The Box Set of Hauntings and Horrors

by Jeff DeGordick

  "Easy there, fellas. Nice and slow. That's my livelihood you've got there."

  "No problem, Mr. Jingle. This thing's heavy as hell, though."

  "That's because she's an original. A '63 Steinway, made in Germany. You don't see these ones around anymore."

  Noel glanced in the direction of the voices. A large archway to his right opened to a den. He wandered into it, finding a smaller, cozier space with armchairs, throw rugs, and a full bar. Four tall barstools, almost as high as he was, were bolted to the floor, and on a shelf behind the large wooden bar were bottles of alcohol of all different shapes, sizes and types. A set of double doors sat open next to it. Noel peered inside.

  The game room was large and square, all bare wood on every surface. A pool table and a poker table had been shoved to the side to make room, and the five movers were mulling around the grand piano in the middle. Walter, with his hands on his hips, inspected the men as they reassembled it. The mover who had carried in the piano legs left the room and returned with the piano's bench seat, shuffling past Noel in the doorway.

  Walter looked over and spotted his son. "Hey, kiddo, why don't you take off your coat and get settled? I'll take care of the boxes in the car."

  "Okay," Noel muttered. He looked down at the floor.

  Walter knelt in front of him. "I know that look."

  "What look?" Noel asked.

  "You don't think you're going to like it here, isn't that right?" Walter said.

  Noel shook his head no.

  "You know, tell you the truth, I didn't think I was going to like it here at first, either. But what if I told you we're gonna make this the best, most awesome house ever?"

  His smile wasn't returned.

  "You're still upset, aren't you?" Walter asked.

  Noel looked away, knowing that expressing his true opinion wouldn't do any good.

  "Come on, you've got to work with me here, kiddo," Walter said.

  "I want to go home," Noel replied.

  "Well we can't do that," he said curtly. Walter looked like he was about to say something a little more unkind, but he stopped himself and took a deep breath. "Take off your coat and boots, okay? Your bedroom's the first one on the right upstairs. I'll bring in the boxes with all your stuff in a minute, so go and get cozy for a while. We won't be too long here." He snapped his head to the side suddenly. "Hey! Don't rest it on the floor like that!" He stood up and busied himself with the movers again, leaving Noel standing in the doorway.

  Noel stared into the room, like he was looking at a microcosm of another world, one he didn't want any part of. His father and the movers bustled around the room, making sure the piano was set up exactly to his liking, and they all blurred in Noel's vision as he zoned out.

  He turned to leave, when something icy touched his arm. Noel jerked his arm back, his breath caught in his throat. He looked around quickly, expecting to see something or someone standing around him, but there was nothing. He held his arm out in front of him and stared at it in wonderment. His puffy coat sleeve covered the length of it; there was no way anything cold touched his bare skin. Feeling uneasy, he shuffled quickly through the cottage. He gave a glance over his shoulder as he left the den and saw all the bottles lining the shelf behind the bar. He knew they all had the bad juice in them, and that made him feel even more uneasy.

  Noel walked past the dining room and suddenly found his feet rooted to the floor. His neck craned to the left and the first of the three closed doors stood next to him. The tarnished doorknob was unassuming, yet it called out to him. He hesitated, but then he slowly reached out for it. The metal was cold and made him shiver. He twisted the doorknob and pushed it back. The door creaked open and Noel let out a sigh of relief. It was just a small bathroom inside, with a vanity and toilet. The next door along the hall let out a musty smell that wafted into his nostrils. The floor was cement, and a light bulb hung loosely from a cord swaying side to side by an unseen draft. A laundry tub was pressed into the corner in the cramped space, and an ironing board full of cobwebs was jammed into the other one.

  The third and final door, across from the kitchen, creaked open with a twist of his small hand on the cold doorknob. Darkness greeted him, and he couldn't see anything inside. A rush of warm air fell over him and choked him, and an indescribable feeling of dread clawed at his stomach. Noel took a few steps back and bumped into the kitchen's island. The black doorway called to him, and he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, somehow, that there was a presence inside. The hair on the back of his neck stood up, and he thought he heard whispering from inside the dark depths. He could almost hear... his name. He stepped forward and reached for the darkness. The air was stale, permeated by a strange scent he never smelled before. Just as his hand was about to sink into the all-consuming darkness, it fell on the edge of the door and he slammed it shut.

  The heavy feeling immediately ceased, and he realized he'd been holding his breath. Noel took off running for the front door. He yanked it open and the sharp, cold breeze struck him. He began shivering immediately as he faced the white expanse. He didn't want to stay in this house any longer, but where would he go? The question lingered in his mind, but the answer was absent.

  Noel slowly closed the door, feeling intense regret. He peered up the stairs toward the second floor, and with a tremendous sense of apprehension, he ascended them. Each of the steps creaked as he made his way up to the landing, his hand moving from one bar in the banister to the next. He turned and walked up the last stretch of stairs, and there was a window behind him, high above the landing, that let in the diffused afternoon sun on the back of his neck. It brought him a tiny comfort, and the dark presence he felt on the ground floor seemed to alleviate the higher he went.

  Atop the stairs, a short hallway leading to a window and a small table below it sat to his right, and a long hallway stretched in front of him to the master bedroom at the other end of the cottage. He walked forward slowly, glancing ahead from one doorway to the next lining the corridor. The floor crunched and groaned with each footstep, and suddenly the feeling he thought he'd shirked came back to him. The hallway seemed to close in on him instantly, and each doorway extended the comfort and invitation of a sharp-toothed, snapping mouth. He didn't want to be here either, but he didn't want his father to be angry with him. His eyes fell on the first door on the right: his new bedroom.

  He crept up to it, trying to put the doorway across the hall behind him out of his mind, like if he looked at it it would swallow him whole. He peered around the frame into his bedroom and saw that it was already furnished like the rest of the house. It was a mess, too, and he was beginning to think that the previous inhabitants of the cottage had been abducted by aliens late one night, leaving nothing but dust and decay behind. A dresser sat against the wall to his left with an old radio on top. His new bed was pressed against the back wall with a window covered in a crooked gray roller blind to the left of it. A bedside table sat on the right, and a closet door filled with old clothes stood next to it. Two posters were affixed to the walls, one for something called the Backstreet Boys, and another for the Spice Girls. Both featured a small group of intense-looking people standing in a line, neither one of which Noel ever heard of.

  As he took a timid step into the room, something caught his eye. He gazed at the twin-sized bed's messy sheets (proof the previous occupant had just sprung out of bed before the aliens took them), and he saw that they were covered in stains.

  Noel pulled one corner of the sheet toward him and saw large reddish-brown splotches stained into the pastel pattern. Whatever it was, it had dried long ago. But as he pulled the sheet up to his nose, his body trembling, the scent was the same as whenever he had a nosebleed.

  The ceiling creaked above him.

  Noel slowly raised his head up toward it.

  The sound of the floorboards in the attic creaking and shifting played across the ceiling. Each sound was measured, like the pace of slow and steady movement across the wood. The
noise stretched over his bed, toward his closet, and extended past his room.

  Noel walked into the hallway, keeping his eyes on the ceiling and following the sounds. He found himself at the top of the stairs again, and he rounded the corner to the short length of hallway leading to the small table and window.

  A square attic door sat in the ceiling with a pull string hanging from it. Noel approached it until he was standing right underneath.

  There was silence for a moment, then a long, whining groan of aged wood came from above, and a line of grit drifted down from a crack in the door and fell on Noel's shoulder.

  Fresh Air

  Noel stood in his new bedroom, looking around at it all like it was a pit of filth. He considered leaving, but he knew the rest of the house would be no better. He turned and lifted the crooked blind covering his window and a spider scurried away from him on the frame. He dropped the blind and jerked back, then settled down. Looking once more at the bed, he carefully lifted one corner of the stained sheets and pulled them out of the way, replacing them with a thick navy blue blanket that was hanging off a corner of the bed, half on the floor. It was dirty and dusty, but not stained with that unsettling reddish-brown.

  Noel sat on the edge of the bed, his legs dangling just above the floor. His heart rate increased, and he didn't know why he was getting so worked up. He stared up at the ceiling, but the noises in the attic had stopped. Silence came over the room, and the only things that could be heard were the distant and muffled noises of people moving around downstairs. But then the silence surrounding him became a fully encapsulating buzz, drowning out all else.

  The closet door was opened a crack to his left, and its dark interior watched him.

  Noel swallowed a lump down his throat, feeling his heart quicken even more. There was something in that closet; he knew it. He shifted himself away from it on the bed, but then he realized his feet were dangling by the gap between the bed and the floor. There was a monster down there, too.

  He quickly hiked his legs up and sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed. He faced his back to the wall and he simultaneously kept the closet, the edges of the bed, and the door to the hallway in his peripheral vision.

  He didn't know how long he'd been sitting there in that terrible silence, but when it became too much, he bolted out of the room. His boots clomped down the stairs to the ground floor and he found his father standing in the kitchen, rifling through its cupboards.

  Walter eyed a dusty can of tomatoes then turned around to write something on a pad of paper sitting on the kitchen island. He looked up. "What are you still doing in your coat and boots?" he asked.

  "There's a monster in the attic," Noel said quietly.

  "What?"

  "He's up there, I heard him."

  "There's nothing in the attic, relax. You probably just heard the wind or the house shifting or something. Go take your stuff off and get comfortable. The movers are gone. I'm just making a list of food we need when we head into town."

  Noel stood rooted to the spot, unwilling to budge from his convictions. "I heard him! He was moving on the ceiling!"

  Walter sighed then stared up toward the second floor with a look of realization on his face. "Hmm, could be an animal or something." He went to reach for another can in the cupboard, but instead he hesitated then put the pen down. "I'll tell you what, let me go check it out, just in case there is something up there." He looked sternly at Noel. "But it's not a monster, okay?"

  Noel stared at him silently as Walter walked past him and headed up the stairs. Suddenly, that unending silence from his bedroom had now fallen over the ground floor. His eyes darted to the bullet hole in the window, and even the whistling had ceased, giving complete dominion to the crushing silence. The kitchen seemed darker than it had been before, even though it was still early afternoon. And then, with a frightful jump of his heart, Noel realized the mysterious door under the stairs that had frightened him earlier was right behind him. He whipped around and backed into the kitchen island again, staring at the foreboding door. The tarnished doorknob stood invitingly, waiting to be turned.

  Noel panicked, and he did the first thing he could think to do: he ran. The cottage whizzed by him as he made his way to the living room, but it brought him no comfort. He spun around and faced the house, bumping into the back door behind him. The energy was dense and negative, trying to choke him out. Noel turned and used all the strength he had to wrench open the door leading to the back porch. The cold nip of the air met his cheeks and he fled down a few steps to the wintry field in front of him.

  The energy around him immediately cleared and the weight that had been pressing down on his chest was lifted. Noel stumbled to his knees in the thin layer of snow covering the still-green grass, and he took in a long breath of air in elation. The winter lake greeted him in the distance when he raised his head, and the water was still glimmering and gently churning, not yet frozen over.

  A small, dilapidated boathouse sat tucked away a little to the right on the edge of the water, and there was a shed standing about fifty yards away from the house near the woods. Now that Noel's fear had departed, curiosity took hold. He headed for the shed to see what was inside the unassuming structure. He glanced over his shoulder as he walked through the field and saw the two-story cottage behind him, looking like something he'd glimpsed in a scary movie late one night. He shuddered.

  The shed was only about six by twelve feet, and it was all gray, splintering wood. The door groaned as he pulled it open, and the strong scent of gasoline and metal rushed into his nostrils. The bright afternoon light crawled inside the shed. Noel could see old workbenches and tool racks inside. Gardening and farming implements hung from hooks, gas cans and bundles of rope sat up on shelves, and tools of a far scarier sort met his eye.

  A row of knives hung on hooks against the back wall of the shed. Butcher's knives, boning knives, carving knives and hacksaws hung dully against the splintered wood, flecks of red covering their tarnished steel.

  The metallic smell overwhelmed him now and Noel backed away from the door, knowing the scent not to be the steel of the tools, but the iron of something else...

  He turned around and doubled over, gasping and drawing in heaping lungfuls of air. When the dizziness passed, Noel stumbled away from the shed, across the field toward the lake. The water seemed terrifying before, but now it was inviting; very bad energies surrounded the cottage and the shed, and he had to get away from them. The lake seemed better; peaceful, serene. But as he approached the water's edge, his sense of dread chilled him to the bone and he fell to his knees.

  Noel sobbed. He didn't know what was happening and had never been sensitive to anything like this before. There was something wrong with this place, and he didn't know what. Just as he wiped a tear from his cheek, he turned his head to the right and saw something peculiar standing near the lake. He got up and walked over to it, snot running from his nose.

  A cross, nailed together from old wood, was driven into the ground.

  Noel rested his hand on it, feeling uneasy, and the sharp end of a splinter poked his thumb. He drew it away and saw a fresh drop of blood well up to the surface of his skin. He stared down at the strange marker and wondered what it meant.

  "What are you doing out here?"

  Noel spun around and saw his father standing a few yards behind him. "What... what is this?" Noel asked about the cross.

  Walter eyed it carefully, then his gaze narrowed like he was considering his words. "Never mind about that," he said. "Come back inside. You're going to catch a cold out here."

  "I don't wanna go back inside," Noel said.

  "This isn't up for discussion."

  Fresh tears streamed down Noel's cheeks. "Please, Daddy... Don't make me go back in there!"

  Walter approached his son and knelt down in front of him. "Why not?"

  Noel struggled to find his words, tried to put the terrible feelings he'd endured into a form Walter could understand
. "It's scary. There's a... a mon—"

  "There's no monsters in there," Walter said, shaking his head. "I went up into the attic and checked for myself. Nothing but a couple pieces of furniture and some old boxes."

  "But... but... the room under the stairs..." Noel protested.

  Walter maintained his calm tone of voice. "Downstairs? You mean the pantry? Just a few shelves with some old cans. Maybe a few dust bunnies."

  Noel stood there helplessly, pressing the tears away with the heels of his palms.

  Walter moved forward like he was about to hug him, but he hesitated then pulled back. He watched his son with pity, but all he said was, "Come on, come back inside. It's just you and me now. I'll be right there with you in the same room. It'll be okay."

  Knowing he had no remaining line of defense, Noel nodded. His body was shaking and he felt exhausted. Walter reached out and took his hand, and the next thing he knew, he was being guided across the field back to the house. It loomed in front of him like a demon grinning at his defeat. The sight of it terrified him, and Noel looked away toward the woods, wishing to see anything but the cottage.

  The girl in the pink coat he'd spotted before was standing again between a couple of trees, looking at the two of them.

  The appearance of her startled Noel and he inadvertently pulled back against his father's guiding hand. The girl had apparently been startled too at Noel's recognition of her, because her eyes widened and she drew back.