by The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares- The Haunted City (retail) (epub)
The Stairs
The desert. But not like last time. It’s still dark and there are howls in the distance. Behind him the Humvee crackles, upturned, tires shredded, bodies hanging out of it just as he remembered. And on the ground, Burke, gurgling his last breaths.
He needs to wait for the choppers. He needs to hide from enemy fire. But he can’t. He has to walk. He has to walk sixty-three steps. These are the stairs. The desert is an illusion. It’s all in his head. He knows that now. It doesn’t make the fear any less real, doesn’t make his heart beat any softer, doesn’t make the staccato of gunfire any quieter. But it makes it easy to ignore Burke as he reaches out to him, gasping for him to stay, and it makes it easy knowing the thing bounding out from the dark doesn’t want him. Not yet. It’s not his time.
One. Two. Three. Four.
401. The Black Oak Door
The Superintendent skulks out from behind the door, shaking off the last shivers of his memories. He glances up at the elevator’s arrow and sees it still pointing at 4.
Burke is here, somewhere in the halls. Somewhere waiting to ambush him. His fingers squeeze the grip of the gun.
He rounds a corner. Rounds another. Winds through a sharp, abnormal series of twists and turns. Finds himself staring down another long hallway. At the end, Burke.
Unlike any of the other doors that open off the sides of a hallway, the black oak door sits at a dead end.
Burke is fumbling for the right key to open it. But there are too many keys, too little time.
He tries this key, then another. Then he stops. He knows he’s being watched. Knows the Superintendent has the drop on him.
“Did you find our friend on the third floor?” Burke asks over his shoulder, not turning around.
“Yep.”
“So you brought the gun.”
“I did.”
“And have you figured it all out?”
“What do you mean?” asks the Superintendent.
Burke turns around slowly, hands held open, up just above his shoulders, key ring dangling from around a single finger.
“This,” he says, motioning to the building. “Have you figured it all out? What it means? What is really going on?”
“I know what’s going on.”
“You think you know what’s going on. But do you really? Or are you still accepting everything at face value?” He looks around. “This place isn’t what you think it is. It isn’t a building atop a crack in the world. Those aren’t magical wooden bullets and hallways don’t rearrange themselves of their own volition. And you, you’re not who you think you are. Do you even remember your name?”
“Yes. Yes I do.”
“No you don’t. You know how I know?”
“How?”
“You keep calling me Burke.”
The Superintendent narrows his eyes.
“Because your name is Burke.”
“You were right when you said I wasn’t Burke. That I was something else. I am something else. A shadow. A reflection. Of you. You’re Burke.”
“No. Fuck you.”
“You said it yourself—you get confused sometimes. Things don’t make sense. The logic of this whole place vexes you, twists you around so you can’t tell day from night or remember when you last ate. How long has it been since you last saw me? A few minutes? A few hours? Days, maybe? Does anything about this place make sense to you? It’s all phantoms. This is Hell and you think yourself some punisher of the damned, condemned to consume the sins of others because you refuse to face up to your own sins. Acknowledge that it was you in the desert who died in the dirt. Who raped that girl and caved in her skull with a rock. Who did oh so many terrible things that you don’t even want to think that it was you who did them. All that. Have you figured all that out yet?”
The Superintendent stares down the hallway at the shade glaring at him, gun trained, sights set. His finger twitches on the trigger, confusion and regret setting in.
“No,” he says.
“What a sad and lonely Hell you’ve created for yourself.”
He thinks back, back to the desert, back to his father in the chair, back to things in the darkness and the Landlord by the fireplace. And he tries to picture the girl, see her face. He can see her breasts, her brown sausage nipples, the sweat on her body as she pushes into him, crying. But he can’t see her face. Because none of it is real.
It’s conjured. Fragments put together from other memories as told by Burke. He remembers the desert all too well. The smell, the stink, the howls. It is real. All of it. None of what Burke said is true. This is no Hell. He is not Burke. This is something else. He is something else.
“Bullshit,” he says. “The dead lie even more often than the living. You only tell enough truth to keep yourselves from being predictable liars. I’m not Burke. I never was. Nice try.”
Burke raises his hands a little higher in the air, smirking.
“I had to try. You gotta give me that.”
The Superintendent pulls the trigger.
Burke’s back explodes, showering thick, black hellspit over the walls and door. He slumps slowly to the ground, bleeding out.
The Superintendent advances slowly, gun at the ready to fire again. Burke clutches his wound, his smile eroding quickly.
“Fuck you,” says Burke, tears welling in his eyes, a bit of black spittle spraying out with every F. “Fffffuck you.” He coughs. “You don’t know what Hell is like.”
“No. But I have an idea. And I know you have it coming.”
Burke raises his hand from the wound, sees his own rancid ichor clinging to it. “Why’d you go?”
“Why’d I go where?”
“To war, asshole. I know why I went. But you. What? Did you think you’d find the courage to fight your boogeymen or some shit? Is that what it was?”
The Superintendent nods. “That’s exactly what it was.”
“Did you find it?”
“Not there.” He pulls the trigger, sending Burke back to where he belongs.
He breathes a sigh of relief, says a silent prayer for the part he liked of his friend, then stares at the black oak door. He stares long and hard, thinking about what to do next, thinking about Burke.
Then the Superintendent rears back, kicks the door in with a single vicious blow, firing wantonly. He doesn’t hesitate. He doesn’t fear what might be waiting. This is what he has to do, and it is best just to get it over with. It is going to be a long day…or night—he isn’t sure which. But he has two more doors to kick in after this, two more souls that need purging.
And sometimes the old methods work best.
The Superintendent’s Quarters
He eats. He hates every moment of it, but he eats.
The bodies are stacked awkwardly in an awful pile, one atop another, flesh and oozing black spilling across the hardwood floor, maggots wriggling out of their wounds. The corpses gaze out, eyes lifeless, seemingly begging for mercy. For freedom. But there’s no life left in them. Only sin. Disgusting, filthy, rotten, sour sin.
The Superintendent sits at the table, fork in one hand, carving knife in the other, slicing pieces of them off and jabbing them angrily into his mouth. He chews, his teeth grinding against fatty tissue, the taste getting worse with every bite.
He’s lost track of how many times he’s thrown up, stopped bothering trying to make it to the bathroom. Black, fleshy vomit covers the floor beneath his feet, dribbles down his chin and onto his suit. There’s almost no gray left to the suit at all—just black. Blood and puke covering almost every square inch of him.
He chews. He tastes the sin. Remembers the details. Sees the horrors. And he grows sicker with every passing minute.
He thinks that maybe, if he had more time, he could eat them one by one, taking the time to regain his strength and see out his term as Superintendent. Take the time to digest all that sin and seek penance for it. But that ship has sailed. He had that chance. It’s exactly what the Landlord offered.
And he had to go and fuck the whole thing up.
It is on him now. All his fault. Every bite is killing him. Damning him. All the color draining from flesh. There is no other way around it.
In the corner he can hear it. Scuttling, scurrying, waiting for the right moment to pounce, its pallid skin catching hints of the light, even as deep as it is in the shadow. The Superintendent just waves his knife at it.
“I’m not done yet. You can’t have me until I’m done.”
The thing waits. The Superintendent is doomed. It knows it. He knows it.
So the Superintendent keeps eating, slicing his way through body after body, doing the job he was hired to do. Whether he likes it or not, whether he understands it or not, whether it means anything to anyone else or not. That’s not the point. These things can’t come back. Not again. That’s all that matters now.
And as he takes his last few bites—hours, days, maybe even weeks after he started—his body failing, eyes bloodshot, arm so weak it can barely lift the fork, he waves his knife at the thing in the corner, the thing waiting for him. He knows what’s next. What’s coming for him.
He waves at the thing, waving it over, whispering, “All right. It’s your turn. Do what you’ve got to do.”
He doesn’t scream. Doesn’t whimper. Not even a little. There just doesn’t seem much point to it anymore.
The Landlord
The oak door swings open and the Landlord slides the key out of the lock. He offers a carnival barker’s arm to the room, presenting its space and grandeur to a nervous young man. The young man looks around carefully, taking it all in, unsure what to make of it. The hardwood floors have been recently cleaned, but the walls are still stained from years of smoke.
“So that’s it, then?” asks the new superintendent.
“I’d hardly say ‘that’s it’ about the job,” says the Landlord. “It’s a hard job. An important one. Not a lot of people can do what you do. Most of them, well, they can’t serve out their term.”
“They leave?”
“Sometimes.”
“But if I stay? And fulfill the terms of the deal, I mean.”
“Then we’ll fulfill our end as well.”
“A bed with a roof over it. Three meals a day.”
“For the rest of your life.”
“And the voices. The…things.”
“The doctors will have pills for that.”
“One year. That’s it?” asks the new superintendent.
“One year. That’s it,” says the Landlord.
“I’m in. Sign me up.” He puts out a firm hand.
The Landlord shakes his hand, nodding, mood darkening for a moment as he hands over the jangling ring of keys.
The phone call woke me up that morning. It was a Saturday. I didn’t like answering the telephone on Saturdays. I needed peace. Most weekends I didn’t even shave, or dress. I stayed in the apartment with the curtains drawn. But in my half-sleep confusion, I answered. Perhaps I was meant to answer. In hindsight I think that must be true. It was a booking. Her name was Alexa Mortimer, and it was her fortieth birthday. She apologized profusely but said it was an emergency. She had hired a psychic to do readings for her party, and the psychic was flaking. Was there any chance that I was available for the day? She lived nearby, in the fancy part of Brentwood. She had gotten my name from her friend Renee Schwartz, one of my regulars. A real piece of work. She would call at all hours of the day and night and expect me to tell her something over the phone. So I told her things. Don’t buy the Porsche. Don’t have an affair with your contractor. But the truth is, we can’t establish a real connection over the phone. Or on Skype. We have to be in your presence. I hated parties. With all the people around we get bombarded with images. I hated large groups of any kind. Even the thought of it made my nerves start to buzz, forcing me back toward a childhood habit of tapping my fingers against my forehead.
“I’m not that kind of psychic,” I said. “I don’t read palms. I don’t throw tarot cards. I don’t predict the future.”
“What do you do?” she asked. Tap tap tap. I don’t like to explain. It sounds so phony when you say it out loud.
“I see auras. Color, emanating from people. From places,” I said. “I get visions, from the past and maybe from the future, but I can never tell which. And…I see Entities.”
She didn’t respond. Some clients get frightened when I tell them that. I don’t blame them. As a child I thought everybody saw the things I saw. One day, I think I was six, I asked my mother to tell my brother to stop talking all the time. She looked at me funny and started asking questions. Did I think I had a brother? The alarm on her face made me opt for silence. She took me to a therapist, who asked me about my brother, and what he said to me, and whether I “heard voices.” I lied. I said no, I didn’t. The therapist’s concern, and my mother’s, was disturbing, the weird shrinking of their auras, a yellow that seeped into their skin and the whites of their eyes as they looked at me. It didn’t take me long to figure out that color was fear. That’s why they call cowards “yellow.” Fear is dangerous. Fear is an invitation. Dogs will more likely bite when they smell it…the Entities sense it too. They like it. They collect around a frightened person like ants on a discarded piece of candy. Living people are their treat. Their craving. And the Entities are everywhere. Watching us. Some of them are “confused.” That’s what psychics are supposed to say. We’re not supposed to say “evil.”
Alexa Mortimer didn’t sound afraid. Her voice softened. I could feel her smiling through the phone as she said, “Please, Edward. I know it’s probably painful for you, to put yourself on display, but it’s my birthday.”
She said my name. I’m not embarrassed to tell you, just that small gesture sent a pleasing chill coursing through me. The kindness in her voice was something I rarely heard in my day-to-day. She told me that Renee said I was very good. That I was “the real deal.” Then she laughed, a warm laugh. A sexy laugh, if I can say that.
I said I would be there and hung up the phone.
As you can imagine, I’ve never been normal. I’ve never had a girlfriend. I was going bald. The hair I still had was dark and lank and long in the back. My palms sweat. My skin was pale. I always wore a cheap dark suit with a dark shirt and no tie. I was never comfortable. Anywhere, even in my apartment. Even in bed. But you play the cards you’ve been dealt. Weird paid the bills. Especially the undeniable strangeness I possessed. People have an innate radar for authenticity. The Normals. They were literally taken aback when they met me, and though mind reading was not one of my gifts, I knew they were thinking, This guy’s a freak. Maybe he knows something.
Unfortunately for me, I did.
The Mortimer house was on a tree-lined street, a humble one-story in a neighborhood of McMansions. It was probably built in the 1940s for a well-off doctor who smoked in the operating room. As I turned off my car and sat looking at it, I could hear laughter and music from the backyard party floating over the trees. The inflated dinosaur head of a bouncy castle was just visible over the roofline, gyrating gently from the happy, unseen children inside it. Another brownie point for Alexa Mortimer. She invited her guests to bring their children to her fortieth birthday party. I anticipated a pleasant afternoon of attractive Brentwood mothers, fit, toned ladies who would smile and blush at my knowledge of them. But as I walked up the brick path to the front door, I was hit with a feeling of dread. The air between me and the house shimmered and warped like a force field. If I reached out my hand to touch it, it would wobble like gelatin. The blank windows of the house stared back at me. I was already getting things, images appearing on the other side of the strange wall of air: a woman running from the house, terrified; a man on the roof, tipping off it and falling; numbers floating by, two sevens and two nines; and then one last vision, crime scene tape across the porch, a body on a gurney, a dead body covered with a sheet.
I tried to breathe. My heart pounded. New places did this, flooded me all at onc
e. The images seemed like they might be historical, based on what the people wore. I looked up into the big tree that spanned across the yard, trying to land, to plant my feet firmly on the ground of the now. It was an old tree, a sycamore, its gnarled white arms stretching out toward the house. The big leaves rustled. I wiped my palms on my pants. My brother was talking. It would sound like babble to you, like a radio through a wall, but I knew him. I knew what he was saying.
“Don’t go in. Turn around. This is not for you.”
He did this to me a lot. I never knew if he had my best interests at heart. Sometimes I think he wanted me to fail. To end up on the street in a cardboard box, with no one but him for company for the rest of my life. I told him I need money to live, just like the Normals. Life in a body has logistical requirements. This woman had agreed to pay me five hundred dollars for two hours. Didn’t he understand? Didn’t he trust me? As I stood there, muttering and sweating, the big red front door opened, and Alexa Mortimer herself stood there, gazing out at me, a smile on her face. All the voices and strange visions dissipated, and I was just there, with her. Like magic.
“Are you Edward?” she said, as she came out onto the brick porch.
I knew her. I mean, I had seen her before. At the Whole Foods and at the little muffin shop by the gas station. I had noticed her aura. It was the most beautiful saturated violet aura I had ever seen. Violet is rare, reserved for the most evolved people. Alexa Mortimer was dazzling. She was tall and slender, wearing a halter dress that stretched to the ground, her long blond hair swept casually up. She had searching, intelligent eyes that drew me. My brother’s words rang in my ears as I stepped up to the porch: “This is not for you.” I put my hand in hers, just to feel the velvety violet seep from her skin to mine. It was heavenly.
“Everyone’s so excited to meet you. I put out a sign-up sheet, is that stupid? I didn’t know how else to do it.” She made a sweet, funny face as she led me inside, past some stacked-up cartons in the foyer. “Don’t mind those boxes. We just moved in a month ago. This is our first party in the new house.”