Hollow House

by Greg Chapman

  “So? Houses are built by the plan all the time.”

  “Not more than 150 years ago they weren’t. Don’t you think it’s odd, that two identical houses were built by the same man, on the opposite sides of town?”

  Megan sighed. “Maybe the guy who built it was really rich and wanted to live on the other side of town as well?”

  Ben sat up. He felt strength returning to his body. “I went to the house on Mayne Avenue because other people had died there. A woman murdered her son in the house during the 1970s, and another couple reported strange occurrences a decade later.”

  Megan rubbed her palms on her jeans and stood as if to leave. “Ben…”

  “You can’t even be in the same room with me anymore, can you?”

  His wife turned. “You should hear yourself.”

  “The woman who killed her son, Cindy Cross, she tried to kill her husband, too. He came to The Gazette to warn me about the house on Willow Street. There’s something… wrong… with that house.” He took another long breath. “There was definitely something wrong with the house in Mayne Avenue.”

  Megan sat back down. “What happened at that place? How did the fire start?”

  He avoided her gaze. “I… I went to Mayne Avenue to see if I could get some idea of what happened in the Willow Street house. I mean, the houses were identical. I’m ashamed to admit that I broke in—”

  “Jesus!” Megan said.

  “—I climbed into the attic. There were candles. I lit one and dropped the damn thing on some old linen. The flames spread so quickly I couldn’t stop them.”

  Megan put her head in her hands. “What were you thinking? What if the owners decide to sue you, sue us? What if the cops decide to charge you?”

  Ben swallowed. He couldn’t believe how convincing a liar he’d become. “No one has lived in that house for decades. As for the cops, well, I’ll cross that bridge if it comes to that.”

  He saw tears in his wife’s eyes. “I can’t do this anymore,” she said. “You’re obsessed with this. Why can’t you just leave the detective work to the police?”

  “Because this is happening on our doorstep. And I won’t feel safe until I know what happened in that house.”

  Megan threw up her hands in frustration. “You’re not a crusader, fighting for people’s rights! You’re just a reporter. Somebody died in a house, and honestly no one cares about it but you!”

  Ben scowled. “That’s bullshit—”

  “The girl who killed herself in the house up the road—that’s more important!”

  “Maybe the two things are connected.”

  “How could they possibly be connected? Just listen to yourself!”

  The arrival of a nurse in the room brought their argument to a halt. The broad-shouldered woman gave them a foul stare. “You need to keep the noise down in here,” she said. “This is a hospital.” She left them without another word.

  Megan nodded and scooped up her handbag. “You’re right. I’m very sorry. I was just leaving.”

  “Megan wait—”

  She stopped, but didn’t turn to face him. He saw she was trembling.

  “No, I’m leaving,” she said. “I’m leaving you.” She fished a set of keys from inside her jeans pocket and placed them on the tray table. “I’ve left your car outside.”

  Ben pulled himself off the bed, her words leaving him more breathless than the smoke. “Wait… what do you mean, you’re leaving?”

  “There’s more to life than secrets and lies,” his wife said. “Life is what’s right in front of you.”

  “Megan…”

  “I’m going back to the house to collect my things, and I’m leaving. Don’t try to follow me.”

  She left before he could say another word, and as much as it pained him, he felt relieved that she’d be away from the Kemper House’s reach.

  ~

  After Megan had gone, he rose and wandered the halls of the hospital. The general ward on the third floor, where Ben had been admitted, was relatively new, but the lower floors were part of the original building. He became mesmerised by the varnished wood panelling, and the ornate cream-coloured ceilings. And it was as he admired the centuries-old architecture that the words of Annabelle Morton’s ghost came to him.

  Mr. Kemper designed and built many buildings…the old hospital, for instance.

  Ben looked over his shoulder, suddenly finding the decor threatening. Or was he just imagining it? He sat on one of the chairs outside the clinic, and tried to catch his breath. Had he conjured the ghosts of Cindy and Nathan and the Mortons to suit his theories about the Kemper House? What if Megan was right, that he was obsessed? He ran a hand through his hair, frantically trying to convince himself the lie he’d told his wife hadn’t really happened

  Fuck—did I burn down the house?

  This particular area was empty of patients, but the voices of the nurses and the administration staff carried up the hall. Ben was thankful to hear them, to feel some connection with reality. He stood, deciding to return to his room, when he saw a plaque on the wall. Its marble surface shone in the fluorescent light.

  WEST PLAINS GENERAL HOSPITAL

  Constructed 1888

  Officially opened by: Governor William. F. Lloyd

  December 7, 1889

  Architect: E.B. Kemper

  The etched words mocked him. Thin red veins in the marble pulsed with impossible blood, of all the people who had been born—and had died—inside the walls of the hospital. His gut roiled in synch with his mind as it conjured the dream he’d had of the behemoth in the darkness of space. So many souls sacrificed.

  Ben had to get away; from the hospital, from Willow Street—and the town.

  He turned to run for the elevator, when the elevator doors opened and a familiar face greeted him—Mitchell Cross. The man’s blanched visage trembled with an inner rage. His eyes were bloodshot from prolonged mourning. He held a length of steel pipe in his hand. When he spoke, his breath smelled like he was rotting on the inside. “I told you not to go in that house.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  His coffee was cold and stale, but Detective Baltzer swallowed it down in the hope it would help his mind make sense of the mess that was Willow Street.

  The crime scene photographs from the Kemper House were spread out on his desk and wall, a pastiche of the house’s filthy walls covered in filthy words and the impossible body, blooming like a corpse flower in all its glory.

  Baltzer had read and re-read the autopsy report, and even though it spelled out exactly what the man had done to himself, it still didn’t explain why. The coroner was certain the wounds, including the evisceration of the chest cavity, had been done by the victim. There was no other DNA in the house; no fingerprints, and no blood but the victim’s. It was a suicide, and one of the strangest Baltzer, and the coroner had ever seen.

  The detective shifted his gaze away from the autopsy report to the photographs of the foreign words that had been written on the walls in the Kemper House. They had been found everywhere: in the kitchen, behind the refrigerator, in the hall behind a mirror, and even behind the bathroom door. Baltzer was awaiting the full translations, but early investigations indicated that the suicide was indeed occult in nature.

  Christ, one only had to look at the body and the knife to see that.

  He thought about calling on the FBI, but he didn’t want those fuckers taking all the glory, and he didn’t need them stepping all over his investigations. Which brought him to Ben Traynor. The man was becoming a pain in his ass, running his own investigation for The Gazette. He didn’t believe Traynor’s story about the fire at Mayne Avenue one iota, and he was tempted to go to the hospital and charge him with obstruction, just to get him out of his way.

  He’d already looked into the Cross case. The mother and child were dead and the house hadn’t been lived in for decades. The ridiculous notions that they were still living there, told him the reporter was either crazy—or hiding somet
hing. Baltzer’s gut told him it was more than likely both.

  Still, he had to admit, the fact there was a second Kemper House was odd. To build a house in the late 19th century you needed to be in the money, and to build two within a year meant you needed to be the wealthiest man in town, or aligned with one. Baltzer had looked into Eric Kemper’s history and all indications said he was a nobody, a poor emigrant from Prague, looking for a new start in the Land of the Free. Kemper had never married or had any children. The guy had nothing but the shirt on his back. Somewhere along the line, he became influential enough to build two houses and two hospitals in the city. Historical records were less than useful, revealing details of Kemper’s exploits, only after he became the city’s top architect. Baltzer could see the immigrant forged a strong connection influence to Mayor William Lloyd and in a very short space of time.

  He pushed the accumulated data to one side of his desk, eager to get away from it. He got up from his desk and grabbed his coat, ready to call it a night, when Dr. Carl Brandt, one of the coroner’s forensic specialists, knocked on his door. The tall, thin technician seemed jittery, bobbing on his heels.

  “You got a minute, Detective?”

  “I was about to punch my card.”

  “Oh, you’re going to want to hear this.” Brandt produced the evidence bag containing the knife the victim had used to carve himself up. “The analysis on the knife came back and it’s really fascinating.”

  Baltzer shrugged on his coat. “Well, unless it spoke to you, and told you why it carved open that guy like a Christmas fucking ham, it can wait until tomorrow.”

  Brandt smirked, and pointed to the symbols that had been etched into the steel. “We’re still trying to determine what these symbols mean. Actually, we’re still not certain it’s a language at all—but what the knife is made out of, is even more interesting.”

  “Stainless steel is it?” Baltzer sighed.

  “No, well, yes, it’s definitely steel, but it’s been mixed with other alloys. There’s some gold and bronze in here. We’ve got some of the experts at the university to take a look at it and they told us that this knife is really old.”

  Baltzer chewed his lip as thoughts of Eric Kemper came to mind. “Like hundreds of years old?”

  Brandt shook his head. “No, no, no. They think it could be thousands of years old. This could actually have been made during the Bronze Age.”

  Baltzer stared at the knife enclosed in the plastic evidence bag. The blade was dull, grey, and etched with gold symbols. The metal handle had lost its sheen, but it was still just a knife.

  “So this guy didn’t just grab the first one out of the woodblock then?”

  “No, the experts at the university said it could be an athame—a sacrificial knife. They wanted to do some carbon testing on it, to see how old it actually is, but naturally, it’s evidence, so I couldn’t let them do that—”

  “Okay, okay, so the knife is very old. A lot of the stuff in that house was old. Maybe the victim was a collector.”

  “Maybe…” The specialist held up the knife to the light. “But why kill yourself with this? When as you said, he could have used any of the kitchen knives. And why write those phrases on the wall? I think he meant to kill himself with this.”

  Baltzer took the knife from Brandt and scratched his jaw in frustration. “If you ask me, he was just a psycho, whose name we don’t even know.” He stared Brandt down. “Are you any closer to finding out who this guy was?”

  “Well, he’s not in any of our records. His fingerprints and dental scans came up with nada, and as you know, the house has been unoccupied for years.”

  “Yeah, yeah great. He’s a goddamn nobody. Are you sure there’s nothing at all about him that could help us identify him?”

  Brandt opened the folder he was carrying along with the knife. “The amount of mutilation made it hard to find any distinguishing marks, and he had no broken bones.”

  “How old was this guy?”

  “Hard to say exactly, but sutures in the skull indicate he was somewhere between fifty and sixty years old at the time of his death. His blood type was AB positive, which is not uncommon, but actually there was something about his blood tests that intrigues me.”

  Baltzer raised his eyebrows. “How so?”

  Brandt scratched at his scruffy hair. “Well, this guy had antigens in his blood for the bubonic plague.”

  Baltzer frowned. “Isn’t that an ancient disease?”

  “It’s still around in some parts of the world, but it’s very strange that this man had it and survived. It’s possible that he picked it up overseas and received treatment.”

  “Can you find out?”

  “We can try, but it could take a while.”

  Baltzer sighed. “I’ve waited this long.”

  Brandt turned to leave. “Well, goodnight Detective.”

  Baltzer tried to fathom the new information the forensic specialist had given him. His office was about to overflow with clues, and here was another layer to the puzzle with no answer in sight. The case was so complex and overwhelming that he was inclined to let it gather dust in the filing cabinets, but the bizarre nature of the death—and the house—was like a shard of glass under his skin. He looked down at the knife in the evidence bag and tried to imagine the man cutting into his own skin. Baltzer picked up the knife and felt its heft in his palm. It was heavy, but its weight was evenly distributed.

  “Too heavy to be a throwing dagger,” he said out loud.

  He ran a thumb over the etchings in the blade. He could see flecks of dark material against the muted gold, the victim’s dried blood in every nook and cranny. He put the knife down on the table, suddenly keen to forget it and go home. He moved to turn off the light switch, and was giving the photographs of the hand written scrawl one last look when he had a thought.

  He approached the display on the wall, specifically the photo of handwriting found in the Kemper House’s kitchen. He retrieved the knife from the table and held it up to the light. The symbol on the tip of the blade matched a similar scrawl on the wall above the kitchen sink, and beneath the symbol was a crudely written word.

  “Doosh?” Baltzer said. “No, Duch.” The knife hummed in his hand. Startled, the detective almost dropped the blade. “What the fuck was that?”

  Had it hummed? He wasn’t sure, but the knife had taken on an allure that he felt drawn to.

  “Duch,” he said again. The knife resonated like a tuning fork in his grip. “Fuck!” This time, the knife clattered to the floor.

  Baltzer glanced around his office and then out into the darkened squad room. He was completely alone, the only witness to whatever had just happened. He bent to retrieve the knife, when he realised it was already in his hand. He exclaimed and dropped it a second time. His mind told him to run.

  The room was closing in. The photographs of the scene were now as large as paintings on an art gallery wall. Baltzer threw the knife on his desk, and started pulling the photos off the wall in a frenzy. They fluttered to the floor like dead leaves. His head pounded, and his vision blurred. The back of his throat tasted like metal. He swayed as he crouched to pick up the evidence. He thought he would pass out.

  Am I having a heart attack?

  He clutched his chest, but there was no spreading pain, no nausea. The sensations he felt went much deeper, a tight coil unravelling inside his head. He didn’t know if he was dying, but the heady confusion he experienced made him wish he was. He dropped a handful of photos into the evidence box and in doing so, uncovered the knife he’d left on the desk. There was fresh blood on its edge.

  He picked up the knife and his palm flared with a stinging pain. The blood had come from his palm—a long red slash from wrist to index finger. The detective had no idea how it had happened. Had he inadvertently cut himself picking it up, or had he traced the oozing path on purpose?

  “I have to get out of here,” he said.

  Baltzer held the knife up and gaz
ed longingly at its gleam. His tongue also defied him. “Davam ti sve dusi,” he said. Panic seized his heart as his head translated the foreign words he’d spoken.

  I give you my soul.

  Before he could conjure the reasons for saying such a phrase, Baltzer drew the blade down the inside of his arm. He cried out for someone to come and save him, but all that answered was his blood. It ran snake-like. It pooled inside his elbow and then fell. When the seventh drop kissed the floor, the air in front of Baltzer’s terrified eyes opened a window into a hidden landscape.

  Gazing through the flickering portal, the detective saw a night sky full of stars. He gasped and dropped to his knees as the view shifted around and down to provide a bird’s eye view of the city. He knew it was his city because he’d seen it many times from the air. Baltzer’s vision soared down and over the cityscape, twisting and turning. He screamed as his viewpoint defied gravity while his body remained frozen. The thrum of his pulse let the blood flow, adding more fuel to the spell.

  He attempted to drop the knife but the hilt was stuck fast by his congealed blood. His soul was rooted to the spot, his gaze locked on the ground below. The floor of the world rushed up to meet him, taking him to a street he knew all too well. The dark house sat on the corner, a central point on a black map lined and veined with souls. But the knife did not take him there; instead it drew him to the house next door. He passed through the roof as if it was water. He could see every room and every hall.

  His journey came to its end in the master bedroom, where he saw a man and woman, both dead, and two boys, their eyes locked on one another. The boy standing dominant over the other, turned to address the detective.

  “Give me the knife.” the boy said.

  The flesh of Baltzer’s palm ripped as the knife threw itself through the gap in reality. The boy caught it, and sneered.

  “Much obliged Detective. Sadly, you’re no longer needed.”

  The gap snapped shut. Baltzer’s psyche shattered, the force of it driving the detective against the wall. He slumped to the floor, and all thoughts and memories of what he’d seen and who he was, pooled onto the floor around him.