Free THREE TIMES A LADY by Jon Osborne Page A

bony fingers to lovingly trace a feathery path along the vertebrae. 
    Dana shook her head in bewilderment and tried again to process the baffling imagery before her.  No good.  But then a second, more powerful wave of shivers racked her body as the next chilling realisation dawned on her.  Since she now understood exactly where she was, it could mean only one thing.  She also knew the identity of the man who’d just passed through her in the darkened hallway, knew his lifeless eyes as well as she knew her own.
    And now he was heading for her bedroom.
    Dana willed her legs to move but it wasn’t easy.  Her limbs felt like cast-iron weights chained to her body.  Marshalling all her strength, she struggled forward to the doorway of her bedroom and peered in to witness a horror movie she didn’t want to see.  Not again. 
    A Superman nightlight illuminated a child’s sleeping face in the darkness.  Nathan Stiedowe loomed over the child’s bed with a huge butcher’s knife dangling from his powerful right hand.  Beams of moonlight streamed in through the window next to the bed and bounced off the razor-sharp blade.  Dana almost threw up when the child shifted in his sleep and afforded her a clear view of his unlined face.
    Bradley, the little boy from the plane who’d promised to marry her one day.
    Stunned stupid, Dana watched in horror as Nathan Stiedowe lifted the gleaming knife over his head, ready to plunge the unforgiving steel deep into the boy’s tender throat.  She tried to scream out a warning but no sound emerged. 
    Shifting her gaze to the mirror hanging above the bureau of her childhood bedroom, Dana abruptly caught sight of her own face.  Her mouth had been sewn shut.  Tight stitches fastened her lips together, rendered her mute.
    She tried to hurtle herself into the room to stop the monster before he could kill the little boy but looked down in horror to see that her feet had been nailed to the floor by six-inch railroad spikes bleeding rust.  All she could now do was look on helplessly as Nathan Stiedowe brought down the sharp knife in a blinding flash of silver that would soon be joined by a sickening explosion of red as the boy’s jugular vein severed and he bled out all over the matching Superman sheets.
    But the knife never came down.  Instead, Nathan Stiedowe simply lowered the glimmering steel to his side and reached down to stroke the boy’s silky blonde hair.  ‘I’ll be back for you in just a minute, little boy,’ he whispered.  ‘That much you can count on.’
    The little boy only mumbled dreamily in response.
    Turning away from the child, Nathan Stiedowe then exited the room, passing through Dana’s body again as he went.  In a flash of jumbled images, Dana’s mind sped through the police reports of the devastating night in 1976 that she knew by heart.  Her father, James Whitestone, would be the first to die, gunned down by his wife’s illegitimate child – the product of a brutal rape over a church altar when Sara Whitestone had been just sixteen years old.  As he relieved himself in the bathroom following a tender lovemaking session with his beloved wife, a .22-calibre slug would shatter James Whitestone’s skull from behind and send chunks of his destroyed brain matter sliding down the tiled wall above the toilet in a disgusting rainbow of gray and white and red.
    Dana strained her eyes through the darkness and watched Nathan Stiedowe enter the bathroom, the scene of her father’s hopelessly grisly murder in 1976.  The soft scratch of plastic shower rings sliding across a steel rod filled her ears as her half-brother concealed himself inside the tub.  Right on cue, her father emerged from the master bedroom and closed the bathroom door behind him.  The gunshot that rang out ten seconds later was loud enough to rattle all the pictures hanging on the wall, followed almost at once by the muted thump of a heavy weight collapsing to the floor.
    Horrified tears