by Smith, Bryan
The man in the photo was John Herzinger, younger brother of Silas. The girl in the yellow dress was Marlee, John’s daughter. The child in his arms was Dalton Herzinger, his only son. There’d been another daughter, Laura, several years older than Marlee. She wasn’t in the picture.
They were dead now, all of them.
Simone let out a breath and took her hand away from the picture. “This is so freaky,” she said, glancing at Terry, who was watching her with a strangely rapt expression. “I can’t believe all this stuff is still here.”
He indicated the pictures with a tilt of his chin. “Maybe you should take one. You know…as a souvenir.”
Simone frowned. “I don’t know,” she said slowly, her gaze going back to the old pictures. “I’m not sure I’d feel right about it.”
Terry grunted. “What’s to feel bad about? They’ve been here all this time. Nobody wants them. Hell, there’s no one left alive to care.”
Simone thought of Luke Herzinger, who’d decamped to the hinterlands many years ago and had never been heard from again. She’d stalked Facebook pages of some of his old friends and classmates. Sometimes they asked each other about Luke, but no one ever knew anything, it seemed. It was as if he’d disappeared from the face of the earth. He might even be dead now. Terry was right. It might be okay to take some of these pictures. Maybe at least one of them.
Terry turned away from the pictures and resumed his exploration of the living room. Simone followed him, her fascination continuing unabated as she examined bookshelves partly filled with books, DVDs, and VHS tapes. The shelves looked somewhat depleted, with a meager assortment of books and video cases present. A few more were scattered on the floor nearby. Here, then, was an example of something clearly more interesting to previous trespassers and scavengers than pictures and moldy old pieces of furniture—the Herzinger family’s media collection.
Some of the remaining items were standard things any home with kids would have. Shrek, The Lion King, Toy Story. The usual. Of the relatively more adult-oriented fare that remained, there was nothing much that piqued Simone’s interest. Meet the Parents, Titanic, Field of Dreams, a few others. She had a feeling the really intriguing stuff had been pilfered by others long ago. For some reason, she’d imagined Silas Herzinger’s taste in films tending more toward things like A Clockwork Orange or Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.
Or, hell, maybe his favorite movie really had been motherfucking Meet the Parents. A phrase she’d encountered often in her reading about killers came to her, the one about the “banality of evil”. It was overused, really. But maybe that was because it was so apt. The weirdest thing of all about the Herzinger story was how shocked everyone had been that Silas had done such a thing. He was frequently described as “sweet”, “gentle”, and “caring”. And yet he’d done something undeniably Evil with a capital E. It couldn’t have come from nowhere. There’d been a deep sickness of the soul inside him, something rotten he’d hidden very well for a long time, until it finally had to come out. Simone thought that was the most disturbing thing of all. Because if that level of evil could reside in a man that beloved, it could live in anyone at all.
In her own father, for instance.
Or in Spence. Or Terry.
Even in herself, possibly.
Terry looked at her again. “You want any of this crap?”
Simone laughed. “My family already has all this shit, I think. Like just about everybody else on the planet.”
She chugged down the rest of her beer and tossed the bottle over her shoulder, grinning at the way Terry winced when it shattered on the floor somewhere behind her. “Relax,” she said, still smiling. “The owners won’t mind. I promise. Here, you carry the beer for a while.”
She proffered the bag with one hand and snatched the phone from Terry with the other.
Terry made a sound of dismayed surprise. “Hey.”
Simone was still holding out the bag. “Take the beer, Terry.”
He hesitated a moment before slipping the bag’s handles from her fingers. “You didn’t even ask if you could use the phone.”
She laughed. “That’s something you still haven’t figured out about life. Sometimes you just gotta take what you want.”
A moment of pregnant silence elapsed as they stared at each other in the semi-darkness. Terry’s eyes were narrowed to slits because Simone had aimed the light at his face. Then he let out a breath and took a step toward her.
Simone moved back a step and shook her head. “And sometimes there are things you’re just not meant to have.”
She felt a little stab of guilt as she saw Terry’s face crumple. The feeling intensified as she replayed the words she’d uttered in her head. This was a slightly cruel thing she’d just done. Maybe more than slightly.
She frowned. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did that.”
There was another brief silence. Then Terry sighed. “It’s okay.”
Simone shook her head. “No. It’s not.” She decided she should change the subject, and quickly. “Do you think the stories we heard as kids are true?”
“About the ghost of Silas Herzinger?”
“Yeah.”
Terry shrugged. “I don’t believe in ghosts. Not really. I mean, I guess it’s possible that what we think of as ghosts is just some kind of unexplained scientific phenomenon. But…”
“In other words, you’re not sure. Meaning it’s possible.”
Terry frowned. “Is that what you think?”
“Do you think I’m stupid?”
“No. Of course not. Jesus.”
Simone smirked. “Stop being so sensitive. I’m just playing with you. I don’t know what I really think when it comes to otherworldly crap. I mean, I tend not to believe, but anything’s possible. We don’t know everything. You know?”
She moved away from Terry, circumventing the couch as she headed for the far end of the living room, where she encountered a staircase leading to the second floor. Past the staircase was a dark hallway. More pictures adorned the walls there. The kitchen was somewhere in that direction, maybe also a laundry room or office. Upstairs were the bedrooms where so many of them had died.
Simone raised the phone and aimed the light up the staircase.
Terry stood at her side and stared up there, too.
They could see the stairs up to about the halfway point. The light from the phone was too weak to penetrate much farther. As they stood there in silence another few moments, Simone was struck by the utter absence of sound emanating from anywhere else in the house. Until now she’d been too fascinated by her exploration of the living room for this to register.
Spence and the others should be banging around somewhere in here, whooping it up as they chugged beers and made a wreck of the place. Her boyfriend was too much of an obnoxious fuck to stay this quiet for this long. She felt her first real prickling of fear as this notion solidified in her head. Any lingering resentment she still felt toward Spence for his rude behavior dissipated at the thought that something bad might have happened. Okay, maybe there were no ghosts here, but that didn’t mean there weren’t other dangers. This was an old house. Nothing had been done to maintain it for a long time. Maybe some rotting floorboards had given way and they’d fallen into…something.
Fuck, she didn’t know what might have happened.
But some kind of accident was definitely possible.
She switched the phone to her left hand, braced her right on the bannister, and started up the stairs.
Terry gripped her wrist, stopping her on the first step. “Hold on, we don’t know if it’s safe up there.”
“I’ve got to look for Spence. Isn’t this total fucking silence freaking you out even a little?”
“Just hold on a second. Let’s try calling out for them first.”
Recognizing this as a sensible suggestion, Simone cupped a hand around her mouth and raised her voice to shout: “Spence! Where the fuck are you!?”
&
nbsp; Terry added his own, even louder contribution. “Karen! Bradley! Stop playing around, you assholes! We know you’re fucking with us!”
They stood there and waited a while.
No response came from upstairs or anywhere else in the house.
Simone let out a breath. “Fuck this.”
She twisted free of Terry’s grip and started up the stairs again.
Terry hesitated a moment and then followed her up the creaking stairs and into the deeper gloom of the second floor.
6.
Luke learned some interesting things over the course of the next hour or so as he continued to drink and talk with Greg Lancaster and the regulars at Sal’s Place. As so often happens with conversations fueled by copious amounts of alcohol, the rambling, multi-participant discourse occasionally veered off into some far-ranging tangents. However, it always returned to the subject of the tragedy that had befallen Luke and his family ten years ago. At first this made Luke as uncomfortable as it usually did, but his reluctance to discuss the matter soon evaporated in the face of Greg’s unrelenting ebullience.
Among other things, he learned that the Herzinger house on Crandall Hill became a focal point of local lore in the years following the tragedy. It hadn’t been long before everyone in Rayford was referring to the location as Haunted Hill rather than by its proper name. Stories of a haunting first began to circulate widely about two years after the murders. It was said that at night screams and other disturbing noises could be heard emanating from the supposedly empty house. Some visitors swore they heard what sounded like the blade of a heavy axe plunging into flesh or wood. Police ventured into the place now and then to check it out after receiving particularly hysterical calls from people who’d trespassed on the property, but they never found any evidence of ghosts or new murders.
The tales nonetheless persisted over the next several years, with elements of the basic story shifting and mutating along the way. At some vague point, it became an accepted part of the lore that the ghost of Silas Herzinger could be spotted wandering around the house at night every Christmas Eve. The ghost was always there, so the stories went, but on that one night each year it became corporeal, gaining physical substance and form. Those who claimed to have seen the ghost usually described it the same way, saying it wore a bloodstained Santa suit and carried a large, heavy-bladed axe. Greg attributed all this to rumors and outright falsehoods told by local kids who were just trying to scare each other.
Luke’s mood darkened considerably when told about this.
Greg noticed and attempted to steer the conversation in another direction. “You ask me, though, there’s no ghost as scary as some of those clowns running for president this time around. Just imagine one of those narcissistic maniacs actually making it to the oval office. This country would go down the toilet faster than a blast of explosive diarrhea.”
Dave Wannamaker and Virgil Alston chuckled dutifully at this, both men clearly sensing what Greg was trying to do.
But Luke wouldn’t be distracted from the story. It disturbed him that the night of horror he’d endured ten years ago had morphed into a source of spooky entertainment for local youth, but hearing about it awakened an insatiable morbid curiosity. He needed to know more and pressed Greg for additional details.
Seeing that his friend wouldn’t be dissuaded from hearing the rest of it, Greg sipped from his whiskey glass and gave Luke’s anxious expression a moment’s thoughtful consideration before setting the glass on the bar.
The look on his face was somber as he told the rest of what he knew. “Okay, here it is. For a while there, a stretch of about five or six years, it became a kind of rite of passage among the older kids to visit Haunted Hill on Christmas Eve. Partly it was to show how brave they were, but at heart it was really just another excuse to get away from the adults in their lives and party. You know how it is. We used to do similar things. Well, some of these kids experienced mysterious injuries while they were at your old house, a few of which were serious enough to require medical attention. One boy had to be hospitalized for a gaping wound to his abdomen. He told the hospital staff he’d narrowly avoided being chopped in half by the ghost of Silas Herzinger.”
All the color had drained from Luke’s face at this point in the tale. “Jesus. What really happened?”
Greg shrugged. “No one knows. And that was the last incident. The police went out to investigate again and again found nothing. No evidence of squatters or intruders other than the trespassing kids who were there that night. Some folks theorized the boy’s wound was self-inflicted, that he’d done it for the attention and had made up the story about being attacked by Silas’s ghost.”
Luke nodded, letting out a slow breath as he stared at the nearly empty bottle of Pabst he was rolling between the fingers of both hands. “Guess that makes sense.”
Greg laughed softly. “More sense than a fucking ghost, that’s for damn sure. Anyway, after that the place was boarded-up pretty securely and some warning signs were posted. ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’, that kind of thing. Guess it worked, because there haven’t been any incidents since then.”
Virgil Alston slid off his stool and grimaced at the creaking of his old bones as he pulled on a jacket. “You watch, all that nonsense will start up again someday,” he said, pulling up the jacket’s zipper. “Now that the fuss has died down, sooner or later some other group of kids will work up the nerve to try and get into the place. And then we’ll have some more ghost stories making the rounds. You watch.” He took out a wallet, extracted some bills, and dropped them on the bar. “Anyway, reckon I better head on home while I can still stand. Evening, gentlemen.”
The other men at the bar bid Virgil farewell as he creakily made his way over to the front door and pulled it open. Another blast of frigid air swept through the opening, as well as some snowflakes blown in by the shifting wind.
Virgil glanced back at them before stepping outside. “Getting bad out here, fellas. I recommend you all hit the trail soon.”
And then he was gone.
Stu braced his hands on the edge of his bar and surveyed the faces of the men seated on the other side. “Those are some words of wisdom. Thinking I’ll go ahead and close up early. Time to settle those tabs.”
The suggestion was met with only minor grumbling. Most of the bar’s remaining patrons accepted the reality of the situation with relative grace. The men paid up and shuffled out the door. A cab was called for the older man who’d been passed out at his table for the entirety of Luke’s stay.
Other than Stu and the passed-out man, Luke and Greg were the last to depart the premises. Before leaving, Luke made some noises about finding a motel to stay in for the night, but Greg had no patience for this, again insisting he stay the night at his place. He told Luke they’d stop at a convenience store for a couple cases of beer and continue the reunion party within the safe and toasty-warm confines of a well-heated house.
Luke allowed as how this might be preferable to spending an unknown amount of time seeking alternate lodging. The prospect of staying in an anonymous room at some cheap motel wasn’t terribly exciting, anyway. With some reluctance, he also agreed it might be best to ride home with Greg in his Jeep Wrangler rather than trying to follow in his Delta. Greg had downed his fair share of double whiskeys while at Sal’s, but he was nonetheless significantly less impaired than Luke, so this seemed the sensible way to go.
Unaccustomed as he was to doing things the sensible way, this struck Luke as strange and sort of darkly humorous. But, hell, it’d been a strange night all the way around, with fate steering him down a most unexpected path, so that was okay.
Once they were buckled up in the Wrangler, Greg started the engine and backed out of the parking space at the front of the bar. He shifted gears, got the jeep turned around, and rolled up next to the Delta.
“Anything you need from your car before we go?” He gave Luke’s Santa suit another amused once-over. “A change of clothes, may
be?”
Luke shook his head. “Didn’t think I’d be alive come tomorrow, so that didn’t seem necessary. Only thing of worth in there’s my shotgun.”
“Where’s that?”
Luke glanced at the Delta, voice going soft as he said, “In the trunk.”
“Well, you won’t be needing that fucking thing. I’ll come back for it tomorrow and get rid of it.”
Greg applied pressure to the gas pedal and the jeep rolled away from the Delta. He took a right turn out of the parking lot and drove down a street that was nearly deserted in the face of the strengthening storm. Strong winds buffeted the vehicle’s canvas top and vinyl windows. The snow was sheeting down and getting blown sideways by the wind, making it hard to see. Greg drove in low gear for better traction, but this reduced their progress to a crawl.
The lights of a convenience store came into view a few blocks farther down the road. Many of the shops and restaurants lining either side of the street in this commercial district were already closed for the night, either in observance of the holiday or because of the inclement weather. On a normal night, most of these businesses would be open for hours to come, but tonight their windows were dark. As far as Luke could tell, this corner Kwik-Stop store was the lone remaining holdout. There were no cars at the pumps, but a couple were parked near the entrance and he could see people moving around inside the store.
Greg turned into the store’s parking lot and pulled up to the pump closest to the entrance. He shut the engine off and shifted in his seat to take out his wallet. Opening it, he took out some bills and offered them to Luke. “You mind getting the beer while I pump gas? Normally wouldn’t bother filling up in weather like this, but I’m running lower than I realized.”
Luke waved off the bills and reached for the door handle on his side. “I’ll cover the beer. Gas, too, if you want. Just tell me how much you’re putting in.”
Greg tried pushing the bills at him. “Come on, man, take the money.”