Til Death Do Us Part

Epilogue

I sat beside Francis for a few minutes after he had died, holding his hand. He had a peaceful expression on his face. Then I looked through his pockets until I found the keys. I got up, left the bedroom, went downstairs. The stereo was still playing. I unlocked the front door, opened it and stepped outside.

I didn't have a flashlight. The only illumination came from the star- and moonlit sky above and the porch light over the front door. I walked away from his house, stumbling down the driveway in the dark, to the road. I looked back at the house where I had been held captive, seeing it for the first time from outside. 

Even in the dim  moonlight I could see it was in a state of disrepair. The paint was peeling and the grass of the front lawn was heavily overgrown. All the windows were dark because they had been boarded shut from the inside. It looked like a house that had been abandoned for years.  The kind of house that all the neighborhood kids probably thought was haunted...and in a way it had been. Haunted by the vengeful ghost of a murderous, misogynistic psychopath and his tortured, mentally-unbalanced brother.

I turned and looked down the road. Francis Voight's house appeared to be at the end of a dead-end street in a residential neighborhood. It was further away from the other houses by quite a distance...as if it had been shunned. 

I began to stagger down the road in the direction of his closest neighbors. I was shivering. It was a chilly February night, and my Prom dress was torn to shreds. I was virtually naked.

I had almost reached the next house when I saw something up ahead...approaching headlights. A vehicle. I heard the sound of its engine getting closer.

I lurched down the road like a zombie towards it.  It got closer. I stepped into its path, not waving my arms or shouting, just walking, not thinking that in the dark the driver might not see me until it was too late and hit me. I was numb, vacant, in shock.

The vehicle screeched to a stop bare inches in front of me. It was some kind of utility maintenance truck. The driver flung open his door and stepped out, looking at me in wide-eyed shock at my appearance -- a beaten, bloody woman in torn clothing  standing in the middle of a deserted street at night. 

"Jesus Christ!" he exclaimed in a shaken voice. "Are you alright?"

"Help me," I croaked. Then I passed out.

*****

I woke up hours later, the next morning, in what I instantly realized was a bed in a hospital room. Bright sunlight was beaming in through the windows. 

My head ached, and my face hurt.  I couldn't get my right eye to open. It felt swollen shut. I gingerly touched my right cheek -- where Ted had struck me with the pistol -- and felt a bandage. 

"Oh thank God!" a familiar voice cried out in relief to my left, "She's awake!"

I turned and saw two faces that filled my heart with joy -- my sister Rebecca and my son Anthony, sitting in chairs beside me. Both of their faces were etched with lines of worry, their eyes heavy with exhaustion and stress. Rebecca's usually perfectly groomed hair was disheveled. They must have driven all night from Mississippi to be here with me in Louisville.

"What did he do to you?" My sister asked me anxiously, "what did that bastard do to you?"

I opened my mouth, trying to find my voice, trying to speak, but the presence of the two people I loved most in my life left me so overwhelmed that all I could do was burst into tears, weeping hysterically. Rebecca and Tony followed suit, and for a while all the three of us could do was cry.

When we had ourselves more or less under control, Rebecca again asked me what had happened. I gave them my ordeal in broad strokes -- an insane, delusional fan of my old television show had abducted me from my house and kept me prisoner in his in order to reenact his favorite episodes with me. I didn't feel up to giving them a more in-depth rundown of the psychosis of my captor and his dual personalities, his obsession with me, or what exactly he had tried to do to me.