Samantha woke up with a girlish squeal. She sat up in the pile of clothes and looked around the room. It took her a moment to realize she wasn't in the house from her dream and that her father was not carrying her. She held out her arms and while the sleeves were too long, they weren't as long as in her dream. She put one sleeve to her head to feel the ponytail on the back of her head, not the pigtails from her dream.
Or had it been a memory? Over the last five years she had experienced a few dreams like that, though not one so vivid. Those dreams had been only fragments and never with any faces. She hugged herself with the jacket. It must have been these clothes that had prompted her to unlock an old memory, from when she had been a little girl playing dress-up in Mommy's clothes. In these clothes.
A horrible thought struck her: the only way for her mother's clothes to have gotten here would have been if Pryde had killed her mother. He must have killed Samantha's mother and turned Samantha over to the reverend, who had tried to brainwash her like the others.
"No," she whimpered. Her mother couldn't be dead. She had to be back on the mainland, waiting for her kidnapped daughter to return, as was Samantha's father. As much as she wanted to believe that, she couldn't deny the evidence. Her mother's clothes were here but her mother wasn't.
She bit down on her lip to keep herself from crying. She couldn't jump to conclusions. There could be another explanation. Perhaps as in the dream Samantha had been wearing her mother's clothes when Pryde had taken her. He might have simply grabbed them from off a clothesline or out of a drawer to take with him. She couldn't give up hope yet.
She rolled into a standing position and then snatched the lantern. Pryde might have left some clues in here about what had happened to her parents. She held up the lantern to look around the room. At the opposite end of the cellar she saw a metal door. Something told her she would find answers in there.
The door was so heavy that she had to pull on it with all of her weight. The door finally creaked open a few inches, enough so Samantha could slip through the crack. She swept the lantern around to reveal a horrible sight. On a worktable she saw a half-dozen knives of varying sizes, all of them covered with rust and blood.
She ran over to a half-dozen of clay pots set against the wall to empty her stomach into one of them. Before she could, she saw what was in the pots: bones. Human bones. A skull's empty sockets glared up at her, its mouth seeming to grin at her. She barely turned her head in time to vomit on the floor.