by Troy McCombs
John's, Bud's, George's, and Bill's face went pale with uncertainty and doubt. They stood in place, not wanting to budge. Their muscles failed to comply with their will.
Rollings broke the silence and increased their tension by saying, "Come on, guys, let's go."
He led them toward the house, a place more frightening to them than a war-zone, more frightening to them than guns and grenades. They trailed so closely behind him that he could smell what every one of them had eaten for breakfast. They followed him up the porch steps, holding onto meters and junk they would have traded in for a good brick of C-4 in an instant. John slowly grabbed the doorknob, twisted and pulled. The mouth of the beast opened with a creak and gust of warm, dusty air. They all entered reluctantly, the ones in the rear more so than the ones in the front. From thirty feet away the remaining soldiers and three MIB watched them disappear as the door closed behind them. They were no longer in sight.
They were, however, visible on four separate, high-resolution monitors sitting atop a table out beside a parked army jeep in the clearing.
"Turn the sound on," Vaul barked at a young man with bad acne. He did as told. Voices entered everybody's ears. The Men in Black crowded around the small TVs. The other soldiers huddled behind them, trying too to see what was going on. Nobody in the house was visibly moving. They all stood by the front door, bullshitting.
"Yes. I know. You two investigate the whole downstairs, basement and all," John told Bud and George. "Bill and I will go upstairs."
The four split up into two teams.
On the monitors, the inside of the house looked older than a hundred years. Dust and dirt fogged up most of the pictures, and the audio popped and cracked through the speakers.
"We—re get—a—lot of—act—with—the—" It was John's voice, no doubt, but the signal was already breaking up.
Vaul ran a hand through his hair and sighed, frustrated. He gazed at the technician as if it was his fault. "You're sure this equipment is functioning properly? You've tested it before they went in there?"
"Yes, sir. Everything was in fine working order."
Vaul looked back at his two expressionless twins. They said nothing.
"What in the fuck was that?!" One young soldier pointed at a monitor. In a split second there was a sputter of static, but he was the only one whom had seen something.
Vaul gripped him by the shoulder. "What did you see?" Everyone looked at the man, whose nose began to run with blood.
"I don't know what I saw. A face. A twisted face. I saw past its twenty-two eyes! I saw into its rabid soul...if that's what it was." The man's eyes were hazy, fuzzy, devoid of vitality. Then, tears sprang in them and streamed down his cheeks...except they were not streaks of clear water, but two red streaks of blood.
"Holy Christ!" someone amidst the crowd gasped, horrified. Someone else backed away. More crackles of electrical noise popped through the speaker. One monitor turned to static. The technician said, "We got one out. Camera one is down."
Vaul turned back to him. As he did, the soldier with the bleeding eyes turned and ran off, out of the clearing and deeper into the shrouded woods. Vaul turned again. "Hey! Come back here!"
No compliance. He looked at the soldiers, as if they should have known what to do. They just stood there. "Go get him!"
They finally moved. Two camo-clad men ran after him.
Vaul looked back at the monitor. Suddenly, camera two fizzled out. "What's happening in there?"
"I don't know, sir." The technician shook his head. "It's as if the electrical signals connected to the motherboard are being manipulated."
"Manipulated by what?"
The man looked up at him but said nothing. He didn't have an answer. "It's very reliable equipment. It never does this. It's made to hold up underwater, in caves, in Antarctica, if need be. My guess is, whatever is controlling the house is controlling the feed."
"This is bad." Vaul glanced up at the house. When he did, he could have sworn he saw the porch roof curve downward in the center and curl up at the sides, as if it were smiling at him. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes. The illusion, if that's was what it was, was gone.
Chapter 8
Inside, John and Bill just reached the top of the steps. A beeping sound reverberated through the hallway. Bill looked down at the thermonuclear detector. It was picking up a high reading of local radiation.
"Whoa, wait." He stopped the psychic.
John stopped and looked back. "What is it?"
"This meter's going haywire on me. The radiation level is through the roof."
"Mine isn't beeping, Bill." And it wasn't.
"Maybe yours isn't working."
"They're both working. Yours is being influenced."
Bill looked up at John, unnerved. "Influenced? You mean—?"
"Yes. By whatever possesses this place."
"What if mine is the one that's working and yours is the one being influenced?"
John thought about it for a moment, even considered it. But he knew that this house knew him better than it knew Bill. Bill was the newcomer, the gullible one. He didn't know anything yet.
"If you want, you can turn off all your equipment." John did just that with his own.
"If the guy in charge out there sees you do that—"
"Don't worry, they won't. Those monitors outside aren't receiving any more signals."
"And how do you know that?"
"Cause I'm beginning to understand this house.”
***
Out in the woods, a bush quivered as someone brushed hurriedly passed it. An army boot splashed into and out of a puddle of water, the soldier wearing it racing away. A second later the bush trembled again, then again, and two more army boots of smaller size plunged into and out of the puddle one right after the other. Ripples spread smoothly across the surface of the water. The chase was on.
"Hey! Wait!" one man yelled to the retreater, whose feet were moving a mile a minute. The man did not stop. Did not brake. He kept going, smacking into some thick branches with his face and snapping them apart upon impact. The followers ran full speed after their fellow soldier, but they could not keep up with him. Each of the two slipped every three feet in the mud. The fallen tree limbs were like hurdles impeding their rapid advancement. Their legs were cut by sharp thorns even through their heavy camo pants. The escapee was almost out of sight, running almost faster than humanly possible. Those receding in his distance saw his blood on the leaves, the ground, and the bushes by which he'd passed. Then, as if magically, the man vanished into thin air. They stopped and looked around, searching for him.
"Where in the hell did he go? Did you see?" The leader of the two was already out of breath. So much for basic training.
"He ran around that oak," he pointed, "and never came out."
They looked down the slope, past a tree, and at a stream. The current of water was strong, and a loose camouflage jacket soon floated along with it.
The two men slowly and cautiously hiked down the hill, both removing a pistol from their pocket, just to be safe. The only sound they heard was the steady flow of running water. The army jacket traveled about thirty more feet before getting stuck on a twig. The soldiers edged their way around the fat oak, tip-toed behind a bush, and came out on the other side.
Neither man could believe his eyes.
His back was turned to them, his body completely devoid of clothes. His army pants and underwear lay in a heap beside a rock. He was hunched over like Igor; his head tilted back, his eyes gazing up at the sky. He bowed a dozen times, as if he were praising the sun, itself. Sounds came out of his mouth, but they didn't sound human.
"Harold?" One solider stepped forward.
He bowed one last time, then slowly turned his head to look at his two former acquaintances. His face was red, broken out in painful-looking sores and blisters. His eyes were pea-yellow. His flesh peeled, then shriveled up and turned to ash right before their eyes. The expression on his�
��or its—face was nonhuman, non-animal, and unearthly. It wasn't anger, fear, glee, amusement, hatred or sorrow. It was some other emotion, unbound by physicality.
Both men standing behind him wanted to blow him away. They could do it and get away with it. They were away from the others, alone, deep in the woods. All they'd have to do was say that he had attacked them. No big deal. But they did not fire the trigger; not yet, at least. They wanted it to speak, to see what it had to say.
"Harold?" The other man stepped forward. "What the fuck happened to you—your face, your—" He pointed to his back. Orange hair poked through every pore violently and speedily. His spinal column quivered underneath his skin. The snapping of bones cracked through the air. Harold, if that's who he still was, roared.
"Man, what's happening? What in the fuck did you see on that monitor?"
"I saw the seven children of D'kourikai. I saw the earth and time when it existed Triperilously. What do you want from me, you little white dwarfs? What ugly, twisted beings you are." Its eyes shifted from yellow, to milky white, to black. More hair ripped through its tough skin, which began to sizzle and smoke the color red. The two men holding the guns began to drool on themselves. Blood began to run from their nostrils. Their hands trembled so roughly, had they fired, they would have missed greatly.
"End me with your lousy weapons, you believe? Only in this world, never in mine. You can't touch me in either with your hands—that's what you call them? Your verbal attempt at communication with these voice boxes is mediocre at best."
But the two humans could hardly communicate at all. They were in shock, too riveted by this otherworldly creature to utter even a groan. Both their index fingers had the trigger pulled back almost all the way, and neither was aware of it.
Harold's deformed back continued to grow with orange hair. The hair on its head curled and fell to the ground, where it evaporated like water on a warm day. Its eyes shifted colors again, to and fro every hue in a Crayola box. Its lips bulged out, ripped unpleasantly apart, tearing and oozing a sticky green slime, through which brown-colored teeth emerged. Its hideous face ran with blood, poured with blood, and the pimples and diseased flesh grew and twisted in circles. The smile it gave the two soldiers made one of them piss his pants. Startled by the warmth in his groin, he finally pulled the trigger. A bang rang out, but the bullet missed the monster by several feet. It did manage to hit a squirrel squirming across a log over by a group of poison ivy.
"I will see you both in time. I will come back to haunt you. Just remember that when the earth's shadow blocks sunlight from reaching the moon again, you will see this face once more," the thing made them know, one of its eyes now a different color than the other.
Before the two men could blink, the being stepped forward, across a long zigzagged line carved into the dirt, and disappeared into thin air. There was no noise, no puff of smoke, no trace of Harold ever to be seen again. Whatever had entered his body had overpowered his will and had basically swallowed him whole. He was gone forever. His two army buddies did not move a muscle for another few minutes. Their noses continued to bleed.
***
Back in the clearing, Vaul pressured the technician into fixing the electrical equipment from the current location, pronto. The monitors were still out, and only the sound of static was getting through the speakers. Seconds ago Vaul had sent three more men into the woods to see what the gunfire was all about. He didn't feel in charge anymore. Everything was going awry. He did, however, feel the house still smiling at him.
"Come on, Steve. We have to get in there and see what they're doing. They could all be dead by now."
Steve pushed buttons, turned switches and smacked the machines, trying to force it to work.
"The problem is that the signal is dead, sir."
"And by your hitting this expensive equipment, you think you can revive it?" Vaul's face turned red. He rubbed the back of his neck harshly every so often, stressed.
Steve unplugged some wires, switched them, checked the power over and over to make sure it was on. His eyes stay glued to the blurry TVs. His right hand kept moving to the bulky headphones affixed to his head every time he thought he heard an interruption in the constant Shhhhhh. Sweat began to pop from the pores on his forehead. He hated being under this much pressure. He could feel several steel-cold eyes watching his back, waiting very impatiently for him to fix something he couldn't.
"Anything?"
"No, sir, not—wait. Wait."
He touched his headphones again. The static stopped. A faint, continuous buzz entered his ears, like the steady flat-line of a hospital monitor. Yet, he had never heard anything quite like it before.
"What do you hear? What is it?" Vaul was standing so close to Steve, it made him uncomfortable. The soldiers gathered around also, a swarm of green and brown clad men anxious to hear the reply.
He listened closely. Intertwined with the whine, which began to slowly fade out, was an unusual sputter of broken syllables that sounded like vocals from some unintelligible life form. It had the elevated pitch of a screaming hyena and the broken up purr of a lion.
But its dynamic jargon seemed quite deliberate in structure. It got louder, drowned out the annoying hum, and the questions Vaul was asking Steve.
When Steve looked up at Vaul, he saw his lips moving, his face bursting red. The man was obviously yelling, but he could not hear him at all. So he took off the headphones.
There was still no noise, not a sound whatsoever. Only a dull roar in his ears.
Steve had gone deaf, his hearing sucked dry by an unknown alien language unsuited for human eardrums.
Freaked out, he jumped to his feet and ran out of the clearing, toward Mayberry Road, not once looking back. Everyone watched him go, mystified by the extreme terror engraved on his face as he retreated. Vaul looked back up at the house. It looked even more menacing now, for reasons he could not fathom. It did not move, did not try to pronounce its features. It just stood there and did nothing.
That was not its true nature.
Behind its walls, Bud and George had thoroughly examined the child's bedroom and now moved on to the living room, which was oddly devoid of any furniture. The dust on the floor was so thick it felt like they were walking on ice. The air was dense and musty. The walls were broken in many places, the slats behind the plaster visible almost everywhere. There were recesses in two of the walls, the first which led into a closet on the left, the second which led to a pane-glass window on the right. Outside didn't look quite right in either of the two men's eyes. The field and trees looked extremely dull and artificial through the glass.
"Nothing about this place is normal." Bud did a slow pan of the room... "Can't you feel it?"
"It's not going to be a house on MTV's cribs. That's for sure. I do feel something, though."
"Depressed?"
"Exactly. Emotionless. Blank of any real feelings I'm used to feeling." George opened the closet door. Suddenly, the feeling of fear rushed through him as something jumped out from the shadows of the cubicle and fell against his body. He leaped back. Bud reached for his gun, grabbed it, and aimed. But it wasn't a supernatural entity.
It was the remains of a human skeleton.
It shattered to pieces when it hit the floor.
"Fuckin damn!" George cried.
"Scared the shit out of me, too."
George looked back at his partner and saw the piece he was holding. "What the fuck are you doing with that, man? You're not supposed—"
"Never mind supposed. Self-protection, y'know? You were here yesterday. You saw what happened to those other guys."
"But like that psychic guy said—"
"It's all bullshit,” he spat. “There ain't no such thing as psychics. Don't be so gullible." Bud pocketed his gun.
"Then how do you explain—"
"Hey, all I know is reality is reality. I don't know what's going on, but it ain't because of no ghosts, I tell you that. Would you go into a war with
out weapons?"
"No."
"Then there you go. Betta to be safe than sorry. You never know, maybe you'll thank me if I save your sorry ass."
George kneeled down and examined the broken bits of bone. The marrow inside them gleamed like red diamonds, and had been crystallized by some type of sudden change in temperature. He grabbed one small fragment with his fingers, but immediately released it when a sharp pain shot up his hand.
Bud cringed. "What's wrong?"
"It's cold. Feels like the dry ice from a fire extinguisher."
"How long you suppose it's been here? The skeleton and all?"
George stood back up and turned to Bud. "I can't tell you that, but by the look of it, I'd say this poor bastard had his complete bodily makeup rearranged."
"Say what?" There was heavy spite evident in his voice.
"His DNA, his skin, his hair—everything that made him him—somehow changed so drastically that the entire molecular level of his being was altered to some different DNA, skin, and hair. It's like in my high school chemistry class, when the teacher soaked a tennis ball in a vat of liquid nitrogen and shattered it. Well, I think this might be the same."
"You think it might? That's not certain at all, now, is it? Huh?"
George didn't respond. He didn't much like the guy he was teamed with. Bud had an air of arrogance about him, a need to be in control. His tone of voice was consistently saturated with sarcasm. He hadn't followed orders, and would probably be a danger to them all.
"Come now, let's check the rest of this dammed house," Bud said, aiming his radiation meter at the archway leading into a small kitchen.
George thought about turning back, going upstairs and joining John and Bill. Their voices were barely audible anymore. Their footfalls were an echo in his ears.
"You coming or what, man?" Bud persisted.
But he decided not to break protocol. The house wasn't that big, anyway. After exploring three or four more rooms, he could see the light of day again. Then he wouldn't have to be around this jerk any longer.