Grayland

by James Bierce

  Then it all stops, all but the screaming.

  The hand disappears, and the door stops shaking — then the sound of loud thumps can be heard as something falls down the stairs, and the building suddenly falls into an eerie silence.

  “What happened?” Christine whispers.

  “Shh, I hear something,” Beth responds.

  They all listen closely, and hear the faint footsteps of someone walking slowly down the staircase, followed by the closing of the front door.

  Larry steps back and stands with his gun aimed at the door. “Christine, move back around the corner for a minute.”

  “What’re you doing?” asks Beth.

  “Open the door, then stand back out of the way.”

  Beth watches as Christine sits down next to George, who’s now wide-awake, then she grabs the doorknob and takes a deep breath before unlocking the door and opening it all the way — ignoring his order to stand completely out of the way. At first she sees nothing but darkness, but as Larry’s light shines further down the stairs, she sees a trail of blood leading to three crumpled bodies scattered across the staircase. Immediately she looks to her side, where Amanda was sitting just moments ago, but now she sees nothing but a blanket on the floor, and the loose bindings of rope that were tied around her hands.

  “How did she kill them?” George asks, his voice weak but clear.

  “A knife — I’m not sure where she got one,” Larry answers, trying to keep his voice low enough for Beth and Christine to get some sleep.

  “But how…? There were several of them, right?”

  Larry is watching out the window, hoping that the faint moonlight will reveal just how many people are out wandering the streets, but he still doesn’t see anybody. Aside from a single coyote and a couple of owls, he hasn’t seen any signs of life in Grayland all night. “To be honest, I’m not really sure. Maybe it’s because she looks unsuspecting, or maybe she’s quicker than she looks, I really don’t know. I’m not even sure how the hell she came around so fast.”

  “You saw where she got out?”

  “Yeah, there’s an open window down the hallway.”

  “I’ve seen a few other people like her, and they won’t stop until you kill them.”

  “Yeah, we’ve seen a few of them as well.”

  “If she’s like the ones I’ve seen, she’ll come right for you eventually — and you’ll have to be ready when she does.”

  Looking out the window to the south, Larry can see an orange glow to the horizon that he assumed was the last remnants of a sunset earlier in the night — but it’s obviously too late for that now. “You mentioned a fire to the south, right?”

  “Yeah, down toward South Bend.”

  “Any idea how big it is?”

  “It has to be huge, we started seeing it several days ago. The smoke is pretty bad to the east.”

  Across the field on the other side of the church parking lot, Larry sees something moving toward them, a dark shadow that’s too large to be a cat or dog. It disappears into the trees for a moment, but when it comes out the other side, on the edge of the lot, he can clearly tell that it’s a person carrying something.

  “There’s someone out there,” he tells George.

  “Are they coming here?”

  “No, now they’re just standing in the parking lot, facing this way. I think they’re looking at me.”

  The person approaches their car, then begins pouring something onto the hood and down the sides. As the flames begin consuming the car, Larry can’t tell whether it’s Amanda or not, but they’re now staring directly at him, holding something long and narrow in their hands, like a pipe or baseball bat.

  “What’s going on?” asks George.

  “Someone just torched our car.”

  “If it’s her, you’re gonna have to kill her.”

  “I know, but it won’t be tonight. Don’t worry though, she’ll follow us north tomorrow.”

  “Why don’t you stay here for a day or two? You can figure out a plan.”

  “No, we have to get back. We have someone waiting for us.”

  George looks down at Christine, who’s finally fallen asleep. “You need to take Christine with you…”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m dying, I wouldn’t even make it down the stairs.”

  “You think she’ll leave without you?”

  “No, she won’t.”

  “So you want us to hang around until you die?”

  George points across the room. “See my backpack over there? There’s a small plastic bag inside.”

  Taking a quick glance outside again, where the person is still watching him, Larry then walks across the room and fishes through the backpack, finding a small bag with a dozen or so pills inside.

  “What are they?”

  “Can you get me a drink of water, please?”

  “First tell me what they are…”

  “I think you already know what they are.”

  Larry contemplates it for a minute, trying to come to terms with what he’s doing.

  “Christine had to watch her mother die a horrible death — I’m not going to force her to do the same with me.”

  Thinking of his own wife, Jennifer, and the agonizing final days watching her slip away from him, Larry hands the bag to George, then gives him a bottle of water. After chewing and swallowing every pill, he offers the bottle back to Larry.

  “That’s all right, keep it.”

  “You’ll take her then?”

  “Yeah, we’ll look out for her.” He looks back out the window, and sees the first glow of morning light appear in the east. The person, however, is nowhere to be seen — and the engulfed car is now mostly just a smoking skeleton of blackened steel. He takes a closer look at the town, noticing for the first time that there’s no broken windows or kicked in doors, and no bones scattered in the streets and sidewalks like the other places he’s seen and heard about. Aside from the young girl they’ve introduced to it, the town is exactly what they’ve been looking for.

  “Do you believe in God?” George asks, his voice slurring and sleepy.

  “I used to, before all of this. I think I still do.”

  “A little hard to have faith now, isn’t it?”

  “Well, it definitely raises a few questions, that’s for sure.” Larry looks down at George, whose eyes are filled with tears as he holds his sleeping daughter close to him. “I do believe though, as hard as that might be right now.”

  “And what about Amanda?”

  “What about her?”

  “Are you gonna find her?”

  “I don’t think I’ll need to — she’ll find us.”

  CHAPTER 14

  COHASSETT BEACH: DAY 5

  Curtis wakes up, startled by the sound of a slamming door, his head pounding from a splitting headache that becomes even worse when he opens his eyes. When he tries to reach for the back of his head where the pain seems to be originating from, he realizes that both of his hands are tied tightly to his side somehow.

  “Sarah…?”

  “She’s not here, Dad.”

  Curtis recognizes the voice as Matt’s, but he sounds hoarse. He opens his eyes slowly and looks around the room, seeing both of his sons huddled closely together on a bed, but only Matt has tears streaming down his face — Ben looks strangely calm in comparison. “Where is she?”

  “She went to the campground to get Jake’s bag.”

  “And where is Jake?”

  “I don’t know, he just left.”

  Curtis looks down and sees that his hands and feet are tied to the kitchen chair with rope, so tightly that he’s already beginning to lose feeling in his left hand. “Matt, where did he go?”

  Matt looks nervously out the window, as if he’s watching somebody.

  “Is he out there? Do you see him?” Curtis asks, still waiting for a reply.

  “No, I can’t see him.”

  “Matt, listen to me carefully… You
need to get me out of these ropes — right now, okay?”

  Matt begins to breakdown and cry, his entire body trembling with fear, then he backs further onto the bed and away from his father. Curtis wants more than anything to scream at him out of frustration, to demand that he stand up and act like a man instead of cowering in the corner like a child — but instead he takes a deep breathe and calms down, trying his best to remember that Matt is only barely thirteen, and under a tremendous amount of pressure for any age. He looks at Ben, hoping that he can get more of a reaction out of him, but Ben’s attention seems to be elsewhere, staring at the same window beside the door that Matt was a moment ago.

  “Ben, what are you looking at?”

  He simply points toward the window, saying nothing at all. Curtis turns his head around and can only catch a glimpse of what’s outside — a flickering orange light that’s dancing across the glass pane.

  “What is that? Is that a fire?”

  “He set the truck on fire when he left,” Ben says, his voice remarkably unaffected by the events.

  With his heart suddenly racing, Curtis desperately struggles to turn the chair around, then watches helplessly as the pickup and all of their possessions go up in flames right in front of him.

  “Ben, you need to get me free…” He glances behind him and sees Ben still staring at the truck. “Ben, do you hear me?”

  The boy points at the window again, this time looking genuinely concerned. “I think the fire is spreading…”

  Curtis looks outside again, seeing the same intense flames shooting up from the pickup as he saw before. Then something catches his eye — a few small sparks of embers floating down from the porch roof and onto the wooden deck below. He realizes that the fire has spread to the roof, and the sound of crackling wood can be heard overhead as the flames race across the needle-covered cedar shakes.

  “Ben, help me get out of this, now!”

  Sarah looks back at the cabin, which is only partially visible through the thick fog lingering in the air — and realizes that she doesn’t actually fear leaving the property, although she has every reason to. What terrifies her is leaving her sons in the care of a madman, and the fact that Curtis was still unconscious and possibly clinging to life when she left. Jake really gave her no other choice though — it was either this, or he promised to brutally murder her husband and boys while she was forced to watch, and from everything she’s witnessed so far, she has no reason to believe that he’s bluffing.

  Beth had told Sarah very little about Jake during their times together, since the pain of losing him still ran too deep to discuss — but what she did manage to share made him sound reasonable and thoughtful, she even called him the kindest person she’d ever met. The man still holding her family hostage, however, the man that forced himself into their lives and then threatened to destroy everything in it — that man seems anything but kind.

  The highway in front of her looks different from the one she’d walked on months before — this time the leaves on the maple trees are just starting to bud out, and the pavement is covered in thick pollen and dead fir needles that came down during the harsh winter storms. Her destination is to the north of here, between Cohassett and Westport — a campground that was once owned by Joseph Embree, the same mysterious man that built the Regency Hotel in Westport. While the campground never had the same rumors and controversy as the hotel, it did have its share of scandal in the months leading up to the Regency’s last closure. Sarah remembers hearing stories when she was a kid about the disappearance and presumed death of a young girl that was staying in one of the cabins, and the fact that the girl’s father was accused of the crime. Sarah remembers actually staying there with her family when she was young, and seeing the infamous cabin on the far south side of the grounds still boarded up after all those years — a futile attempt to keep the public from taking souvenirs of the crime scene.

  Making her way north, past the empty houses that her family has scoured in recent months, she can see the decaying human remains that Curtis warned her about, scattered on the front lawns and alongside the road. With the appearance of Jake in the neighborhood, and the bodies that Matt and Ben found in the ravine, it’s not much of a mystery as to how they ended up there. The real mystery is how long Jake has been in the area, and why it took him so long to finally make contact.

  It’s not until she reaches the outskirts of Cohassett nearly a mile away that she sees the first sign of human life — a middle-aged man wandering aimlessly through the woods to her right, talking to himself loudly as he crashes through the brush and wetlands. When he sees Sarah he stops talking and stands motionless in a bog halfway to his knees, watching her intently as she continues walking. She glances back at him a few times, worried that he might begin following her, but she can see him struggling against the mud as he tries hopelessly to move again.

  Shivering against the cold wind coming off of the water, she wonders why Jake was so insistent that she make the journey with only a thin shirt on. She knows from walking this route before that it could take her most of the afternoon to make it to the campground and back, and that’s if everything goes perfectly smooth with no distractions — something that seems increasingly unlikely the further down the road she travels. In late-October of last year, they saw absolutely no sign of people until they spent the night in Westport, and even then the people were skulking from one shadow to the next, afraid of even the dimmest of moonlight. This time, however, she’s startled by the number of people walking in broad daylight as she approaches the residential area of Cohassett. They’re clumsy, filthy, and slow — but they’re also persistent when it comes to pursuing whatever they find interesting. By the time she reaches the entrance to the campground she can count at least six people stalking her, the closest being about two-hundred feet away. She considers trying to lose them somewhere among the two-dozen cabins spread across the property, but she can already see the sun finding its peak in the sky above, and she knows that she’s quickly running out of time.

  Jake was excruciatingly vague when it came to what she was looking for, but there was one thing he made abundantly clear — she had until sundown to make it back to the cabin. Any later than that, and her family would be killed slowly and painfully. His demand was to find a nondescript bag that he’d left at one of the cabins, which was filled with something vitally important to him — but exactly what it is seems to be a guarded mystery.

  Seeing the worn-out faded sign along the highway, she turns and starts making her way down the driveway of the campground. It looks different than what she remembered, with knee-high grass surrounding each of the campsites and wild vines growing over the front gate. Looking down the row of cabins, all of them lined up with views of the sand dunes and not much else, she decides to search the one nearest to the driveway in hopes that Jake chose the most convenient one to stay at.

  She walks up onto the covered porch and reaches out to open the door, her hands shaking so much from the cold that she has a hard time actually gripping the knob — but then she thinks twice about simply barging in. Afraid she might be walking straight into a trap, she peers through the window first and spots something lying on the bed — a large white duffel bag with a logo on the side that says “Washington Start Department of Corrections”. Figuring that it must be Jake’s bag, and seeing nobody else inside, she reaches for the door handle again, concentrating on steadying her grip long enough to turn the knob and push on the door, but it doesn’t move. Not wanting to attract too much attention from the people on the road, she gives the door a firm shove, but it still doesn’t budge. As panic begins to set in, she begins hitting the door harder and harder, ignoring the attention that the noise is likely making. When it finally does give way, after repeated kicks, a loud crack echos through the campground as the thin wooden door splits in two and partially falls apart onto the floor just inside the entry. Suddenly aware of just how vulnerable her situation is, she spins around and looks toward the r
oad again, and this time sees at least two dozen people walking toward her from multiple directions.

  Carefully stepping over the broken slab of wood on the floor, Sarah rushes to the bed and tries to tear the duffel bag open, but then notices that it has a small padlock that’s sealing it shut. She also detects the strong odor of chemicals coming from inside, and a wet spot underneath it where something has leaked out. When she attempts to lift it off of the bed, however, she nearly falls over from the weight of it, and is left with no other choice but to drag it to the doorway. As she tries to pull the bag over the remains of the door, she catches the handle on a piece of splintered wood sticking up from the floor. Feeling the strain on her legs and arms, she begins yanking on the handle, seeing the fabric ripping apart with every pull — and then she hears the sound of someone stepping onto the porch behind her. She gives the bag one last tug before finally giving up on it, escaping into the single bedroom of the cabin instead.

  Once inside the dimly lit bedroom, where dark, filthy curtains cover the only window in the room, she locks the hollow-cored door and presses all of her weight against it. At first all she can hear is the sound of heavy rain beating down on the metal roofing overhead, but then she hears the unmistakable sound of clumsy footsteps on the other side of the door, and the heavy, labored breathing that always seems to accompany them.

  “Open the door…” comes the frail, crackling voice of a man, which catches Sarah off-guard.

  “You can speak?” she answers back.

  “Open… the door…” the voice answers back, the words slurring horribly.

  “If you can understand me, please let me go… I need to be somewhere else…”

  “Open!” they respond again, this time more forceful and angry.