by The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares- The Haunted City (retail) (epub)
“I know, honey.” Martha put a cool rag on Max’s head. “I know it’s hot. We’ll go to a hotel if it doesn’t cool off.”
“For Christ’s sake, we’re not leaving,” Sam said. “A little heat won’t kill us. I’m going to figure this out.”
“Don’t be mad, Daddy,” Max said.
Martha said, “Daddy is just sweaty and tired and being a jerk. It’s hotter than hell in here.”
“What’s hell, Mommy?”
“Hell’s not a real place, honey. It’s just imaginary.”
“Hell is real,” Sam said quietly. “Hell is here.”
“Stop it, Sam. Can we change the subject?”
Sam heard a noise. An indistinct vibratory chatter. “Do you hear that?”
Sam and Martha followed the noise into the living room. The noise was closer now but still hard to source.
Max pointed at the wall. The wallpaper appeared to be moving. Sam stood on the couch and touched the edge of the already peeling wallpaper. He pulled down the sheet and revealed a wall covered in locusts. The insects buzzed in unison. An incantatory wall of sound.
Martha screamed and dragged Max upstairs to his bedroom. Sam went from room to room and pulled down pieces of wallpaper, revealing wall after wall of locusts, congealed in a gossamer of mucal larvae. Their strident dirge vibrated through the house.
The next morning, while they ate cage-free eggs and fair-trade pancakes at the diner down the block, the guys from Brooklyn Pest Control fumigated the house (using naturally derived pesticides). It cost them three thousand bucks, but Sam said it was worth tapping Martha’s 401(k). The pest-control guys covered the house in plastic tarps and sprayed down the walls. Within an hour, the locusts were dead. “Don’t usually see locusts in Brooklyn,” the pest control guy said. “There might be more in the woodwork. Let’s keep the plastic tarps up for a few days. In case we have to come back.”
The locusts stayed away. At least at first. But Sam assumed they’d be back. That was just the opening salvo. War had been declared.
—
At nine p.m., Martha heard screaming in Max’s room. Martha thought maybe it was the heat. She gathered three rotating fans around his bed and tried to blow in the cold air from the open window. “Shhh,” Martha said. “It’s just a bad dream.”
“It’s not a bad dream,” Max said. “It’s him.”
Max pointed behind Martha. Mr. Sticks was sitting in the chair.
“I don’t want to sleep with Mr. Sticks.”
“Why not?” Martha asked. “I thought he was your friend.”
“He’s being mean to me.”
“How is he being mean to you, honey?”
“He keeps saying mean things. He keeps saying this isn’t our house. And…he said he’s going to take me away. Take me somewhere bad.”
“Where does Mr. Sticks want to take you?”
Max held up his notebook filled with crayon drawings of demons dripping with dark tar. “Hell,” Max said.
Martha hugged him. “Mr. Sticks isn’t going to take you to hell. Hell doesn’t actually exist. You were just having a bad dream. Mommy will protect you. So will Dad.”
“What if Dad goes away again? What if they take him back to the place where they put pillows on the wall?”
“Dad’s not going anywhere. Daddy was…sick. But he’s better now. He’s not going away. But Mr. Sticks is.”
Martha kissed Max good night and carried the doll down into the basement, where Sam was conducting his nightly ritual, kneeling in front of the symbol like some entranced penitent. The dog was sitting next to Sam, also watching the circle, on guard. Martha had to say Sam’s name three times before he noticed.
“You spend too much time down here,” she said.
“I’m protecting my family,” Sam said.
He turned around. He was wearing a sleeveless shirt, and Martha noticed that his arms were covered in smeared marker. He had drawn the circle symbol again and again across his skin.
“You’re scaring me. Snap out of it, Sam. You need to finish fixing this house so we can put it back on the goddamn market.”
“It’s our house. They’re not going to scare us away.”
“They? Who’s they?” Martha asked.
“They…it…whatever it is. The plumbing, the heat, the locusts. All of it. It’s not just a coincidence. It’s evil.”
Sam turned and saw that Martha was holding Mr. Sticks. The eyeholes in the burlap head seemed to taunt him.
“You seriously need to stop it with this evil stuff,” Martha said. “Did you know your son was just having a nightmare about going to hell? He’s six years old. He’s drawing pictures of Dante’s Inferno.”
Martha threw down the notebook filled with demonic stick figures spreading black wings. Sam examined Mr. Sticks. “I destroyed this doll. This is impossible.”
“Don’t do this. Not again. This is how it started, remember? The delusions?”
“I’m not delusional, Martha.”
“Spending seven hours googling ‘satanic symbols’ is not exactly normal. If you’re having another nervous breakdown—”
“I never had a nervous breakdown,” Sam said.
“The doctors had to put you someplace, didn’t they? Involuntarily? For three weeks? I had to explain to my son why his dad had to go away. I had to explain to my friends that my husband was dealing with a little chemical dependency–slash–manic episode.”
“I’m not having another manic episode,” he said. “I’m not popping pain pills. I’m clean and sober and I’m trying to tell you there is something demonic going on here.”
“The only demons in this house are yours,” she said.
Sam picked up the mattock axe.
Martha took a step back.
Sam raised the axe.
Limb by limb, he dismembered Mr. Sticks, severing the doll into several dozen pieces. The dog stood vigilant guard.
When Sam had finished, Martha started up the stairs. Holding the banister to steady her nerves, she said, “We’re going to put this house on the market.”
“We’re not going anywhere. Not without a fight.”
—
After midnight, despite the heat, Sam grabbed a hot coffee from the kitchen and checked his laptop. The live feed of the baby monitor in the basement showed no movement.
Sam walked upstairs to the master bedroom and watched his wife sleep. Martha had never looked more alone. Sam wanted to be in that bed with his wife. But he had to protect her. He had to be vigilant. He was holding the axe, gripping it tight. Ready.
Fatigue crept in. For a split second, Sam allowed his eyes to close. Two sleepless nights catching up to him. When he opened his eyes, his wife’s body was covered in snakes. A cocoon of black cobras. Sam blinked and the snakes were gone.
A noise downstairs.
Sam rushed down to the living room and pushed through the maze of plastic tarps left by the exterminators. He caught a glimpse of something—a shadow—darting behind the translucent material. He turned. No hint of what he had just seen. Maybe it was just exhaustion. Retinal fatigue.
From behind the tarp, a figure pressed itself against the plastic. Impossibly tall. Several rows of serrated teeth. An apex predator. Sam couldn’t see any real detail, but he saw enough. The beast was in his house. Sam clutched the axe in his hands and took a swing. The tarp ripped. The beast was gone.
Sam ran through every room in the house, scanning the darkness with the light from his cell phone. All he saw were dead locusts clinging to the plastic tarps.
Sam turned the corner and noticed footprints in the foyer. Rather hoofprints, forged in tar still steaming. Sam knelt to inspect the prints, pulling back tendrils of tar with his fingertips.
Sam looked up and saw a goat standing in the hallway.
The goat was completely coated in black tar. Its eyes teemed with maggots. Sam choked up on the axe.
Barking came from the kitchen. Sam left the goat and ran to find Dave
at the top of the stairs, baring his teeth at the basement. Suddenly, the dog was yanked into the darkness. The door slammed shut behind him.
Sam pulled on the door. It wouldn’t budge. Sam swung the mattock axe against the thick oak, but the wood barely splintered.
Sam ran to his laptop and, in the baby monitor’s feed, saw the dog growling at the circle symbol. The concrete inside the circle had become a smoldering cauldron of boiling oil, steaming froth rising from a subterranean crematorium. A black hand emerged from the bile. The obsidian fingers elongated and coiled three times around the dog, then constricted. Once the animal was motionless, the tensile fingers dragged the dog down into the stygian abyss.
Sam screamed as tar seeped out of his laptop’s USB ports. Locusts crawled out of his keyboard. The screen itself became a black hole. His MacBook Pro was now a portal to perdition.
Sam extended his hands and reached inside the screen, his fingers breaking the barrier, penetrating the birth canal of death. His probing arms disappeared completely into the wall of tar.
Sam was inside the laptop.
Pulling out, his palms scalded by the mucilage, he held a charred dog collar. His laptop burst into flame.
Sam threw it into the dishwasher and turned it on cold wash. He ran outside, into the backyard, and pulled open the storm door. Running down the stairs, Sam discovered that the basement was empty.
The dog was gone.
Sam spent the dawn hours ripping apart his books from art school, tearing out hundreds of images of hell. From the fiery landscapes of Hieronymus Bosch to Gustave Doré’s illustrations for The Divine Comedy. Orpheus and Eurydice. The Hydra. The great pit of Tartarus. The tiers of infinite torture. Sam used duct tape to hang the illustrations until every square inch of the basement walls was covered in his tarnation collage. Front and center were Max’s crayon sketches of eternal damnation—the stick-figure portraits of demons with hooves. Demons with wings. His son had talent. There was no doubt. Maybe he’d be an artist someday, like his father had tried and failed to be. For once in his life, Sam was grateful for his fallback profession. When your house is being invaded by the forces of evil, it helps to have a basement filled with power tools.
Using the table saw and spokeshave, Sam crafted dozens of wooden crosses and hung them throughout the house. He was a disciple of Christopher Hitchens but desperate times called for desperate measures. It was better to believe in God than to believe he was going insane.
Sam turned on the television and found C-SPAN broadcasting a congressional hearing. Some senator from somewhere ranting and raving: “Abortion and homosexuality are paving the road to hell! What happened to one nation under God?” Sam cranked the volume. A sonic exorcism.
Martha and Max came down the basement stairs to find Sam at the table saw, fabricating a life-size cross. Six feet tall.
“They took Dave,” Sam said. “They’re going to take us next. We have to be prepared to fight.”
Martha stared at the crosses and paintings of hell.
“Max, go to your bedroom. Pack your backpack with clothes.”
“Are we going to hell?” Max asked.
“No,” Martha said, “we’re going to Aunt Sharon’s.”
Max ran upstairs. Martha asked, “What did you do to the dog?”
“They took him,” Sam said. “The circle isn’t just a circle. It’s a gateway. Last night it opened. But now it’s closed. You have to believe me.”
“I believe you’re having a psychotic break. I love you, Sam, but you have to get out of this basement. We all have to get out of this house. Now. Go over to my sister’s.”
“You go. You’ll be safer. I need to stay.”
“You need help, Sam. You need to talk to Dr. Cronenberg.”
“Doctors can’t help me, Martha. Only God can help us now.”
Martha came closer to Sam. Restraining tears. She touched Sam’s face and ran her hand along his beard.
“Please,” she said. “I’m begging. Come with us. Let’s leave this place.”
“I can’t leave,” Sam said. “This is our house. This is our home.”
Martha and Max packed their bags. Sam helped carry the luggage down the stairs. “Why do we have to leave?” Max asked.
“Because, bud,” Sam said, “it’s not safe here anymore.”
“I don’t want to go, Daddy.”
“Don’t worry, Mad Max. Wherever you go, I’m always going to find you.”
“Let’s go,” Martha said, picking up Max, who was now crying. Sam walked them to the front door. Martha turned and kissed him.
“I love you,” she said. “Good-bye, Sam.”
Martha turned the handle and opened the front door.
Instead of broad daylight, a wall of tar cascaded from the doorway. An avalanche of toxic asphalt swept them away and filled the house, sloshing against the walls and rising above the windows.
Sam struggled to grab Martha and Max as they swept past him on the wave of black fluid. The house was engulfed in a typhoon of tar. Locusts broke through the windows. A cacophony of insecticidal screaming.
The flood carried Martha and Max toward the basement door, which shattered, and the undercurrent dragged them down the stairs. Sam trudged through the mire, clinging to the railing on the basement stairs, fighting the squall.
Below him, the tide funneled into the circular hole in the basement. A sinkhole. Swallowing the flotsam of floating power tools. Martha and Max were drifting toward the hole. Helpless.
Sam kicked the railing, frantically, until it broke off the wall. He lunged forward with the pole and Martha just made contact. “Don’t let go!” he screamed, straining to be heard over the gushing waterfall of black tar.
Martha reached out. Sam grabbed her wrist.
“I GOT YOU!”
Drenched in dark turpentine and a newborn’s veneer of vernix, a demon emerged from the sinkhole. In its mouth, rows and rows of fingers extended and grasped for their prey. The infantry of teeth-hands grabbed hold of Martha and Max, pulling them inside a marsupial pouch. Sam saw their limbs thrashing inside the beast’s folds.
He jumped into the lagoon and grabbed the mattock axe. He took a futile swing as the demon spread its venous wings and dropped into the hole.
The hole closed. The flood was over. The house was quiet and the locusts were gone. So were Martha and Max.
Sam raised the axe and hit the concrete floor. Again and again. Until his body buckled. He dropped the tool and realized his family wasn’t coming back.
—
Apparently the neighbors called the cops. “Domestic disturbance,” Officer Rodriguez told him. “Disturbing the peace.”
Sam had to admit it looked suspicious. His house and his clothes covered in tar. His verbalization bordering on catatonia.
“Where’s your wife, sir? Where’s your son?” asked Officer Diaz. All that Sam could muster was to feebly point his finger in a downward motion.
“Your family is in the ground? Is that what you’re telling us?”
“Can you explain this black shit everywhere, huh? Is it asphalt? Did you bury the bodies?”
Near the front door, Officer Rodriguez noticed the luggage. “Let me guess. Your wife wanted to leave. She wanted to take your son. And you wouldn’t let ’em go?”
“We ran your name through the system,” Diaz said. “Couple priors. Drug offenses. Brief stint at Bellevue psychiatric. You run out of happy pills?”
“You’re coming to the precinct.”
Officer Rodriguez took his eyes off Sam to take out his handcuffs. He didn’t notice Sam reach for his belt loop and pull out the mallet.
Sam connected with the cop’s face, breaking his nose. Diaz went for his gun, but Sam was already out the door. Diaz called for backup and hauled ass down the block, trying to catch the crazy man covered in tar.
The chase continued all the way down Nostrand Avenue. Sam finally lost him by ducking behind a bodega dumpster. Once the sound of the police r
adio receded, Sam found the nearest hiding spot.
He needed to lay low. He needed a drink.
—
Sam took out three hundred bucks from the bodega ATM and scurried toward the windowless bar on the corner. The unmarked metal door was locked, but he heard a television blaring inside. He knocked. Loudly. A large man wearing a tracksuit unlocked the door.
“This is not bar,” the guy said in a thick accent. “This is private social club.”
Sam held up the wad of cash. The large man let him in.
The joint was empty and dark and reeked of stogies and spiced meat. There was an old bar in the front room with a few stools and booths off to the side. A Romanian flag on the wall. A high-definition television gave the only semblance of modernity. The large man in the tracksuit (apparently the bartender) was watching Romania versus Greece. “Piţurcă kill us!” he screamed. “Couldn’t coach a fucking potato!”
Without prompting, the guy poured Sam a double whiskey neat while continuing his rant: “The 1994 World Cup. Round of sixteen we beat Argentina but Sweden kicked us in anus.”
Instead of taking a drink, Sam took out his iPhone. Found the Instagram photo of his family hugging outside their house on the day they made their offer. They smiled auspicious smiles. Six months later, their dreams had disappeared into a hole in the ground. Sam Rathbone had lost everything, including, probably, his mind. Did he kill his dog? Did he kill his family and bury their bodies in asphalt (which would explain the tar on his clothes)? He didn’t care if they put him back in Bellevue. The only place he wanted to be, the only place he deserved to be, was hell itself.
Sam raised his whiskey to the mirror behind the bar. His hair and beard congealed with tar. Just before he could take a drink, an accented voice interrupted him.
“You look like hell.”
An old man sat at the end of the bar. He was in a wheelchair, with tubes in his nose running to an oxygen tank.
“Don’t mind him,” the bartender said, in his broken English. “He always here. He never have cashmoney.”
Sam picked up his whiskey. Walked over to the guy. Placed the drink down in front of him. “This one’s on me, old-timer.”