He steps across the wood floor. Sarah is behind him.
Something cracks above him. He ignores it. Feels for the door.
Almost there.
Then something hits him on the head. He feels a flash of pain, a single moment of agony, then everything is dark.
He is unconscious for a time. He can’t tell how long. Too long?
He doesn’t know.
He feels hands under his armpits, pulling him somewhere. He hears something strange. It sounds like rain but isn’t.
Something is wrong with his eyes. He isn’t seeing properly. He tries to blink, and realizes that his right eye isn’t responding at all. His brain parses out the mangled images that his eyes are sending it. The left eye can see, though everything is blurred.
The right eye…. Everything is black. A part of him knows that the eyelid has burned away. The eye itself is shrunken and seared; ruined forever.
He looks down.
“Easy, fellah, don’t move,” says a voice.
He ignores the voice. He looks at himself.
He is burning. His skin is black. It sloughs off his flesh in dark sheets, peeling away as the outside breeze touches it. His mind short-circuits for a moment, and he remembers toasting marshmallows around a fire with his family when younger.
I’m a burnt marshmallow. I hate burnt marshmallows.
Then something brings him back to The Now. Screaming. He recognizes it, but only vaguely.
Where have I heard that voice before?
His brain isn’t working right. He’s having a hard time concentrating. The screaming continues.
Something lifts him up, he feels another something lay him flat. A gurney. It is soft, but it is agony against his tortured skin. He tries to scream, but his voice doesn’t sound. Pain steals his breath.
But there is still screaming.
He looks around again. Bright lights. A house. Burning. A house on a hill, surrounded by trees.
My house.
Jets of water are aimed at it. Water droplets falling like rain from heaven, salvation for his home. Firefighters saving it.
But who’s saving Sarah?
The thought brings him back for a moment. He hears the screaming and knows who it is. In spite of the heat that still has him in its grip, the flames that continue to burn under his superheated skin, he suddenly feels cold.
He turns his head. The skin on his throat falls away as he does.
“Don’t move!” shouts a voice. He ignores it.
He sees men surrounding something. Screaming at one another.
“She’s in shock!”
“Where do I even start?”
“I’m losing her! I’m losing her!”
He feels his body convulsing. Death throes grip him. But he manages to keep his remaining eye fixed on the sight.
Legs, covered in burns like his – worse than his – flop into view. He can barely see them between the huddled bodies. But he knows who they belong to.
The legs thrash around. They leave flesh and seared skin behind, the body falling from the bone. Then they suddenly straighten. Grow rigid as what is left of the muscles all clench at once.
The scream –
(not my wife’s scream not her scream not Sarah’s scream not Sarah’s scream)
– grows in pitch and volume.
“Oh my God!” someone shouts. Not a curse, a prayer, a shouted entreaty to the heavens.
He sees blood splash on the gurney. The legs are suddenly awash in it.
“Baby’s coming!”
“This isn’t happening, this isn’t happening!”
“Shut up and pull yourself together!”
The gurney is red with blood.
The legs shake.
The scream fades away.
The legs tremble, then grow still.
One of the huddled men turns and vomits.
There is a single, shrill cry. Low, almost a wheeze. One of the men picks something up. It moves in his arms, but only for a moment. Then it, too, is still.
He watches it happen. Watches it end. And knows what true pain is. It isn’t waking in smoke, it isn’t being burned from head to toe. It isn’t even death.
It is being alone.
And with that, his body goes limp.
He is gone.
24
The Third Day
4:36 am
***
The pages stopped turning.
The last page stood open.
Cap looked at it.
“Couple Dies in Gas Fire. Arson Suspected.”
The words under the headline didn’t matter. He looked at the pictures. Saw his own face staring up at him. Saw Sarah beside him on the page. Beautiful.
He looked at her.
She looked different than she did in the picture. The lie was gone. He saw her as she was, as the other ghosts were, with her body the way it was in death. Swathes of skin hung from her like tattered ends of a decaying black shroud. Flesh peeled from her bones. He could see bone shining through her legs, ribs jutting out of her sides, yellow and darkened with blood and soot.
She was still beautiful. To him, she would always be beautiful.
Her stomach was slack. Loose. She held something in her arms, something wrapped in a blanket. He could barely glimpse what was inside, a hint more than a sight. A familiar shape, a misshapen form that had come before its time, that had lived only a moment before finding another, stranger kind of life beyond the veil of tears and blood.
“Daddy,” said the voice. The same voice he had heard before, the voice that had frightened him more than any of the others, the voice that would force him to see.
“Come and playyyyyy….”
But the fear was gone. He knew that it wasn’t the gruesome sight of the malformed baby that had frightened him so much that he had swerved away from it in the dark, that had terrified him beyond words when it scratched at his door and begged for him and Sarah to come out. It wasn’t the thing itself, it was the truth that it hid, the reality he hadn’t wanted to accept.
“Daddy,” it said again, an impossibly well-enunciated sound from a baby’s lips. But the voice was no longer terrible. It was comforting. “Daddy, stay with us. Forever.”
Cap reached out. Wanting to touch the baby, the child he had never known, the infant that had been so close and at the same time so far away.
But he couldn’t move. He looked up. Sarah was standing with them. Standing with the ghosts. One of them. And like them – like their child – she suddenly began screaming.
Cap became aware that he was hearing the chanting again. A knife in his mind. And suddenly he knew. Not just about him, not just about The Before. He knew what the other things were, the dark things that had chased him and hurt him.
He turned slowly, intending to face them. And as he did, Father Michael’s voice sounded in his ears.
“An exorcism follows set patterns,” he said. “First the owner of the house must try to cast out the ghost or ghosts himself.”
“How?” said Cap.
“Tell them to leave.”
And he saw in his mind what Sarah had seen when she tore open the door to the closet under the stairs. He was there with her, as he was with her in everything, for he was a part of her and a part of their child and a part of the house. Sarah opened the door, and this time he saw beyond what she had seen the first time. He saw the reality.
She opened the door. A woman was hiding in the closet. A woman who had moved into the house, the latest in a long line of owners doomed to fail in their attempt to live safely and soundly in this place. The woman who had come here to start a new and better life. Her husband had not come with her: he had to stay behind to finish up business, to settle matters so he could live in comfort with his young wife. But he had packed her some things to make her happy. Their wedding dishes which seemed unaccountably alien to Sarah when she opened the box that held them. A baby monitor that she would find and be delighted by, knowing it meant
that her husband agreed with her that it was time to start to grow their family. Even a crib.
But there was no delight. Not in this house where her box cutters kept moving around. Where boxes she had not remembered unpacking from the moving truck kept disappearing, somehow finding themselves in rooms that she had never intended them to reside in. The place where, when she tried to start the moving truck and drive it around so it would be closer to the side door, the engine kept turning off of its own accord and the keys disappeared for hours on end. Where doors opened and shut without her touching them.
Where she saw… things.
She ran, hid inside the closet. And when it was thrown open, she had screamed, “LEAVE ME ALONE!” Cap saw her cringing away, not aware that she had scared the particular poltergeist that opened the door as much as it had scared her.
The woman’s shirt was red. The same red Sarah kept seeing on the first day.
Then Cap was back in the attic, still looking at his dead wife as he replayed the next words Father Michael had spoken.
“But take care. You must believe you can overcome them. If not, trying to cast out one or two of the foul demons who have come here will simply sound as a summoning call to more of them. More ghosts will come to this place, and they will fight among themselves to possess it….”
And now Cap knew why the killer had come. Why the hanged man and the boy with the cruel gunshot wound and all the others had come. Because when the woman hid in the closet and screamed for Sarah to leave her alone, the terrified command didn’t work. It just called more ghosts to her.
Father Michael’s voice rang again in his ears.
“If the owner of the home is unsuccessful, then we go to the next steps. The priest tries to cast them out with repeated litany and prayers….”
Cap heard anew the chanting. The sound that had pummeled at him and Sarah, had screamed at them in a language he did not know but nevertheless understood. He saw it for what it was: an ancient monk, a holy man in a robe, called upon by the woman in red to rid her house of the things that had frightened her. Cap saw the old man, and realized that this was the midnight-cloaked figure he had seen, and the darkness that surrounded it in folds of featureless midnight was nothing more than the monk’s robe – but seen through the darkness of his own mind, a mind seeking to hide from itself.
The woman in the red shirt stood behind the monk. She was terrified. But she wanted the house. She wanted it to be safe for her. For her family.
And Cap was back in the attic. He was still turning. Still turning to face the things that were coming up the stairs. The realizations of what was happening came fast, lightning fast epiphanies that illuminated the dark recesses of his mind.
“The rosary is used….”
Cap heard again the sound that had come to bedevil them, the krrrrick-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic that had pounded at him and Sarah like boulders falling from a cliff. He saw in his mind the monk again, still chanting, the rosary beads clicking in his hands as he prayed, the woman in red watching on as the old man strained and bent his will to cast out the demons that had infested her house.
Cap kept turning, turning, the images coming faster and faster….
“Holy water is used to inscribe the sign of the cross on the places we wish to cleanse….”
And he remembered the blackened, burning lines that appeared on the bedroom door as he and Sarah hid behind it, not suspecting that they were the things to be feared. The monk wrote words in holy water on the door. “Leave this place.” The words looked backwards when viewed from behind, from where they cringed on the other side of the door.
Still praying under his breath, the monk dipped his fingers in an open jar that sat beside him. He laid his hands on the wood, and burning handprints appeared. He ran his dripping fingers along the door, drawing a crude cross on it, a cross that burned through the door and appeared on the other side, though only Sarah and Cap and the other dead could see it.
“The priest attempts to touch the ghosts, and burn them with his faith….”
Cap was back on the roof. Trying to get into the attic window, terrified of what was behind him. He reached for the window sill. Then something yanked him away. He looked behind. It was the shadowed thing. The monk. Frail and old, but brave and strong enough in his faith that he had made the leap to the roof, had followed the phantasms through the rain that did not touch them, though it soaked him through. The old man reached out, and touched the pale outlines of the specter. Cap screamed as his leg started to burn, his reality seared by contact with worldly holiness.
“Sage is placed around the house. Ghosts hate sage. Makes ‘em sick to death….”
Cap knew what the smell was, the horrible smell that had caused him and Sarah to vomit, though he also knew that the throwing up was not real, was only a memory that filled in for the reality of what was happening: the monk placing sage around the house, the smell filling the air, trying to push them away.
“And what if all that doesn’t work, either?”
“Then more priests will come to bring their faith to bear….”
And in the attic, Cap completed his turn. He looked at the beings on the stairs. At the rest of the monks who had come, who had gathered to destroy him; the priests who had cast Father Michael’s spirit into oblivion, never to return. They were still chanting, stepping off the stairs.
He glimpsed a face behind them. It was the woman in red. The woman who had come here. The person who fancied herself the owner of the house.
My house.
The priests were reaching for him. For Sarah.
For the baby.
“NO!” he roared.
As he did, he felt himself change. The flesh peeled from his bones. The vision in his right eye dimmed and disappeared. His face drew tight, the teeth bared in a grimace that was exposed past the gumline as his lips charred and fell away.
He felt Sarah behind him. With him. Felt the baby’s presence. They would not be taken from him. This was his house. His family. He did not have to turn to know that the other ghosts recognized him now as one of their own.
“This. Is. My. HOUSE!” he screamed.
The sound ripped through the attic. The monks stopped chanting. Several fell to their knees, their faith battered away. Others began weeping, praying not for the Virgin or the Saints but for their mothers as the darkness they had fought to dispel grew only stronger.
The woman, the cursed woman who had tried to take this house from him – had tried to take his world from him – saw the monks falling back like blades of grass before a hurricane. Her mouth opened in a wide “o” of terror. She turned to run. Down the stairs, two at a time.
Cap pointed. He felt rage; was rage.
The ghosts flowed down the stairwell. The hanged man’s noose swung through the air, catching the woman’s throat and yanking her back. She pulled away, managed to keep running somehow. Taking another step. Another. The door in her reach.
And then a small hand. Warped, bloody. Born too soon and died without taking more than two breaths. Cap’s child was somehow on the landing. The tiny hands reached out. Pushed.
The door closed.
The baby laughed.
Cap was proud.
The woman screamed.
The killer’s knife raised. Fell.
The scream cut off.
All was silent.
Final Story
***
The house sat atop a hill.
It had sat there for many years, and as far as anyone knew, would sit there for many more. Visitors would occasionally travel the long path to see it. They would shiver, and wrap their coats tightly around them if it was winter. If it was summer, they would shiver and wish they were wearing a coat in the first place.
It had been partially destroyed by a fire. But a new owner had commissioned it to be rebuilt. It took three different construction companies to finish the job. The first two lasted less than a week, and both suffered unusual accidents that resulte
d in fatalities of several of their crew. The third managed to complete the work by only coming on days when the sun was shining brightly, and even then only staying for a few hours at a time. They treated the place with reverence and caution, like a temple filled with anthrax. And the house let them alone.
After a suitable time, a sign had appeared. “For Sale.” The words made the townsfolk sigh. Would people never learn? Was money really worth so much?
This time, it was only a few days before the sign changed. “For Sale” became “Sold.” A truck came into the town. It was driven by a woman, who stopped at the single grocery store on the main street to purchase a few things. The people were friendly enough to her, but they did not want to be friends. What was the point? She wouldn’t last. She couldn’t.
And sure enough, soon there were whispers. Tales of a woman who called for help, of a robed monk and then of a dozen more. They came in silence, and less than twenty-four hours later they fled. The woman, it was whispered, had died.
No one was surprised at how the tale ended.
But they were surprised when the man came to town. He was the woman’s husband, he said. He was going to live where she had lived.
A few braver souls warned him to sell the house. Or better yet, burn it down. He would not listen.
He went to the house. And was never heard from again.
The townspeople did not talk of this. They busied themselves with life, and only spoke of the house infrequently, mostly to warn children and grandchildren not to go there.
It was vacant again. Vacant, but not empty.
A few of the braver children did go there, of course: nothing is so interesting as things forbidden. None actually went into the house, but some managed to get closer than others. The bravest were able to look into the windows. Some saw nothing. Others swore they saw faces looking back from the shadows. Bloody, wounded faces. Blackened, burnt faces.
One even swore he heard a mother, singing as to a baby.
The house remained on its hill. Master of all it surveyed, and casting a long shadow that occasionally reached as far as the town. Isolated on its hill, protected by the sheltering trees.
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