Dark Halls - A Horror Novel

by Jeff Menapace

  (blood)

  red. Rebecca started to cry. She caressed the parts of the photo that were not desecrated. The match went out, and she lit another, forcing herself to look away from her father’s picture and take inventory of the room’s remaining contents. And she only cried harder when she did. The things she saw—the horrors she saw.

  The match died, and she lit another. As though scripted, the last item she spotted in the far corner of the room was the very reason for her trek. It was the urn.

  80

  Rebecca’s fourth match had maybe twenty seconds left, but that was enough time for her to locate the small entrance at the base of the chamber wall from which she’d emerged. She placed the urn inside, blew out the match, stuffed the box of matches into her waistband, and crawled on in. Once inside the narrow passage, she managed to turn herself around so that her feet were leading the way, the urn now carefully balanced on her lap. From there, she scooted forward on her butt, one hand holding the urn tight to her lap, reached the end of the passage where the panel was still blocking her exit, brought her knees up, and then thrust her legs forward, soles of her shoes banging the panel. The panel did not give out entirely on the first blow, but it did give. Two more powerful thrusts and the panel came free.

  Rebecca crawled out into total darkness and stood, urn gripped tight in both hands. “Stew?” she called.

  Nothing for a moment—and then her mother’s voice: “Rebecca?”

  Rebecca readied a second bluff. “Mom? Is that you?”

  The voice grew closer, maybe twenty feet away. “Yes, it’s me. Are you all right?”

  “I can’t see, Mom. I need to show you something. I need to show you something really important, but I can’t see.”

  An excruciating pause. Rebecca could almost hear her mother thinking, considering, judging.

  The boiler room came to life with light. Rebecca squinted as her eyes tried to acclimate. She did not see her mother in her immediate field of vision.

  “Mom?”

  Carol rounded the corner, her footsteps slow, casual, confident.

  “You wanted to show me something, Rebecca?” No “sweetheart,” no “honey,” no “Becks.” Rebecca. Her full name was always reserved for times of seriousness or scolding. Now it seemed to carry a different connotation, as though her mother was politely addressing a stranger she’d just met. It frightened Rebecca that much more.

  Rebecca brandished the urn. “I know what this is…I know what you’ve been doing…” She bit down on her inner cheek to keep from crying. “…I know you killed Daddy.”

  Carol’s expression was ice. “Rebecca, you have an opportunity in front of you now that no other person in this world has. You have the opportunity to gain infinite power.” She pointed a finger at her daughter. “It’s in your blood.” She brought the finger to her own chest. “It’s in our blood.”

  Rebecca kept quiet.

  “You have the opportunity to attain any and all you desire, Rebecca. The opportunity to feel the unparalleled rapture you can only feel when you consume the essence of something so pure and unspoiled…and I can give it to you. I can teach you.”

  “You kill children.”

  “I’ve never killed a child in my life.”

  “You made them kill each other.”

  Carol shrugged. “Semantics.”

  “That’s sick.”

  Carol shrugged again. “Am I any different than the puppet master people call God? God kills all the time, and he is indiscriminate in his choosing. Young, old, devout. And it is the devout fools that perhaps he takes the greatest pleasure in killing, for they continue to worship him after, convincing themselves that his choosing to take their loved ones was all part of some grander plan.” She laughed. “It really is all so amusing.”

  “You’re not God.”

  “No—nor do I want to be. But I have embraced his way. I too can kill indiscriminately to feel his exquisite sense of power. And my rewards are far greater than any sense of power. It is power. A power that grants me…” She closed her eyes and exhaled with perverse delight; a woman on the cusp of an orgasm. “…oh, Rebecca, the ecstasy that power grants me…”

  “Why did you kill my father?”

  Carol opened her eyes. “Again, I should remind you that I’ve never technically killed anyone—except maybe poor Stew just now.” She giggled.

  “Stop it, Mom.”

  Carol cocked her head. “All right then. Your father was a traitor, Rebecca. A hypocritical traitor. He delighted in wickedness and then ultimately asked forgiveness from God for that delight. He asked forgiveness when everything else in his life was in chaos, and isn’t chaos the true nature of man? It certainly isn’t order. Your father never went to God out of true faith. He went out of fear—no different than an atheist asking, begging, for salvation on his deathbed. What God would embrace such hypocrisy? I do believe God would actually thank me for taking him as easily as I did.” She laughed.

  “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you.”

  “I know it’s painful for you now, Rebecca. But if you let me show you…if you allow me to let you taste what’s possible…”

  “What did you do to Ryan?”

  “Oh, please don’t tell me you’re shedding any tears for a boy you’ve only known a few weeks, Rebecca.”

  Rebecca said nothing.

  “He was a threat, Rebecca. He had that damned ability to see, just like the others. Though I must admit, he was a hell of a lot tougher than the others. I thought he was mine as soon as I obtained his semen after you two snuck out onto the deck for a cigarette the other night. Thank God”—she chuckled softly at her own hypocrisy—“for the boy’s drunken carelessness of leaving a used condom on the floor. Pretty classy fella, Rebecca, I must say.” Her face then darkened. “Oh, and I must also say, I’m very disappointed you started smoking again. It’s weak, Rebecca. It shows weakness. But we’ll make you strong again.”

  Rebecca hung her head and bit down on her cheek again to keep from crying. It was futile. Tears rolled down her cheeks against her will. “Well, then I’m sure you’re going to love this.” Rebecca set the urn on the floor and dug into her back pocket, where her crumpled back of Marlboro Lights still hid. She plucked one from the pack and placed it between her lips, pulled the box of matches from her waistband, lit one, lit her cigarette, and inhaled deeply.

  Carol looked on without expression, seemingly refusing to give her daughter the satisfaction of visible disappointment.

  Rebecca took a final drag, long and slow, and then flicked the cigarette at her mother. Carol flinched and turned away. Rebecca quickly plucked another match from the box, lit it, tipped the porcelain urn over onto its side with the toe of her shoe, and then brought her heel up and then down onto the side of the urn with a mighty stomp, shattering it, keen on setting its horrific contents ablaze, for it had to have been—had to have been—preserved in something flammable all these years.

  Only Rebecca set nothing ablaze. The match burning idly between her thumb and index finger, Rebecca set nothing ablaze because there was nothing to set ablaze. The urn was empty. She could only gape down at the nothing within the shattered remains of the urn before eventually lifting her head and locking eyes with her mother.

  Her mother raised both eyebrows, splayed a hand—and was there not the tiniest bit of smugness in that gesture? Mockery, even?

  Rebecca dropped the match to the floor, where it burned and soon died, sulphury smoke rising right after.

  “It’s empty,” Rebecca said, dropping her gaze to the shattered remains once again. She spoke these words, not to her mother, but to herself, as though she had betrayed her own virtue.

  “Empty,” Carol said.

  Rebecca raised her head and looked at her mother once again.

  “Earlier, I overheard your partner in crime, Stew, telling Ryan he was going to feed me Helen’s heart,” Carol said. “I found it deliciously—pun most certainly intended—amusing.
He reiterated this threat only moments ago. I told him I wasn’t hungry.” She licked her lips and patted her belly.

  “Oh my God…” Rebecca slapped a hand over her mouth, sure she was going to vomit.

  “From the day I started, it had always been the endgame for me, Rebecca.” She explained it all so casually, as though discussing her aspirations within a sane vocation. “Believe me, it would have been far easier to do it sooner than later, only I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t earned it. I took a chance tonight.” She smiled. Her eyes were red. And then they weren’t. Rebecca blinked hard, certain she’d seen wrong. “I’m glad I took that chance. Helen’s soul resides in me now, sweetheart…”—again, these words, so casual, as though such a perverse undertaking was an everyday thing—“and I look forward to the infinite rewards it will offer. Please, please allow me to share it with you. Please.”

  “No.”

  “I can undo what I did to Ryan,” she said. “I can make him love you unconditionally. All memories of what has transpired over the course of these past few weeks can be erased. He will be yours and yours alone until you deem otherwise.”

  “What about my memory?”

  Carol tilted her head, screwing her gaze into her daughter’s, a probing, testing gaze for what she was about to say. “I can change that too.”

  Rebecca started to cry again. “You’re crazy…”

  Carol sighed and pulled her knife. “I want you to know, sweetheart, that despite what you might think of me, I take no delight in this whatsoever—” She wiped the blade free of Stew’s blood onto her shirt, as though killing her daughter with a blade soiled in another’s blood was disrespectful. “I love you.”

  Carol lunged.

  Rebecca screamed.

  Stew rounded the corner from where Carol had left him to die, shoved Rebecca out of the way, and met Carol’s charge with a sledgehammer right cross on the point of her chin, dropping her like dead meat.

  Panting, doubled over in pain, Stew spat blood on Carol’s unconscious body. “That’s for my boy John, you crazy bitch.”

  81

  Rebecca and Stew did not speak at first. Both just stared down at the unconscious Carol Lawrence, Rebecca weeping, Stew still panting, doubled over again, clutching his stomach with one hand, his hamstring with the other.

  “I’m sorry I hit your mom,” he said.

  Rebecca turned to Stew. Took in his wounds. “Did she do that to you?”

  Stew reached down and grabbed the discarded knife by Carol’s side and showed it to Rebecca. She acknowledged it with a dejected nod.

  Stew slid the knife into his back pocket and then turned his attention onto the shattered remains of the urn and, more importantly, the nothing therein. “Did I hear right?” he said. “Did I hear she actually ate the heart?”

  “Yeah. My guess is that she did it while you and I were upstairs by the nurse’s office. When we came down here and caught her crawling out of her…” Rebecca swallowed hard, glanced over at the boiler and the entrance to her mother’s chamber beyond. “…whatever the hell you call it, she must have just finished.”

  “My God…how does one eat a two-hundred-year-old preserved heart without getting sick?”

  “She said it was always her intention—even from the very start. My guess was that she—I don’t know—knew a way with all her mumbo-jumbo stuff.” Rebecca snorted incredulously. “And I brought it to her…served it right up like some delivery boy.”

  “You had no way of knowing,” Stew said.

  Rebecca looked at Stew, his wounded state. “We need to get you to a hospital.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “What do we do with my mother?”

  “Let’s get her upstairs. Call the police for real this time.”

  “You sure you can lift her?” she asked, gesturing to his injuries.

  “I think the two of us should be able.”

  ***

  Rebecca and Stew carried Carol Lawrence’s unconscious body into the lobby and placed it on one of the sofas.

  “She never did call the police, did she?” Rebecca asked.

  Stew, who had quickly ducked into the nurse’s office soon after laying Carol on the sofa and was now dressing his wounds with supplies he’d found there, replied: “No—I highly doubt it.”

  Rebecca watched Stew attend to himself. “We really need to get you to a hospital. You were unconscious for a spell, weren’t you?”

  Stew nodded. “Not from these, though,” he said, waving a hand over his stomach and leg. “She whacked me good on my noggin with something soon after she sliced my hamstring.”

  “Then you could have a concussion to boot.”

  “Wouldn’t be surprised.”

  Rebecca looked down at her mother. “What do you think will happen to my mom?”

  Stew sighed. “I honestly don’t know.”

  Rebecca looked away, tears welling up and then breaking free, rolling down both cheeks.

  “What’s going on?”

  Both Stew and Rebecca spun.

  It was Ryan, stumbling out of the fifth-grade wing and looking as though he’d been on one hell of a bender. He spotted Carol on the sofa. “Is that…?”

  Stew nodded.

  Ryan looked at Rebecca. “What are you…what is…what the hell happened?”

  Rebecca said nothing. She didn’t have to; her face said it all.

  “Oh, Rebecca, I’m so…” He stopped. Looked at Carol again. “Is she…?”

  “She’s alive,” Stew said.

  “And the heart?” Ryan said. “You found the heart? You destroyed it?”

  “Didn’t have to,” Stew said. “She ate the damn thing.”

  “She what?”

  Stew didn’t repeat himself, just looked at Ryan with raised eyebrows and a face that said: Yup—crazy, huh?

  Of all the things Ryan might have said next, neither Stew nor Rebecca could have predicted what he did utter: “We have to kill her.”

  Simultaneously, Rebecca and Stew said: “What?”

  “Jesus, Stew—Samantha,” Ryan blurted. “Don’t you remember what she said? The Moyers never destroyed the heart because they feared Helen Tarver’s soul would be set free to inhabit another. You’re telling me Carol actually ate the fucking thing? Do the math!”

  Rebecca looked at Stew, afraid. Stew returned an uneasy glance, then turned back to Ryan, showed him his palms, and patted the air. “Whoa, whoa—slow down there, Ryan. Samantha also said the Moyers’ beliefs about that were superstition.”

  “Then why would she eat it? Can you think of a more intimate way for her to embody Helen Tarver’s soul?”

  Palms still up and patting the air, Stew said: “Ryan, you’re not yourself. You just had one hell of an ordeal in your classroom. I’m not really sure what happened to you in there, but you were unconscious for a while and in obvious pain.” Stew paused a moment. “Do you remember what happened?”

  “I…no. No, I don’t remember. But please stop and think about—”

  “No, you stop and think for a minute, Ryan. If Carol was still capable of wielding the heart’s power, why are you awake and out here with us? Wouldn’t you still be unconscious in your classroom?”

  Ryan pointed at Carol. “Maybe it’s because she’s unconscious.” Ryan’s eyes, nervous, frantic, skittered all over the lobby, settling on the nurse’s office in the distance. “What about Karl? Have you checked on Karl? Is he awake?”

  “I haven’t checked on him yet. But he banged his head on the floor pretty good when he fell, Ryan. You were there. If he’s still unconscious, it’s likely because of that, not because Carol is making it so.”

  Only Stew wasn’t necessarily sure of his own convictions. Dazed as he was, Ryan’s points were valid. Valid because Stew was coming to when he caught Carol’s words to Rebecca before she’d attacked her: From the day I started, it had always been the endgame for me, Rebecca. Believe me, it would have been far easier to do it sooner than later, only I wasn
’t ready. I hadn’t earned it. I took a chance tonight. I’m glad I took that chance. Helen’s soul resides in me now…and I look forward to the infinite rewards it will offer.

  “Ryan…” Stew started, but the uncertainty in his voice, in his eyes, betrayed him; Ryan’s point grew more and more valid by the second. Carol had clicked off the lights in the boiler room without being anywhere near the damn switch. And those eyes…those eyes…he hadn’t imagined that. Knew in the deepest recesses of his own soul that he had not, had not imagined that.

  He flashed on Samantha’s words when Ryan had asked why it was so important to keep the heart close when she kept all of her “crazy crap” that she used to carry out her rituals in the school: Mere tools, Samantha had said. They enable her to carry out her rituals, but her strength—her true strength—stems from the heart. It is her conduit, her direct line to Helen Tarver’s evil. Without it she has very little.

  And now she had ingested that evil. It was inside her. Believe what you will—and at this point, it was safe to say no one knew what to believe anymore—but was it not possible that Helen Tarver’s soul was inside Carol now? Granting her infinite power far beyond what she was previously capable of?

  “You know I’m right, Stew,” Ryan said.

  “You’re not killing my mother!” Rebecca yelled.

  “She’s not the woman you thought she was, Rebecca,” Ryan said.

  “You’re not killing her!” Rebecca pulled her phone. “I’m calling the police.” She flipped open her phone. Frowned. Hit the power button several times and frowned some more.

  “What’s wrong?” Stew asked.

  “It’s dead,” she said, still fiddling with the phone, removing the battery, snapping it back in, and then trying it again to no avail. “What the hell…”

  Stew pulled his phone. It too was dead. He told them so.

  “Coincidence?!” Ryan yelled.

  Rebecca spun on him. “Yes!” She started towards the main office. “I’ll use the school line,” she said over her shoulder.