“No,” she said, tears trying to claw their way out of her eyes. “But I knew it wouldn’t be.”
“We don’t have to go,” he said.
“Yes, we do. And you can’t let me come back here, Jack. Ever. Do you promise?”
“Sure. I promise.”
With that, they pulled away from the house, Jack commenting on the uselessness of his windshield wipers, talking about how he should have been better prepared. Chloe barely heard him.
He drove the first leg of the trip. She sat in the passenger seat with her eyes closed, feigning sleep in order to avoid conversation. She was much too sad and sick and confused to really fall asleep or to open her eyes and talk, for that matter.
She pretended to wake up just before midnight and they pulled into a rest stop somewhere in eastern Illinois. Jack said he was tired. She told him she would do some of the driving. They fucked in the passenger seat, Chloe straddling him. It was quick and furious. She was barely aroused and it was nearly painful but, for some reason, she had wanted to feel the solidity of Jack inside her, hot and real, stabbing her insides while his arms wrapped around her. Ever since she had met him, it was always this gesture that made her think things just might turn out all right.
She sat in the passenger seat with his come leaking out and into her ass crack. He put his big, warm hand on her knee and said, “What’s the real problem?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She was crying again.
“You can tell me everything, you know? That’s what this is really all about. That’s why we’re going away together. It’s kind of like a marriage. Anything that bothers you, I want it to bother me too.”
“You’d think I was crazy.”
“We’re from Ohio, remember? Crazy is relative. Actually, it’s most of our relatives that are crazy.”
Without expecting it, without really wanting to, she launched into the whole story. She told him everything. He didn’t seem as concerned about the crazy supernatural stuff as he was about the gun she had left at her grandmother’s bedside.
“If there’s a gun involved, they’ll come looking for us. You know that, don’t you?”
“Well . . .” She tried to justify herself. “She said she didn’t want to go into a home. I figured that, in the off chance she actually woke up and was somewhat aware of herself, she could, you know . . .”
“Chloe, this is the kind of thing the news gets ahold of and . . . and then we’re finished. Then we have to come back and God only knows what happens after that.”
“Maybe it was stupid,” she said.
“No, no, we can fix it. We’re not that far away.”
“No, Jack. We can’t go back. We can’t. Nobody’s going to come looking for us. It’ll look like suicide.”
“The gun’s gonna have your prints on it. If she wakes up and does away with herself, you’re going to look bad either way. You’re either going to look like you abandoned her and were too gutless to call an ambulance or you’re going to look like you shot her so you could get away and live your teenage life.”
“No. It wasn’t like that at all. I just didn’t want anyone to find out about her.”
“I know that. But think of how crazy that’s going to sound to anyone else.”
“And when we go back and find that nothing’s happened . . . what then? We can’t take her to a home. Then they’ll know. Then they’ll all know. And we can’t live there with her.”
“Why not?”
“Because I just can’t. What we have . . . it’s beautiful. I don’t want it mixed up with that. I want to make a clean beginning.”
“Well, maybe we’ll have to wait until she’s gone before we make our beginning. I don’t mind, Chloe, really I don’t. I’d do anything for you.”
“I know you would. That’s what makes me so scared.”
“Forget about all that Zwinns stuff. It’s all just rumors and lies.”
“Okay. We can go back. But if we go back, we’re getting someone to take care of her. Are you willing to work enough to support that?”
“I’m willing to do anything you ask me to do.”
“Who’s driving?” she asked, turning petulantly in her seat and reaching in the floorboard for her underwear.
“I’ll drive,” he said.
“Let’s get this over with then.”
Jack drove. She watched the rain beat against the windshield and she couldn’t think of anything except the wallpaper in her grandmother’s room. She didn’t know why she thought of it. Maybe she thought of it in order to take her mind off all the other things she could have been thinking about. Maybe it was the intricate pattern of the wallpaper that kept her mind busy, tracing it over and over. No. Not it. The memory of it. And she still thought of the roses as tumors and the raindrops as little baby tumors but, after a bit of driving, she saw the tumors clearing up. Like they were going away. Mouths closing, satiated. Memories were tricky things.
Something inside her told her that her grandmother was better now. Another part of her told her this was insanity and, even if that was the case, then maybe it was Chloe who had made her sick these last couple of years. Maybe her being gone was the best thing to happen to her grandma. Or maybe it just meant things would work out. Things would be different. If she had Jack there to help her with her grandma, maybe things wouldn’t be so bad. Or if they put her grandma in a home. Really, what was stopping them from doing that? The Zwinns weren’t real. Just like Jack said. They were made up. They were a scapegoat for what ailed the town. Reality was what really ailed the town.
In her mind, she saw the wallpaper in a sunny room. All the tumors were gone and now it was just the roses, dark red with deep green vines against an off-white background. Normal roses. Normal wallpaper. A normal life. The way it should be. It wouldn’t be the ideal beginning but Chloe thought, maybe, it was the only way she could be truly happy—to have both people who mattered near her at all times.
The trip back seemed to go a lot quicker than their abbreviated trip toward their nonexistent California dreamland. Sometime before dawn, they reached the sad old house nestled at the edge of the woods, surrounded by towering trees.
“I guess we’re here,” Jack said.
“Yeah,” Chloe said. She didn’t want to go inside but knew she had to. Going inside, coming back, that was doing the right thing. She didn’t know what she had been thinking. She wasn’t that type of person. The type of person who leaves a dying old woman in bed with a gun to off herself if she came to and found herself alone. Jack wasn’t that type of person. Of course, she had never told Jack about the gun until they were at the rest stop. She had told Jack someone would be there to look after her grandmother. Now they were back and that was that. That was doing the right thing. It felt good.
“I guess I should go in,” she said.
“I’ll come with you.”
“No,” she said. “I mean, I think I should go in alone. I don’t want you to see anything you shouldn’t see. This is my mess.”
“Are you sure? I want to. I mean, I wouldn’t mind.”
“Yeah, I’m sure. You stay here. Let me make sure everything’s okay. I’ll come back out. I still don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“Just don’t do anything stupid.”
“You mean like use the gun myself . . . on her, just to put an end to it?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
“I couldn’t do that.”
“I know you couldn’t . . . wouldn’t . . . Okay, I’ll be here. If you’re gone too long, I’m coming in to check on you though.”
“’Kay.”
Then they kissed and she didn’t want to release his lips. The second she pulled away from him, she felt an overwhelming sense of emptiness. The time for hesitation was over. She had to do this. She had to go back in. This could be a beginning too, she realized, even if maybe it wasn’t the beginning she had originally wanted.
* * *
The door creaked op
en. The house was dark and scary. She couldn’t remember a time she had ever been scared in this house. The night she had seen the strangers, that didn’t even make her scared. It filled her with something else. Something like wonder and awe. But what she felt now was fear and she didn’t know why she felt that way.
She flipped on a light as soon as she found it, hoping it would chase some of the scariness away.
The light came on, spreading through the hallway like a beacon to her grandmother’s bedroom door. Even though she had only been gone for a few hours, the house looked different. It looked and felt even sadder and she didn’t know why she had come back. Coming back was perhaps the stupidest thing she had ever done, she now realized. They couldn’t do this. She and Jack would not be able to live in this house with that woman down the hall. Of that, she was certain.
She walked down the hallway, wanting to get it over with, wanting to confront those crazy fears raping her mind. She wanted to get to the end of the hallway and go to her grandmother’s bedroom and see that the woman was just as wooden and dormant as always and then she could call the ambulance and they would come and take her away because even if they took her in and ran tests on her they weren’t going to find anything, were they? Of course they weren’t. Because the Zwinns didn’t exist. They were myth. They were legend. They couldn’t be part of her.
Chloe flung the door open and her heart stopped for just a second.
The old woman was not on the bed.
The first thought she had was that the roses had climbed down off the walls, grown down off the walls and covered the bed, ate her grandma with their hungry mouths or ultra rapid cancer. Then her heart sped up. Of course those weren’t roses.
They were bloodstains.
Her grandmother had woken up and found the gun. The gun lay in the middle of the bed, covered in those vulgar, drippy-looking roses.
But where was her grandmother?
Had there been time for the ambulance to come and find her? Had she called them before doing it?
Her heart doubled its pace.
She had to get out of here. She had to get out of this carnage. She didn’t even care about answers anymore. She just wanted to grab Jack and then they could go off and do what they had planned. What they had wanted to do for so long now.
But the door was blocked.
Her grandmother stood in the doorway, flanked by two of the people she had seen in the kitchen the one night. Her grandmother’s long gray hair was down, falling around her shoulders in bloody clumps. Her mouth was blackened. Chloe gagged, went down on her knees, staring at the atrocities in the doorway. To her grandmother’s right was the beautiful woman. To her left was the man whose face Chloe had seen in the moon.
In that instant, she understood everything, knowledge as ubiquitous as the coppery blood smell around her.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she mumbled through a mouth gone cotton.
“Thank you for making me free,” Chloe’s grandma said, approaching her.
“Stay away!” Chloe spat.
She knew who the people with her grandmother were. Those were Chloe’s parents. She was surprised she didn’t notice the resemblance that night in the kitchen. And it was true, they had died in an accident but they had become something else. Something that fed off the living. Something nightmares were made of. And her grandmother had lived so that she could feed them only, eventually, the old woman had dried up. Her parents looked gaunt, wasted.
Chloe knew exactly what they wanted of her. Maybe she would just grab the gun and explode her head and give them what they wanted, give them the blood, give them the life. In her mind, she mapped where the gun lay on the bed. She needed to have it in her hand only she didn’t know whom she was going to use it on.
Her grandmother stayed out of Chloe’s reach but continued to talk.
“I’m glad all the secrets are out. Now we can be like a family again. There’s nothing we can do to help it.”
“I’m not going to be like you,” Chloe said. “I’m not going to turn myself into a wasted wreck so you can continue being whatever you are.”
“There’s nothing you can do to stop it,” her mother said.
“The fuck I can’t,” Chloe said.
She sprang up to her feet and grabbed the gun, putting it to her temple.
“Chloe, no!” Jack shouted from the doorway, shoving her family aside and flinging himself on her.
He grabbed her wrist and yanked the gun away from her head. But Chloe was not going to let him stop her. She pulled the trigger and the gun went off with a deafening explosion.
Chloe never felt the impact.
She reeled back on the bed and looked around her. Jack stood at the foot of the bed, the top right half of his head blown away. But he didn’t drop. He didn’t go down.
She wondered why it had taken her until now to recognize him for who he was. He had been in the kitchen that night also. Maybe it was the way the dawn slanted in through the window, reflecting off all the roses scattered across the bed and the floor and Chloe’s arms.
The roses were hungry.
She knew that, no matter how many bullets she decided to put into Jack, in any of them for that matter, they would not die. Because they were already dead. Or, perhaps, beyond death. So, doing what she had originally planned, she put the gun to her head and pulled the trigger but the gun didn’t fire. She tried again and again – nothing and nothing. Jack approached her, removed the gun from her hand. She thought about struggling but didn’t know what value struggling would have. Jack had been the dream, or at least part of the dream, and now he was part of the nightmare. He pushed her back on the bed. She extended her arms out to either side and, with deathbright eyes, the Zwinns tore her open and fed from the blood coursing through her veins.
Chloe thought about a little girl she had seen downtown the other day. Perhaps she could take that girl. Take her and call her her daughter. Bring her here, tell her lies the entire time she grew up. Maybe she would even tell her about the roses on the wall. Tell her they were really like tumors . . . or hungry mouths. Tell her they would consume everything she knew and loved. Or maybe Chloe would just tell her to run. To run and run until she was so far away from this place it was just a distant memory. And, if the girl ever saw any strange visitors, Chloe could tuck her into bed and tell her it was nothing. Really, it was nothing. Just a bad dream. Just a nightmare. And everybody knows nightmares end when we open our eyes.
THE MAN WHO HATED STEPHEN KING
Mariska found herself in the small town of Twin Springs. It had happened more than a few times in the nearly three decades since the disappearance of her father. And why not? It was a quaint town. Charming. It was someplace that would seem almost at home in a Bradbury story. Maybe even a Stephen King story. Hell, maybe that was even more appropriate. There was more a sense of ’60s counterculture and baby boomers living out their golden years than Norman Rockwell American pie-ism, now that she thought about it. But that name – Stephen King – she didn’t like to think about it. She’d never read one of his books and probably never would. She wasn’t really much of a reader anyway. Her father had hated Stephen King far more passionately than he hated most things.
She had come to Twin Springs for the fall street fair but had apparently missed it by a week. She wasn’t really sure how that had happened. The town was currently no busier than it was on any other gorgeous Saturday in early October and signs for the fair were still posted here and there.
She paid for her small black coffee at the tiny, dirty café and contemplated dropping into the used bookstore next to it, but that made her gag a little. The only reason she would have gone in was to see if they had any of her father’s books on the shelf. She wondered if bookstores still even had horror sections. Then she remembered that this particular bookstore – Thing Books, here for as long as she could remember – had called it ‘terror,’ not horror. Her father had dragged her in here countless times and then he’d stop
ped. In retrospect, he’d probably been banned. He had a tendency to be goading and cantankerous, especially when he left the house.
She pulled her knit cap down over her ears, extracted her electronic cigarette from her coat pocket and took a long and satisfying hit. Not as satisfying as the real thing, she was sure, but using it made her feel less like an addict.
Addiction was a family curse.
An older couple passed her and said ‘hi.’ She nodded and tried her best to smile. She moved in the direction of the state park and it didn’t occur to her what she was doing until she stood at the trailhead taking a warming sip of her coffee, another hit from her fake cigarette, and staring at the beauty of leaves that had not yet dropped.
She was subconsciously moving in the opposite direction of the house. The house where her father had disappeared from on a bitter cold winter night nearly thirty years ago. Although she always had to wonder if he’d disappeared from the house or into the house.
It was a ridiculous thought, she knew.
She decided to catch the last hour or so of daylight and drift into the woods. She told herself these were not the same woods looming behind that house. After all, there was the whole town separating them. But they probably wrapped around. They probably were the same woods.
But they didn’t feel the same. These were somehow thinner, sparser. They let more of the good sunlight through. Maybe there were fewer pines or something. Maybe they just grew from soil that wasn’t blighted and cursed.
Now Mariska found herself wanting something even stronger than an actual tobacco cigarette. Maybe a joint. She didn’t even know where that thought came from. She’d never really liked pot and the last time she’d smoked it was probably five years ago when she had dated a guy roughly the same age she was now. He’d been going through something of a mid-life crisis. He smoked pot, listened to Nirvana on vinyl, and wore old school Doc Martens. After she dumped him she’d referred to him as Mr. Nineties around her friends.
She wandered deeper into the woods until she came to the town’s namesake, Twin Springs. It was an odd name she guessed, since it really appeared to be one creek. Enough so that a lot of people referred to it as Twin Springs Creek, which seemed somehow redundant. Maybe, somewhere, there were two springs joining to form this creek. She didn’t know. She wasn’t much on research. Sometimes knowing the way things worked destroyed the mystery. She preferred to look at the single creek rushing through the gorge and imagine the interplay between two streams of water. Two things with completely different origins combining into one seamless whole.
Creep House: Horror Stories Page 5