The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares

by The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares- The Haunted City (retail) (epub)

  —

  On my way to 640 Park Avenue, I pass the armory. There’s this tiny steel door at the bottom of a set of stairs. You can hardly see it beneath all the construction. A posted sign reads:

  Interglot

  Reduced Hours Due to Government Slowdown

  At 640, I make it past the doorman without any problems. It’s like I’m invisible. The new elevator guy is at least eighty years old. He stinks horribly, his breath a rat’s caked nest. That same skinny woman as before joins us on the second floor. She stinks too, and her lips are missing. She’s chewed them clean off.

  As we ride, everything closes in. The space is too tight. I can’t breathe. A wriggling slug unfolds inside me. Its arms extend in every direction, as if it’s a plow packing the loose snow of my organs tighter and tighter.

  “Are we dy-ing?” I ask.

  “Hssss!” workout shrew answers.

  Two young men in business suits board on four. A family with teenaged kids boards on five. Slug-widthed serpents slither out from the teenaged kids’ mouths like second tongues.

  “Are we bio-log-ic-al weapons? Will we die of cancer?” I ask. No one answers.

  “Last stop!” the operator calls at six. “Everyone off!”

  All ten of us head in the same direction. The kid holding the door open at the end of the hall has sandy brown hair and a freckled nose. It’s Lucas Novo. He’s standing beside his parents, both of whose eyes are gouged out. Tentacles flick from their empty sockets like upended hermit crabs.

  We go in. Lucas shuts the door behind me.

  The apartment is enormous, with vaulted twelve-foot ceilings and marble floors. On the mantel are photos of Novo’s parents tucked between famous actors and lesser-known but far more powerful politicians, like John Blankfein, the head of the World Bank.

  We converge around an oak dining table, where the fading sunset casts fractured rainbows through the crystal chandelier. I squeeze between two businessmen to see what’s for dinner: a gutted horse, still saddled. Its leather etching reads: Preakness, 2016.

  The people around the table—the inhumans—begin to feed. Giant black slug-snakes slither in and out of their mouths, lapping.

  I decide this isn’t happening. I’m not here, even as Minnie Brooks sneaks up and drops a rubber monster mask over my head. The eye holes don’t line up and I can’t see anything but low-down pricks of light. I can’t move. I can’t speak.

  The squirming thing fills my voids. It presses against the wound in my hand, and my chest, and my throat, until the real me retreats. I’m banished to a dark place with a window so tiny that I have to squint to see outside. Someone else is driving me.

  My driver takes me closer to the table. I’m standing over the horse. I think I’m eating it.

  “Grrls!” a voice says. And then they’re all chanting with what words they’re still able to speak: “Kill the girls! Keel huh grrls! Kuh-th-grls! Kuh-th-grs! Kuh! Kuh! Kuhhh!”

  My voice joins, only it’s dead and without echo: “Kill the girls!”

  The next thing I know, I’m on the subway to Queens, my mouth wet with horse blood.

  —

  We’re standing in our daughters’ bedroom. Someone is shouting. Another is banging. Then comes a scream. It’s Grady, trying to break from his attic.

  “Yes. Obviously it’s an emergency!” Daisy says into her cell phone. She’s cornered against the window, the girls behind her. Her left eye is swollen shut like she just got sucker punched. “He outweighs me by thirty pounds! Please, hurry.”

  We come closer.

  She drops the phone. “The police are on their way,” she says, like this isn’t an outer borough, like budget cuts haven’t castrated the entire emergency system. Like we don’t have all the time in the world.

  The girls’ bare knees edge out from behind their mother, giving the impression of a disfigured, feminine beast. Daisy smiles a fake, placating smile and steps forward. “Now, Gra—”

  We bash the side of her face with a Swingline stapler. She falls nose first into the nest of pillows on the floor. Like blades of grass missed by a great and terrible mower, the girls stand unmoving at her sides.

  “Trip-trap, trip-trap!” we shout. “Gobble-gobble!”

  A thick black tentacle bursts through Grady’s broken hand. It wiggles and giggles, and we laugh too. “Come grls!” we say.

  Elaine does as told. We take her into our slithering arms and squeeze.

  Neighbors bang on all sides. “Shut up!” a man shouts from below. “Keep those kids quiet!” Daisy moans on the floor and starts crawling. We step on her back. Inside us, Grady rages.

  We don’t do these things because it pleases us to harm. We do them because nothing has ever pleased us.

  “Trip-trap!” we scream at little Lisa. “Come kiss us or we’ll break your sister’s neck!”

  Lisa won’t budge. We swing a tentacle arm and pull her in while she kicks. Now we have them both. We giggle. We cry too. Because it’s so sad and funny and ugly.

  “Daaaddy!” Elaine shrieks. “Let go!”

  We shove them both to the floor, our knees dug into their small bellies as we bind the bigger one’s hands to her feet with a pair of rainbow tights. She’s doesn’t fight us. She’s too scared. She’s weak Elaine.

  We move on to Lisa. She wriggles free and bites our tentacle.

  It’s red-hot pain. We slap our wet arm against her face. Her small skull hits the floor. She stops moving.

  Grady rages. He’s watching through his tiny window, trying to get out and drive. We decide it’s time. He’s ready. He wants this too. We unfurl, filling all the spaces, even the attic where we’ve locked him. There’s nowhere left for him to live, except as part of us.

  “Help me, Daddy,” Elaine calls from the floor.

  Grady hears. Through his tiny window, he sees his girls on the floor. He courses through us, a burning behind our black eyes, then our chest, our legs, and at last, he breaks through, into our true body. He’s doesn’t dissolve like the others before him. He’s stronger than we thought and he’s everywhere as he raises our arm and bites down, into our black flesh.

  “Hssss!” we scream. His teeth come out, all eight, and ride us like shark fins. It hurts. We retreat from that hurt, pulling our tentacles back inside, shrinking our skin from his holes like a salted slug.

  While we’re gone, the fucker gets control and starts driving.

  “Avert your eyes, ladies,” Grady says as he steps over his family’s bodies. Then he opens their bedroom window and jumps.

  —

  Grady breaks a leg, the dumb shit.

  We’re disappointed. We can’t absorb Grady, but he can’t keep us out, either. It’s a loss like his brother. We’ll need a new host. By the time the police show up, we’ve regained control. He’s back in his attic.

  Two men strap us into a straitjacket and carry us in a stretcher down the block. Pedestrians gawk. We stick Grady’s stumpy, ragged tongue out at them. When we get to the armory, a woman—Anna Beth Cassavetes—ushers us down the steps and inside the old jail we’ve inhabited for the last hundred and fifty years.

  A pneumatic glass door opens with a fresh-sounding pop. Jailers in white lab coats wait on the other side. Cassavetes shines a light inside our open mouth. “He’s not fused!” she shouts.

  They move with great speed. We’re shoved in a wheelchair and rolled through a long corridor that opens up to barred jail cells with soundproof glass inlays. The floors are dirt and broken clay.

  We pass the first cell. Margaret Books has lost her dentures and eaten the outsides of her mouth. Her face is a bloody star. After that is Minnie, who slams herself against the glass, her belly pregnant with slithering tumors. We keep going, past Lucas Novo and his dinner party. They howl and hoot and fling their excrement. The skinny workout woman from the elevator looks down at us, her expression no different.

  We know her. We know all of them, and all their memories. Like your God, we are one.
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  We go down one more level. We’re out of the prison and in a medical lab with bright lights. Orderlies strap us onto a bed.

  “It’s deep,” says a woman in white. She flicks our cheek with her index finger, the rude thing. “Do you know its name?”

  “We have many names!” we say.

  Grady’s family enters with Cassavetes. They surround us, hot breathed and hurt but still standing. Grady shouts from his attic, but no one can hear. Don’t look at me! he cries. You’re safe. Run away!

  “Listen closely, Grady. You need to say the name of your demon. Do you know it, or am I gonna have to run through the whole list of escaped convicts with you?” Cassavetes asks. Then, to the family, “He’s gonna need your help.”

  “Mares eat souls and does eat souls,” we say. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Silas Burns,” Daisy says. “That’s the name from his notes.”

  One of the men in white whistles. “Silas? That’s a bad one.”

  “Can you say that, darlin’?” Cassavetes asks. “It’s two little words, and I know you can do it, ’cause you still got your tongue.”

  Silas Burns! Grady shouts from his attic. But he’s not driving. We push him farther away until his has no window. He’s locked in total darkness. We burst his puppet edges. His nose, eyes, and ass are bleeding. We will not be evicted from this body. Never again will we live in a pig.

  “Say its name!” Daisy cries. She’s bent over us, her head pressed against our chest, crying. “Oh, for the love of god, say it!”

  “Trip-trap!”

  “Forget it,” one of them says.

  “Y’all, I’m so sorry for your loss,” Anna Beth Cassavetes answers. “Lock him up.”

  Daisy blocks the bed’s front corner wheel with her foot. She shoves hard on our forehead so we can’t lunge or bite, then gets in our face. “You want it out. I know you.” Her image is distorted. Her eyes are too small, her nose too wide. It’s not a human way of looking at people, but like perceiving through a funhouse mirror. “You love me.”

  “Say it, Daddy,” Elaine cries. “Say it!” Lisa chimes. “Say it! Say it! Say it!” says Daisy. And then all three shout, “Say its name!”

  Grady tears at the black but there’s no way out. He’s so far away he can’t hear.

  “Say it!” Grady’s family keeps crying.

  In the attic, their voices take on a new property. They become a light: Say it! Say his name! The light shines under the locked door, which is how Grady finds the handle. He twists. Pulls. The family knows, with a gut-level intuition, that he hears and needs them. They keep chanting: “Say it! Say it!” The room brightens like dawn. All is illuminated.

  It occurs to him (to me, I’m Grady!) that when people die, they see this light and mistake it for God, when it’s actually just the last glimmer of the people they love, calling them back.

  “I can’t do this without you, Grady,” Daisy says.

  I shoulder the door. It won’t open. But I can’t give up, because I know what will happen to them once I’m gone. I was broken when Ezra got sick, and a part of me never recovered. It left a space for this terrible thing to grow. If I leave my family, they’ll be broken too. I will not surrender them to an indifferent world populated by invisible monsters.

  “Come back, Daddy,” Elaine says.

  “Silas Burns,” I whisper. “You’re not welcome here.”

  The door swings open. I say it again. My tongue moves with the words. “Silas Burns, I cast you out!”

  I’m in a hospital room, surrounded by people in white coats. A woman yanks the edge of the slug from my mouth. With the help of the guy standing next to her, she gets enough slack to wrap the slithering thing around a cylinder, then brings down a thin, metal bar that locks into place. Three people turn a lever that twists the cylinder. They pull the slug from me, inch by inch. My jaw unhinges. The demon is the width of a liter-sized bottle of Coke. By the time they finish, they’ve pulled out nineteen feet of slack. It shrieks, this terrible, high-pitched birdcall, as it shrinks in the atmosphere to the size of a garter snake.

  A door opens. In comes a screaming pig. They feed the snake to the pig.

  And then I’m empty. It’s almost as lonely as losing a twin. Everything goes black.

  —

  I’m able to walk out of the hospital room on crutches. I’m led past another wing, full of pigs locked in separate cells. Then I’m deposited into a packed waiting room with linked chairs. Some people are alone, some with friends. I spot a guy in a business suit from Lucas Novo’s party. His lips are stitched back onto his face, and he’s scrolling through e-mails on his cell phone.

  In the corner, I see Daisy and the girls. I get to them as fast as my crutches will take me. I can’t help it, I’m crying. “Girls,” I say.

  Daisy stands. I drop the crutches and take her in my arms. She stiffens. I hold her until she goes soft. She cries into my shoulder.

  “Please don’t send me away,” I say.

  After a while, we sit. The girls won’t look at me. I don’t want to scare them, so I wait. Minutes pass. Lisa scoots from her chair and touches my stitched hand. “A monster lives in you,” she says.

  “It did. It’s gone.”

  She climbs over the chair, into my lap. “Gone?”

  “Gone. Never coming back.”

  Lisa closes her eyes and almost immediately falls asleep.

  There’s Elaine left, yet. I wait a half hour, then hand Lisa to Daisy and kneel before Elaine’s chair. “I’ll spend the rest of my life making this up to you and your sister and your mother,” I promise.

  She looks at her hands.

  I sit back down. She stays in that chair, watching the Shake Weight infomercial on the wall-mounted television for another twenty minutes. I’m about ready to beg all over again, when she comes back and stands in front of me. I don’t want to scare her off, so I don’t speak directly to her.

  “Whatever you want, I’ll do,” I tell them all.

  Lisa wakes. We all hold hands. Soon, the girls cry. They recount what happened from their small perspectives. Daisy and I listen and try to hold them in such a way that they don’t see we’re crying too.

  After a few hours, Anna Beth Cassavetes calls us into a bustling office. There’s only room for two chairs, so the girls sit while we stand. Everything’s cheap and fluorescent, like a discount store’s corporate office. “I’m your caseworker,” she tells us. “That was a serious infection. But I see here that y’all have clean bills of health.”

  “That’s what you said last time. Why didn’t you ever call me back?” I ask.

  “The city’s overrun,” she tells me. “I didn’t have the manpower.”

  I expect an explanation. Instead she walks us to the dimly lit exit, just below the armory construction. “Y’all are free to go!”

  —

  By the time we get back to Queens, it’s dawn the next day. My newspaper article in support of the Interglot’s buyout is on the welcome mat. Next to that, a headline announces the gruesome murder of three hookers by the paper’s publisher, Tom White. He claims he doesn’t remember what happened, that something possessed him.

  The two million dollars is gone from my account.

  We spend the morning cleaning the kids, the house, ourselves. After that, the four of us play Go Fish, walk the neighborhood, get souvlakis, and come home again. I’ve got a message waiting from the editor at the New York Post. He says several occupants of 640 Park Avenue have been arrested for murder. My story’s going to scoop every other outlet in town. He wants to know what I’ve got next.

  I still remember the demons’ collective memories. I know where the escaped ones are hiding. Their corruption is what I’ll report on. Because it’s everywhere.

  But for now, we rest on the couch as a family, each fitted together under a warm blanket, like perfect jigsaw pieces. I turn to Daisy and tell her, “I’m the luckiest man alive.”

  It wasn’t until their fifth session th
at Dr. Beth Harper first heard Toby Rheva speak. As far as she knew, the boy hadn’t said a word to anyone in the six weeks since the murders, leading Beth to determine he suffered from progressive mutism brought on by acute traumatic stress disorder. He had been, quite literally, scared silent.

  Toby’s case, and the particulars of how he came to be in her care, were among the most disturbing Beth had encountered in her sixteen years treating child trauma survivors. The Padesky Murders were shocking as much for their casual brutality as for how quickly the public nodded and moved on, numbed by the twenty-four-hour news cycle’s unyielding stream of similar atrocities. The story was all too familiar. Jerry Padesky shot his wife and two children to death before killing himself. Twelve-year-old Toby and one of the dead children, a nine-year-old girl named Sara Brobeck, were under the foster care of the Padeskys, a detail not originally found in the news reports but later revealed to Beth by Toby’s caseworker.

  Married fourteen years to Anne Padesky, Jerry Padesky had no criminal record, no history of psychiatric issues, and no chemical dependencies to explain why he went to the basement of his Langston Street row house that uncharacteristically warm March night and loaded his father’s hand-me-down Savage 99 rifle. He then climbed the stairs to the second floor, passed through his bedroom to the bathroom where his wife stood brushing her teeth, and shot her in the face. The force of the blast knocked Anne Padesky into the bathtub, where the police found her and fragments of her teeth approximately twenty minutes later.

  What happened next is less clear. Neighbors reported hearing that initial gunshot at five after eleven, at which time they called 911. Over the following thirteen minutes, Jerry Padesky lined up his ten-year-old son, John, and foster daughter, Sara, in the upstairs hallway, where he shot them at point-blank range, then carefully placed them in their beds, as if they were sleeping. Finally, he went downstairs to the living room, where he sat in his favorite chair and put the rifle in his mouth.

  The police didn’t know how Toby escaped Jerry Padesky’s deadly march through the house. Given where he was found, they could only assume the child was sneaking a late-night snack when he heard the shot that killed his foster mother. According to the crime-scene report, the police were in the house an astonishing forty minutes before they discovered Toby. Officer Ramirez was standing in the living room near Jerry Padesky’s body when he heard a faint whimper coming from the kitchen.