by Smith, Bryan
At least, this was Luke’s assumption. His father died without saying a word about why he’d done what he’d done. But, really, what other explanation could there be? He certainly didn’t believe the old man had been possessed by a demon, as some of the more unbalanced religious loonies he encountered in the aftermath of the massacre insisted. Luke didn’t believe in ghosts, either, despite what he’d been told tonight about the local legends that had sprung up over the years. No, he believed in rock-solid reality. He believed in that house. It was still there, a monument to horror. It was made of wood and plaster and other flammable things. He could do something about that.
He could burn it to the fucking ground.
But first they had to make it up to the top of so-called Haunted Hill without sliding off the drive and tumbling down the side of the hill. There were a few slightly unnerving moments when the Wrangler’s tires lost traction on the snow-covered drive for a few seconds, but Greg handled each of these incidents with aplomb. Even with the high level of alcohol circulating in his system, he was an obviously skilled driver. And living in this climate, he of course had many years of experience driving in adverse conditions. He drove in low gear the whole way and it took quite a while, but eventually the dark outline of the old house became visible through barren tree branches as they rounded the last bend.
Luke frowned as they came clear of the trees and neared the house. “What the hell?”
A snow-covered vehicle was parked alongside the porch. It looked like an SUV. The front door to the house was standing open.
Greg grunted. “Kids, probably. Guess some of them finally got the nerve to try breaking in again.”
Luke shook his head, his features drawn back in a look of extreme disbelief. “On a night like this? How fucking stupid are they?”
Greg pulled up close to the SUV and parked the Wrangler. “Do I really have to point out the deep irony inherent in that question?”
Luke winced. “Well, okay, this isn’t the brightest thing we’ve ever done, granted, but at least we’ve got a legitimate reason for being here.”
“Arson?”
“Yes.”
Greg chuckled. “Beer me, please. I think the law might have some argument with your definition of the word ‘legitimate’. What do you want to do here?”
Luke passed him another beer. A shiver rippled through him as he stared at the open door to his childhood home. He hadn’t passed through it again since the night he ran screaming out of the house. There was a sense of the surreal at being back here again after all this time Aside from the boarded-up windows, the exterior of the house looked much the same as it had when he’d lived here. Or at least it did at night in the swirling snow. Perhaps the bright light of day would more clearly reveal it for the derelict structure it really was.
Greg popped his beer open and chugged some of it down. “Luke? Ya hear me? What do you want to do?”
Luke let out a shuddery breath. “Flush them out, I guess. Then do what we came here to do.”
Greg’s brow creased again as he scratched his whiskery chin and thought about it. “I don’t know. Later on when they hear about the place burning down, they might blab about seeing us up here, then maybe the law will get wind of it and want to have a word with them.”
Luke shook his head. “And get in trouble for trespassing? No, I think they’ll keep it to themselves. And even if they don’t and it comes back on us, fuck it, I’ll take the hit on this thing. I’ll swear I was up here with someone else.”
Greg tilted his head back and chugged down the rest of the beer, belching loudly when he crushed the can moments later. “Fuck it, then. Let’s do this.”
He crushed the empty and tossed it in the back.
Then he got out of the jeep.
Luke finished his beer and got out, too.
Snow crunched beneath their booted feet as they approached the SUV. Only the top of the vehicle was snow-covered. Now that they were close, Luke could see its paintjob was a shade of bright red. Greg brushed snow off the hood, removed a glove, and placed a hand on the metal.
“Still a bit warm. They can’t have been here long.”
They stared at the open front door for a moment.
Greg glanced at Luke. “Want to go on inside or do we try shouting at them first?”
Luke considered. “Shout, I think.”
Greg nodded. “Hold on a sec first. Need to offload some of what I’ve been drinkin’.”
He positioned himself in front of the SUV’s front left tire, pulled down his zipper, took out his junk, and let out a loud groan of relief as a thick stream of urine began pattering against the hubcap. Luke couldn’t help grinning. Trespassing little bastards deserved to have their ride pissed on. Realizing his bladder was also pretty swollen, he made a contribution of his own against another tire. Both men were laughing by the time they zipped up and staggered away from the vehicle.
Luke knew they were being pretty juvenile. Such behavior shouldn’t feel so gratifying for a man his age. But it did. Moreover, he realized he was actually having a pretty great time. He was struck by the very large disconnect between how he felt now and where he’d been mentally only a short while ago. And he again had to wonder about the unexpected twist in the path fate had steered him down tonight. Was it really just random chance or was there something larger and more inexplicable happening here?
He still didn’t know, probably never would. And, anyway, it was a question best saved for later, when he was sober again.
Greg stopped in his tracks a few feet shy of the porch steps and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hello, you trespassing little snots! The grownups are here! Time to get your asses out of there before we come in and kick the shit out of them.”
Luke laughed.
Then he cupped his hands around his mouth and started yelling, too.
9.
As Simone edged closer back to full consciousness, she imagined she heard voices calling to her from far away. In her head, they were the voices of her parents, calling out to her and her siblings to come downstairs on Christmas morning and open their presents. But that was silly. She wasn’t a little kid anymore. Also, as her eyes began to flutter, she perceived a different quality in what she was hearing, a sort of brute belligerence very unlike her parents.
Her eyes opened to blackness.
At first awareness of where she was and what had happened eluded her. All she knew was she was flat on her back in a lightless space. The floor beneath her was hard and uneven. Wood, probably. Then she grimaced and cried out weakly as a lance of pain went straight through her head. She raised a shaky hand to touch the side of her head and her fingers came away wet.
Oh, no.
She put her hand to her mouth and tasted what was on her fingertips.
Blood.
An alarming amount of it, actually. She had fallen and hit her head hard enough to get knocked cold for an indeterminate time. It might have been minutes or hours, she had no idea. Raising her voice, she cried out softly for help. She didn’t know where she was or who might be nearby, but there had to be someone around who could help her.
In a moment, an answer came from somewhere else in the darkness in the form of a girlish giggle.
And then a low, grating voice: “Welcome back to hell, cunt.”
It all came back to her in the next instant.
That was Karen. Something was wrong with her. Very, very wrong. She was either playing a very cruel trick or she was possessed by something, an evil spirit or demon. Other memories suggested the latter was more likely. An image of Terry’s head leaving his body and tumbling down the hallway made her gasp and sit bolt upright, heedless of the fresh jolt of pain this caused.
She sensed movement in the dark.
The thing possessing Karen’s body was coming toward her. She tried scuttling away from it, but her back met something unyielding, perhaps the side of a bed or whatever it was she’d hit in her fall. Before she could attempt to g
et to her feet and get around it, she felt Karen’s hands on her. They slid up her legs and reached inside her jacket to grope her breasts.
Simone yelped and swatted the hands away.
“Get away from me!”
More of that girlish giggling. In a moment, Karen’s cold hands were on her again. Simone pushed her away, surged to her feet, and directed a kick at Karen’s approximate location. Rather than connecting with soft flesh, her foot was seized in a lock-solid grip. Simone shrieked and tried to jerk her foot free, but there was no give to that grip at all.
She tried reasoning with her adversary. “Karen, I know you’re in there somewhere. Please fight against whatever’s got you and let go of me.”
There was a brief silence.
And then the hands gripping her foot yanked hard on it. Simone fell to the floor, landing hard on her ass. The impact sent another jolt of pain shooting through her back and had an amplifying effect on the still-throbbing ache in her head. But she couldn’t allow herself to be incapacitated by the pain. It could mean the difference between life and death. Though Simone still couldn’t see her—couldn’t see anything—she sensed Karen was on her feet now.
The other girl started dragging her across the floor. Simone didn’t know what Karen had in mind, but she was sure whatever it was wasn’t anything beneficial to her well-being. That ghoul in the Santa suit was still around somewhere. Maybe she was being taken to him. In desperation, Simone slapped at the uneven floor planks, her gloved fingers digging for purchase, but they just kept sliding over the wood.
She had been dragged at least several feet by the time she reached out with her left arm and felt her fingers grasping the contours of what felt like a human face. So there was yet another person in here with her, someone prone and unmoving on the floor. This could only be Spence or Bradley. Her palm went to the unseen person’s mouth. The glove covering her skin made it impossible to tell for sure, but whoever it was didn’t seem to be breathing. Given the position of the possible corpse relative to where she thought the door was, it was likely what she’d tripped over after running into the room. Her hand came away from the disconcertingly still features of the face as she was dragged another several inches closer to the door.
“Karen, please stop,” she said, her voice cracking slightly on the last word. “Where are you taking me?”
Another giggle.
“To see daddy. You’ve been a bad girl and he needs to punish you. Just like he punished me.”
Simone supposed “daddy” was the wasted-looking ghoul in the Santa suit. An anguished whimper escaped her trembling lips. “Please don’t.”
The thing controlling Karen’s body made a tsk-tsk sound deep in its throat. “You shouldn’t snivel so. It’ll just make daddy even more upset. You need to stop your crying and take your medicine like a big girl.”
Simone tried rolling hard to one side in an effort to loosen the creature’s grip on her. That didn’t happen, but she was able to grab onto the leg of the unmoving body next to her. The creature tightened its grip on her ankles and heaved with all its might, pulling her another couple feet along the floor. Simone’s hand slid farther down the leg, failing to find purchase until her fingers closed around its ankle. She held on as tightly as she could and was rewarded with a grunt of frustration from the thing controlling Karen.
“Let go of the dead meat, bitch,” the creature said, reverting to the low, grating tone it’d used earlier after having switched briefly to Karen’s normal speaking voice. “Daddy doesn’t like it when his children try to get out of getting what they’ve got coming.”
Instead of letting go, Simone rolled hard to her left again and hooked her other arm around the leg she now knew belonged to Spence. She could tell by the way the cuff of the jeans leg was stuffed inside the thick winter boot. Bradley had been wearing similar boots, but not with the jeans tucked inside them like that. She felt a sharp pang of loss at knowing her boyfriend was dead. The hurt went deeper than she would have expected, overriding and rendering irrelevant the aggravation he’d caused her earlier. She thought of how much his mother had loved her only son—way more than Simone ever had, she knew—and imagined the look on the sweet old lady’s face when she found out he was dead.
It made her angry.
But that anger was forgotten in the next instant as the thing possessing Karen screeched at her, a shrill, high-pitched sound that was more insectoid than human. It was unsettlingly similar to the grating whine made by cicadas in the height of summer. It was like needles repeatedly being driven into her eardrums. It filled the room and temporarily obliterated awareness of anything else.
And then it stopped. “Fine,” the creature said, again switching back to Karen’s regular voice. “If you won’t come to daddy, daddy can come to you.”
It relinquished its hold on her ankles and padded softly away. A moment later, Simone heard a click as the door lock was turned. This was followed by a creaking of hinges as the door was pulled open. Still cognizant of the inadvisability of complacency—a probable death sentence—Simone let go of her dead boyfriend’s leg and scrambled to her feet.
Breathing heavily and facing in the general direction of the door, she stood there a moment and wondered how she might defend herself. She was still backed into a corner with nowhere to go except back out into the hallway, which was no real option at all, not with what was waiting for her out there. The boards on the windows meant she couldn’t get out that way. She could maybe crawl under the bed, but that would just be delaying the inevitable. No, she had to stand here and somehow fight back against these demons or whatever they were. But the how of that was still eluding her. These things were manifestations of some primal evil force. They were stronger than her, no question. She had no hope of defeating them, but getting past them…yeah, maybe she could do that.
But it was going to take a lot of luck and more than a little courage. More than that, she needed some kind of defensive weapon. Something she could use to fend them off long enough to slip by them and run out of the house. But what she might use was another big question mark. Not being able to see a goddamn thing in this perfect blackness wasn’t helping matters any.
Then she thought of something.
She dropped to her knees and felt around on the floor until she found Spence’s body again. Patting his jeans, she found his phone in his right hip pocket. She dug it out, swiped at the screen, and almost cried out in joy when it lit up. The feeling faded when she saw the massive puncture wound in the middle of his chest. Even in the meager light provided by the screen, it looked hideous. Her eyes watered as a whimper rose up inside her.
Then she heard voices out in the hallway. And footsteps, coming closer.
No time for grief. Not now.
She tapped in Spence’s security code and swiped at the screen again, pulling up expanded menu options. The flashlight icon appeared. She tapped it and a bright light projected from the bulb at the back of the phone. Muttering a silent prayer of thanks to poor, dead Terry for reminding her about the flashlight utility, she got to her feet and aimed the light at the open doorway.
It was empty for a moment.
And then the thing in the decaying Santa suit appeared in that open space, its rotten lips twisting in a gruesome mockery of a smile. The big axe was still clutched in its hands, the blade wet with the blood of her dead friends. She hadn’t seen Bradley yet, but she assumed he was also no longer among the living.
It’s just me, she thought. I’m the only one left.
Except, no, that wasn’t quite true. Karen was still alive, it seemed, or at least her body was. Maybe her consciousness was still locked away somewhere in there, maybe not, but Simone had no idea how to free her from that prison and it wasn’t exactly her top priority here, which was saving her own ass.
The Santa-ghoul took a single step into the room.
Karen entered behind him and moved off to the left in an apparent flanking maneuver. The thing inhabiting her body
made her mouth stretch wider than it ever normally would, causing the flesh at the corners to split open and leak blood. And now it shook its head and spoke in that low, grating way again. “Daddy’s not happy with you. He says he would have gone easier on you if you’d come to him willingly. But now he’s gonna chop you into a thousand tiny little pieces.”
The Santa-ghoul chuckled and took another step into the room.
Karen edged closer, too.
Simone backed away, taking care to avoid bumping up against the bed. She remained determined to fight, but the essential problem remained the same—there was nowhere to go and she had no way to defend herself.
Then, in the midst of her deepening terror, she became aware of those boisterous voices ringing out from somewhere outside of the house. These were the same voices she’d heard upon her return to consciousness. She had no idea who those people were, but summoning them might be her last hope.
She backed up another few steps.
Then she opened her mouth wide, sucked in a big breath, and screamed with every ounce of lung power she had.
10.
When several minutes passed with no response to their shouted directives to vacate the premises from anyone inside the house, Luke realized they would need to enter the house and perhaps bodily remove the trespassers. Not being in the best shape after several years of letting himself go, he didn’t relish the idea of a physical confrontation. Greg was also no longer quite in his physical prime, though his rate of decline wasn't quite so advanced. Some of these kids might be big jock types in no mood to be pushed around by a couple of drunken old guys in their mid-thirties.
Greg scowled when Luke voiced this concern. “Oh, don’t be such a pussy. You’re not so old.”
Luke grunted. “I feel old.”
“But you’re not. You’ve just been lost in the wilderness for a long time. It’s fucked up your perspective.”