Listen to Me Now: Supernatural Horror with Scary Ghosts & Haunted Houses

by A. I. Nasser

  “That’s the problem with you Greens,” Karen said, opening drawers and rummaging through them as Eva slid away from her. “You think you can take whatever you want and there won’t be any consequences.”

  Eva cried out again when Karen kicked her in the back, the pain from the blow soaring through her spine. Suddenly she felt the familiar tug on her hair and was pulled up into a sitting position. Eva blinked through the tears, Karen’s face inches from her own, swimming in and out of focus.

  “Time to teach you Greens a lesson.”

  Eva felt the blade of the knife slide in between her ribs, deep, puncturing her lungs as she gasped at the sudden invasion. She felt the breath race out of her, and grabbed onto Karen’s arm as the woman pulled away.

  The world around her began to spin, and when Eva coughed, blood shot out of her mouth in wide splatters onto the kitchen floor.

  No longer supported, she slumped down, her eyes staring out into space, the haziness she had first experienced quickly fading into complete darkness.

  ***

  The first thing John registered was the smell of smoke. That was quickly followed by sirens and flashing lights.

  “What the hell?”

  John was about to say something in reply when Hank turned the corner onto their street and the world lit up in bright colors of orange, red and blue. John’s mouth dropped open.

  Fire rose from the Greens’ Victorian house like tongues licking at the sky. The flames engulfed the entire construction, raging with heated fury, illuminating the entire street as firefighters tried their best to control the situation. Barricades had been set up all around, a small crowd having had gathered to watch as the house burned. Hank pulled up to the curb, a few yards away from John’s house as both men stepped out of the truck with wide eyes.

  John caught sight of David Green as the man wrestled with two officers, trying to break through the barricade, screaming at the top of his lungs at the flames that were engulfing his home. John scanned the crowd, looking for Eva, his heart racing as he failed to find her, his eyes instantly falling back to the burning house and what her absence probably meant. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  “What in God’s name happened here?” Hank exclaimed, taking his cap off slowly as his eyes followed the dancing flames.

  John feared the worst and trudged behind Hank as they slowly made their way forward, mesmerized by the chaos in front of them. The firefighters were attacking the flames from three different directions, water shooting into the house as the men desperately worked to put it out. He didn’t know much about fires, but John was certain that no matter what they did, the house was gone.

  Probably with everything inside, too, Johnny-boy.

  John felt his stomach turn. Had Eva been inside when the fire started? Was she still inside now? He could almost see her body sizzling in flames, the fire eating her with everything else, turning her into nothing but a corpse of ash. He shook the image away, praying to God that he was wrong, but there was an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  Murphy’s Law, Johnny-boy. Remember that?

  John turned to his own house.

  Karen was standing on the porch, arms crossed over her chest as she watched the fire from a safe distance away. She seemed incredibly calm, the light of the flames dancing across her face and throwing shadows around her. She looked peaceful, as if the fire were calming her down, her lack of emotion troubling in more ways than one.

  She slowly turned to John, their eyes meeting, and in the shadows of the flames, she smiled.

  Chapter 18

  Sheriff Walter Garland felt like hell.

  He pulled his cruiser up to the station, turning off the motor and sitting back with a frown. His eyes scanned the people walking back and forth across Gale Street, going about their business as they strode across the sidewalks, moving in and out of shops. He recognized many of the faces, a lot of the older ones he had grown up with. The younger, more vigilante ones had been only children when he had become Cafeville’s Sheriff.

  He envied them. He envied the melancholy with which they went about their lives, most oblivious to what was happening right under their noses in their own town, the others ignoring things completely.

  One would think that a small town brought about a kind of charm, where everyone knew everyone else, but Cafeville had changed over the years. The population had grown to almost a thousand, a number that would have been ludicrous a decade or two ago. There were times he would look outside his office window and not recognize more than two or three people walking by.

  The competition between the founding families had done that. Healthy competition at first, but one that had grown quite sinister near the end. Still, the family feuds had brought more good to the town than harm, and Walter had been one of the first to pop open a bottle of champagne when it was finally over.

  Thirty years without any incidents.

  Thirty years, and now this.

  Walter Garland shook his head in dismay as he heaved himself out of his cruiser and trudged towards the station. He had spent the last two days interviewing witnesses and going over forensic reports, and he was beyond tired. Insomnia, coupled with age, made the tragedy at the Green house more and more difficult to deal with. And all this just two years before his retirement.

  He walked into the station, barely acknowledging his deputies as he kept his head low and made straight for his office. Unlike regular days when half the workforce would be kicking up their feet and just waiting for their shifts to end, everyone in the station seemed to be bustling about. They were already understaffed, but that had never bothered Walter. Nothing really happened in Cafeville that couldn’t be solved with a simple conversation and a pat on the back.

  Except for arson, of course. And murder. Those were two completely different things.

  Walter didn’t buy the initial reports of a gas leak. He knew the Greens; he knew all the founding families, or whoever was left of them. A gas leak would have been perfectly understandable if the family wasn’t paranoid and didn’t have everything in their house triple checked on a weekly basis. Hank Pollard’s business strived on the Greens, and it would be out of the question that Hank would miss something like faulty piping.

  Besides, after interviewing the Kriks, Walter had a sinking feeling that there was more to this story than met the eye.

  He shuddered as he slowly sat back in his chair, running his hands thoughtfully over his desk as he randomly organized papers and files. His mind kept returning to his latest interview with John and Karen Krik, the experience a little too familiar, too uneasy. He had known that something was terribly wrong the minute he had pulled up to the Victorian; it was as if a terrible weight had landed on his chest and threatened to suffocate him.

  The last time he had set foot near that house was almost thirty years ago, and it was like he had just been there yesterday. The house was just as forlorn, and it had taken all his willpower not to jump back into his cruiser, turn around and drive the hell away. It was like the damn thing had been laughing at him, the wooden frames of its door twisting into the illusion of a grin.

  Walter sat back in his chair, pulling out the small pad he had taken his notes in and opening it to where he had scribbled the couple’s statements. His handwriting was terrible, shaky even, a stark contrast to the rest of the pages in there. His mouth twisted in a grimace, his body shuddering as he tried to shake off the feeling that had lingered inside him even after he had left the house. He hadn’t noticed just how nervous he had been.

  The husband seemed stable enough, although Walter had his doubts as to what passed for stable these days and what didn’t. His hair had been completely disheveled, as if he had just woken up and tried to comb it with his fingers. His eyes were bloodshot, the eyes of a man who hadn’t slept for days, like the world had decided to burden him with its infinite problems.

  Walter had seen the photograph on the back sleeve of John Krik’s book. If he hadn’
t known any better, he would have sworn they were two completely different people. The smile was faded, the face had atrophied, and the man living in the old Dean house could have used a little more sunlight for that pale complexion.

  However, Walter wasn’t too bothered by that. He had asked his questions, which John had answered amiably enough, although his answers had come in fragments and mumbles, forcing Walter to strain in order to hear anything. His alibi was solid, not that he was really a suspect, and a quick telephone call to Hank Pollard had confirmed his story. All in all, Walter had felt sorry for the celebrity author.

  His wife was a completely different story, though.

  Walter had been welcomed into the house, but after a second’s thought, had opted to sit out on the porch instead. A part of him didn’t want to cross that threshold; a part of him still believed there was something evil lurking in there, something that had been waiting for nearly thirty years. Only when he had finished asking Krik his questions had the man called for his wife.

  Walter had felt a chill run down his spine when she had come out to meet them. It was a mix of many things, a combination of horrors wound up into one moving mess of terror. Although dressed in a simple shirt and jeans, she looked like she had just been pulled out from under the bed. She had attempted to tie her hair in a ponytail, but had botched up the job so much that it looked like a hornet’s nest held together awkwardly to keep it from flying all over the place. Her eyes had been dead, lifeless, like she had not been completely there, and her smile had scared the hell out of him.

  Walter could have sworn she looked just like Ana Dean. And even the idea of that had made him want to run for the hills. The thought alone had chilled him to the bone.

  He believed that was probably when his hands had started to shake; that and the familiar smell that seemed to diffuse out through the front door. He remembered that smell, more clearly than he would have liked to, and it had brought him back to when he had last been to the Victorian to arrest Ana Dean for attempted murder. Looking at Krik’s wife gave him a terrifying sense of déjà vu, and his gut was telling him, even now, that there was some connection between the woman and the so-called gas leak.

  Walter opened his desk drawer and pulled out a pack of cigarettes he had stashed away for times like this. He had given up on the habit years before, and had left the half-crumpled pack there for times when his will became too weak. If there were ever a moment of weakness that required a cigarette, this would be one of them. He frowned upon smoking inside the station, but at the moment, he really didn’t care how hypocritical he would look in front of his deputies. The way he saw it, he had every right to smoke, especially now.

  He lit his cigarette and stood up again, crossing to the small file cabinet he kept in the corner of his office where the cases he had personally worked on were kept. He had made copies for himself, unwilling to indulge in the new wave of technology that had taken his station by storm. Let the youngsters have their computers and smartphones; Walter Garland wanted the feel of paper at his fingertips when he looked through reports and scanned crime scene photos.

  With his cigarette hanging loosely from one corner of his mouth, he opened the bottom drawer and fingered through the files, slowly drawing out the Dean case reports and everything related to that fateful day thirty years ago. It was a case he had always hoped would remain in the bottom drawer, at the back, only visited in his mind during nightmares and conversations after one too many shots of whiskey.

  Walter dropped the files on his desk, opening them tentatively as he settled heavily back into his chair. He scanned the police reports he had personally filed back then, looking over photographs he had hoped never to see again, images flashing before his eyes that had been secretly lurking in the back of his mind and had waited for this moment to come out.

  It was the house. As ludicrous as it sounded, as crazy as it might have seemed, he had a sinking feeling that there was something seriously wrong with the Victorian. Something wrong with all three houses, for that matter.

  Damn the founding families.

  Walter flipped through the files one by one, reading, scanning, and ignoring the ash falling from his cigarette onto the yellowed sheets of paper. His mind was doing jumping jacks inside his head, and he could already feel a headache coming. He pondered handing the case over to one of his deputies, then quickly dismissed the idea. If anyone was going to relive the history of this town, if anyone was going to be burdened with the horrors that came with the founding families, it would be him.

  Walter vaguely remembered Krik telling him that he had gotten the house keys from his editor, and it had hardly surprised him when he heard Derrick Fern’s name. His mind replayed his conversation with Fern’s mother three decades ago, the story she had told him about what she had seen and heard in the house. He had downplayed its importance back then, writing it off as a widow’s post-traumatic paranoia and need to explain the obvious. Now, he was seriously revisiting how wrong he had been about that.

  Walter put out his cigarette and pushed the files away, rubbing his temples with his fingers as he tried to fight off what had started as a headache, and now threatened to turn into a full blown migraine. He knew that he would have to go to the house again, ask more questions, and spend a little more time interviewing the wife, this time alone. Maybe he could get something out of her he hadn’t been able to the first time.

  Maybe he could ask her to come in. If he were on home turf, he would definitely be more comfortable, and whatever effect the house had on him would be out of the equation. The question was whether or not the Kriks would agree to that. In his experience, that house had a way of keeping people locked inside.

  He briefly remembered looking up at the house as he was preparing to leave, an illusion of a shadow passing across the attic window having had caught his eye. The clouds, he had thought; the clouds reflecting across the glass.

  Walter shuddered. Definitely call them in. He didn’t want to be anywhere near that Victorian.

  Chapter 19

  “I don’t know, buddy.”

  John Krik ran a hand across his face as he clutched his cellphone to his ear, the stress of the past few days taking its toll on him. His hands were shaking, a slight tremor that would normally go unnoticed to anyone who didn’t know just how calm John usually was. He hadn’t slept in three days, hadn’t eaten anything proper in a week, and his only notion of sunlight came from the few rays that happened to find a way through the blinds he had drawn closed.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” he asked his editor.

  John could hear Derrick Fern sighing on the other end of the phone, the soft sound of turning paper making its way across the phone lines and piercing his ears. For some obscure reason, which John blamed on the lack of sunlight, the rest of his senses had spiked, and he was starting to hear things that didn’t exist.

  “It’s nothing like what we’re used to seeing from you,” came the quick reply, a reply John didn’t want to hear this close to the end of his story.

  He had been pushing through the past few days on overdrive, eager to be done, wanting to end the writing as fast as he could. The urgency had more to do with his need to leave, a sinking feeling inside him that if he were to stay here any longer, if he were to spend any more time in this damn house, he would go completely insane. The charm he had felt at first, the ludicrous notion of entertaining Karen’s wishes and living out his life in Cafeville, had disappeared.

  “You’ve known that since day one, Derrick,” John almost spat, realizing that he was getting more and more short-tempered the longer he spent locked up in his room. “You read the first few chapters a month ago, and you gave me the green light. Don’t give me this bullshit now!”

  Derrick paused on the other end, and for a second John thought about hanging up. He had never liked the way Derrick seemed to linger in thought before saying something completely stupid, and that habit was getting more and more annoying with each passin
g year.

  “It’s just so dark, John,” Derrick said, and John felt his body cringe at the tone of his voice. It was a tone that usually preceded a refusal or a request for absurd changes.

  Don’t change anything, John almost begged him. Please don’t change anything.

  “This is going to completely alienate your fans,” Derrick continued.

  “Then I’ll get new fans,” John replied, squeezing his eyes shut as he fought to stay awake.

  “Why?” Derrick asked, and John could almost feel the man frowning. “Why go through building up an entirely new brand for your name when we already have one established? And a successful one at that?”

  John shook his head and fought the urge to start shouting. “Hire a ghostwriter, Derrick, or write a frigging love story yourself,” he finally said, making sure he kept his tone in check. He wanted to sound convincing, not threatening, and Derrick was making that hard. “This is all I’ve got. I’m trying not to breach my contract here.”

  “You see, and that’s exactly what’s worrying me,” Derrick sighed. “I have the feeling you’re just writing anything to please me.”

  That is absolutely not what we’re doing, is it, Johnny-boy?

  John shook his head again, squeezing his eyes shut as he forced the voice in his head quiet. Not now. He couldn’t deal with any voices now.

  “Derrick, coming here was your idea,” John measured his response. “You said this place would spark my creative juices and push a masterpiece out of me, right? Well, this is what’s come out. Take it or leave it.”

  Derrick paused as he contemplated John Krik’s words before saying, “Take it or leave it?”

  John sighed, sitting back tiredly in his chair as he rubbed his closed lids. “You know what I mean.”