad guys in her books never sounded sincere. They always had evil cackles and spoke in raspy, guttural tones.

  “Look at me.” From the way he spoke, this seemed to be a request, not a command.

  Although she wasn’t sure why, she felt compelled to obey. She tried to meet his eyes, but she could only do it for a second. In that second she sensed... something. In a way she couldn’t describe, the color around his irises seemed to evade her and she saw in those deep, black pools someone she felt she should recognize, someone she could almost name.

  Behind him, the door to the room stood open. In the hallway beyond, she saw a single baluster supporting the knot of a handrail, which revealed the location of a staircase.

  Instinct told her this may be her only opportunity for escape. In mustering the courage to run, she again leaned on the bravery she’d seen in her storybook heroes. She sniffled, breathing in short breaths, trying to stop the last of her now quiet tears, fortifying every muscle with the strength to act.

  But before she made her move, the man gently took her hand. By his touch alone, the adrenaline coursing through her body seemed to immediately lose its potency. She couldn’t run; she couldn’t escape. Surprisingly, her fear subsided. The dire expectations she had for her future vanished, replaced by a surreal understanding of her relationship to this man that she couldn’t yet put into words. His name, which she inexplicably felt she should know, seemed a little closer to revealing itself.

  “I made this for you,” he said. Without releasing his left hand from her right, he presented the ceramic doll he had brought with him.

  She looked at him again, a little longer than she had before, and he smiled. Blue. His eyes were blue. Then, easing out of his grip, she used both hands to accept the gift.

  She held it in her lap and ran her fingers along its smooth, skillfully crafted surface. “It looks just like me.”

  The painted yellow dress that the doll wore was identical in every detail to hers. Its dark brown hair had been molded to her cut. Their green eyes matched, as did every other detail from her imperfect nose to her black shoes.

  As she studied the doll, the stranger brushed her long bangs away and hooked them behind one ear. His hand came to rest on the side of her head. Mesmerized by the doll, she didn’t notice until she felt the tips of his fingers tingling like they held an electrical change.

  She looked up to meet his eyes for the last time as the tingling spread from her cheek and along her face. With her mouth open but unable to move, the tingling overtook her body. As it did, white light trickled out of the cracks between his palm and her head, growing brighter until it blinded her to the room.

  In that moment, just before the world became still, Jessica Mallory knew who he was...

  Chapter 1

  FOR SARAH WINSLOW, THE NIGHT BROUGHT with it a sense of vulnerability. Six weeks had passed since bodies started turning up with “God is Blind” burned into their torsos. Police around the world had found ninety-nine victims so far—everywhere from Moscow to San Francisco. The most recent had been a young girl named Jessica Mallory, who’d turned up right here in Atlanta behind a dumpster on Tenth Street. Sarah worried, especially as the day drew to a close, that she or her eight-year-old son
, Brandon, might be next.

  With her doors locked and her blinds shut, she curled up on the couch and cocooned herself in a blanket. It was almost eight-thirty and Brandon was already in bed.

  She flipped through the channels, trying to distract herself from thinking about all the terrible things that could happen to them while they were alone in the house. Tomorrow was a school day and it couldn’t come fast enough. She was anxious for them to be back at St. Ives Elementary, where she would be safe among her fellow teachers and Brandon his peers.

  She breezed past an Atlanta Falcons game, Madam Secretary, The Simpsons, and a 60 Minutes episode where Alex Harmon, head of the Climate Dynamics group, was discussing the risks associated with global climate change. She finally settled on a rerun of The Big Bang Theory.

  Someone rang her doorbell. A wave of cold alarm fired up her spine, standing her hairs up on end. They’re here, she thought, as the image of a hooded, knife-wielding maniac flashed in front of her mind’s eye. Then she took a deep breath, told herself she had nothing to worry about, and padded barefoot across the wood floor of her small, one-story bungalow.

  “Jim, is that you?” she called out, brushing away the long blond strands that had escaped from her ponytail.

  Jim Rossin was a fellow teacher from St. Ives. Although he hadn’t been the only man to ask her out in recent months, he was the only one she’d agreed to have dinner with. Dinner had led to two more dates. A romantic relationship never blossomed, but a strong friendship had.

  The doorbell rang again.

  The door was solid oak. The only view of the outside world was through a peephole. With her eye pressed to it, she saw the distorted view of her porch lamp hanging an absurd distance from the cement stoop and the darkness that shrouded her front yard. Although she knew it would have only taken a moment for someone to step out of view, the empty porch stirred up memories of campfire ghost stories.

  With one hand on the lock, the other on the doorknob, and one eye still pressed to the peephole, she dismissed the idea of opening the door to see if there was anyone out there. Instead, she returned to the kitchen, grabbed the cell phone from the small island in the center, and called Jim.