The Spook House (The Spook Series Book 1)

by Paul Emil

“Identify!” I screamed.

  The bloody head struggled to look up at me. I barely recognized the ravaged face through the blood and tears.

  “Stillman!”

  “Abe! Oh, dear God. Help me! You gotta get me out of here! Abe!”

  Stillman raised his bloody hand. I almost instinctively reached for it, but something held me back. My instincts were at war with each other. This was a teammate. Hell, he was a human being. I could not stand by and watch him suffer. But at the same time, I would not cross that threshold. It might as well have been the door between life and death itself. I knew that once I crossed the line, there was no going back.

  “Abe!” Stillman cried.

  “Just … just come out the door,” I said. “Just a little further.”

  “Abe, don’t leave me,” Stillman wailed.

  “I … I won’t,” I insisted. “Just come out the door! You can do it!”

  “Help me,” Stillman whimpered. His raised hand was shaking. I noticed, however, that it never left the threshold of the door.

  Suddenly, his body, only visible from his chest up, was jerked into the darkness like a swimmer being yanked under the surface by a shark.

  “HELP ME!” Stillman screamed.

  He looked up at me as his face, body, and head were pulled back into the dark pool. His bloody hand clawed the air, still reaching out for mine as it too disappeared into the blackness.

  Then there were the sounds – sounds of Stillman screaming, and other noises I couldn’t quite identify. Then the crunching sounds began. And the ripping sounds. Wet, smacking sounds. The din of something slithering or skittering around in ooze.

  To hell with Coles’s warning. I aimed my gun and unloaded it into the darkness beyond the door. Yelling like an insane animal, I sprayed the area in every direction. If Stillman were still alive and I hit him, good. It was my final act of mercy. If I hit anything else, even better.

  I hosed the area with bullets until the gun ran out. I let it fall from my fingers and picked up one of the others slung across my back.

  The hideous noises from beyond the door stopped. Everything was silent now, as silent and still as when I first discovered the door. Emotionally and physically drained from the adrenaline rush, I staggered back from the portal. For the first time, I noticed the words carved into the stone wall above it: “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here”.

  I knew immediately where I had seen that before. I had this fruity, New Age-type English teacher in high school who was so hopped up on Dante that he made us read the whole Divine Comedy. I knew exactly what this was.

  “The gateway to Hell!? You’ve got to be freakin’ kidding me!”

  It didn’t make any sense. But with a growing horror, I realized, suddenly, it all made sense.

  Something dripped on to my face. I pointed my light up to the cave ceiling. The stalactites overhead looked different – smoother, flatter, and with a strange, wet sheen to them. It took my brain several seconds to process what I was looking at. They weren’t stone stalactites. They were rows of giant, triangular teeth, all adrip with ichor. More were pushing down from the roof of the “mouth,” as well as up from the ground.

  Something in my brain snapped. When the floor felt spongy, I started screaming. Air reeking of blood exhaled out of the portal opening.

  I started shooting everything. The whole “room” flinched in response. I slipped and fell to the ground. On my back, I posted my hand on the ground. It was soft and slippery. I looked up at the teeth coming down.

  “God help me!” I screamed.

  “God can’t help you now,” came the response. “He’s not here.”

  The voice was raspy. It was not like a human voice, but more like a rush of air, a hiss, or a whisper. It was the nightmare voice at the other end of terrifying phone call waking you up in the dead of night.

  My body started involuntarily shaking. My anus was sputtering. If there that been anything in there, I would have crapped my pants. I was soaked with a chilling sweat like a person jolting awake from a nightmare.

  The voice said God wasn’t here, and I believed it. So who was? The Devil? I could almost believe that, but I know her, and this was not her style. This whatever-it-was was not the Devil. It was something else.

  Foul saliva dripped off of the fangs. It burned the skin of my arm. I dropped the gun. The teeth were dripping digestive fluids. The tongue-like floor undulated.

  I instinctively shouted, “Ashira!”

  If I were really at the Devil’s door, she should hear me.

  Something stung my arm. I looked down. A giant tooth protruding from the floor had cut me with its serrated edge. I pulled my arm away. It was wet and warm. The blood dripped to the ground. The ground squirmed, invigorated by the taste of blood.

  “Ashira! Help me!”

  There was no response.

  “Can anybody hear me?” I cried.

  To my relief and horror, I got my answer.

  24

  “I can hear you,” said a woman’s sexy voice.

  “Fuck! Ashira! Is that you?”

  I already knew the answer. I had called her, but somehow, I both did and didn’t expect her to respond.

  A flame flickered in the darkness beside me. It momentarily revealed a tall woman with long red hair. She was lighting a cigarette with her fingertip. The flame disappeared, plunging the spot into total darkness again.

  The tongue-like floor trembled and knocked me closer to being swallowed by the portal to Hell.

  “Ashira! Help me!”

  “Now why should I do that?”

  “Because … Because … you owe me!”

  The smoldering end of the cigarette flared up in the dark, as did two other points of light that must have been the pupils of her eyes.

  Ashira said, “Stop.”

  The mouth of the monster froze, and I realized she wasn’t speaking to me. I was standing in a cave again.

  Ashira stepped into the tiny pool of light given off by my remaining lantern. She stood uncomfortable close. She was wearing her red “slutty lawyer” business suit. The hem of the dress was unprofessionally high and the buttons of her shirt were largely undone, leaving a gaping opening that showed an excessive amount of cleavage. She was beautiful.

  “Jacob,” she said in a soothing voice. “It’s been a long time.”

  I didn’t know if I should be flattered or freaked out.

  She sucked on her cigarette and blew out a plume of smoke. It had a familiar aroma of cannabis.

  She held the joint out to me and said, “Wanna hit?”

  I stared at the rolled paper in her beautiful hand with the long fingers and nails. Of course I wanted a hit.

  “Well, get it over here,” I said.

  I took the joint out of her hand, brought it to my lips, and inhaled. Oh my God that was good. I blew the smoke out. I felt my muscles relaxing, and my heartbeat slowing. The drug made it almost impossible not to be relaxed.

  I took a deep breath. “That’s good shit,” I said, exhaling. Then I put the buds back to my mouth.

  “Hey, don’t bogart that!” Ashira joked. I passed the joint back to her. She took a hit and laughed.

  For a moment, I almost forgot where I was. I was happy, smoking weed with an old friend I hadn’t seen for a long time.

  “Well, Jacob, I’m not going to ask you what you’ve been up to, because I know. You’re in the Army now. I didn’t figure you for the military-type.”

  “Why not?” I said, slightly offended.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I mean, the military? Really? How is that going to get you laid?”

  “There’s more to life than just fucking things,” I said seriously.

  Ashira and I looked at each other and started busting up.

  “Oh Jacob,” she said, “You still amuse me.”

  I was falling under her spell again. She was so charming.

  “Ashira, what’s going on here?”

  I look around. The cave lo
oked normal again. I saw water dripping off of some the stalactites. I was beginning to wonder if I had freaked out again like I did upstairs with Paco and Dubois. I mean, here I was, talking to the Devil in person. Again.

  “Ashira,” I said, struggling to speak the question. “Am I insane?”

  She said, “If you’re sane enough to ask that question, then the answer is probably no.”

  I waited for more. She added, “Truly insane people don’t ask themselves that, because they don’t have the self-awareness to think that there might be a problem.”

  “So what’s going on here? Is this really the gate to Hell?” I said with disgust. “Is this your idea of a good time?”

  “Oh no, I’m not responsible for this, although I do admire the work that’s being done here,” she said. “Human beings come up with more creative versions of Hell than I ever could. You never fail to surprise me.”

  “So what’s really going on here?”

  The tiny lights in Ashira’s eyes seemed to flare up again in excitement as she smiled and said, “I think you know.”

  I thought back to what Paco and Dubois said.

  I said, “They’re testing drugs on us.” It was both a statement and a question.

  “Well of course they are!” Ashira said.

  “But … we’re Americans!” I blurted out.

  Ashira started laughing so hard she was in tears.

  “Oh Jacob, that’s a good one. ‘We’re Americans.’ Classic.”

  She composed herself and said, “‘We’re Americans. We’re the good guys.’ That always makes me laugh.”

  I didn’t think that was funny. Ashira looked at me darkly and said, “We’re Americans. And America doesn’t torture people.”

  I got her point and I said, “But my team ... We weren’t terrorists, or even terrorist suspects. Why would the Army go after us? We’re the fucking troops! We’re on the same side!”

  From somewhere in my shadowy halls in my mind, I heard a ghost from the past. It was a platoon leader in boot, telling the new recruits to obey orders and not to piss anyone off, because “shit happens” and “The military is not some great brotherhood of man.”

  I was still resisting Ashira’s assertions, however right she might be. I shot back, “Why would they do this to us?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Ashira said. “Are any of you particularly valuable to the Service?”

  I didn’t say anything. She went on.

  “Are any of you particularly educated or trained? Do they have a lot invested in you?”

  A voice in my head said, “No,” but I didn’t let it come out of my mouth.

  “What about your families? Are any of you going to be missed?”

  I was about to say yes without hesitation, then she added, “… by a lot of people?”

  The answer was no. Nobody in the unit was that into school. Most of us were on military probation, in fact. None of us were married. Nobody had any kids that I knew of. The only family members who would really miss me would be my dad and my dog.

  Feeling like I had lost ‘the mental game,’ as they call it in fight training, I gave up. Ashira’s arguments were too strong. She was right.

  “So what you’re saying is, ‘They used us.’”

  “If you’re going to act surprised that the military threw away lives of its own people to achieve some pointless objective, then I’m outta here,” Shiva said. “This little exercise wasn’t a mistake. Your team didn’t die because somebody fucked up. They died on purpose. They died because your superiors wanted you all to die. They wanted to see if their drug could make you violent and crazy enough to kill each other. And guess what? It did! It works!”

  My “superiors.” The word made me want to spit. The very idea sickened me. It was like getting laid off by a boss who was making big bucks, and then finding out that he got a bonus. He wanted to improve the bottom line. So what was his answer? Cut people at the bottom, naturally.

  I felt used. The organization I had served had cast me into the abyss and watched me go down. What they didn’t know was, I personally knew the monster at the bottom, and I had a free pass. Now I was clawing my way out. I was going to make it out, and when I did, I was going to find them and throw them into the pit.

  “I’m going to get them,” I said, to myself more than to Ashira.

  “Excellent,” Ashira said, her eyes flaring with excitement. “Tell me what you want.”

  “I want …”

  I stopped. I reminded myself to think of Ashira as an evil genie who might interpret the wish literally but not as I intended.

  “I want freedom,” I said. That felt right, and I didn’t see anyway that wish could be screwed up.

  “OK,” the Devil said quickly, wanting to dispense with that and get to the good stuff. “And?”

  “I want to make them pay,” I said coldly. The lights in Ashira’s eyes flared as she smiled. She was excited. This type of thing turned her on.

  “You want revenge,” she said, breathing heavily.

  “I want justice,” I said.

  “Same thing,” she said, “usually.”

  I didn’t argue. I clarified my statement. “I want to get them. I want to shut them down, and I want to make sure they can’t do anything like this to anybody else. I want them to go down.”

  “That sounds like revenge to me,” the Devil said, delighted.

  “Justice,” I corrected.

  “Well,” she said with sly smile, “Whatever you call it, I think I can help you with that.”

  –––––

  Ashira put her marijuana cigarette back to her lips. Its orange tip burned brightly. She removed it, turned her head, and blew out a flume of smoke.

  “Want another hit before we get to work?”

  “Hell yeah.”

  She passed it over.

  I took so many puffs off of it I started to feel light-headed, like I was a balloon that might float away.

  “Easy there, Big Guy,” she said. “That’s not crap. It’s the good stuff.”

  “The good stuff from Hell,” I said, amused. I started giggling at my own humor.

  “Look, I’ve got a plan, but you’ve got to start moving. Are you ready?”

  I momentarily thought my situation. I was trapped in this “house” where I had watched my teammates (that I was in charge of) kill each other. I was covered in their blood. I was now in a nearly pitch black cavern, smoking pot, standing by the gate to Hell and talking to Satan about how I had been betrayed and drugged. Now we were planning how we were going to get out and get even.

  Modern vocabulary didn’t even have a term to describe the mental state I was in. So I said, “Yeah, I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”

  “Good,” Ashira said. “Let’s go.”

  25

  Ashira took another puff on the joint. Then she moved the rolled marijuana away from her lips and looked at it in her hand, as if admiring it. Suddenly, the whole joint burst into flames. There was no look of surprise or pain on her face. She had no expression at all, except maybe a slight smile. She looked at me casually as the paper burned away to nothing. Her fingertips were on fire, making her hand look like an eerie candelabrum in a haunted house.

  “OK,” she said, “Let’s go.”

  She slipped past me and started walking. I followed her cautiously. My eyes were drawn to her hips as they swayed back and forth as she walked. At some point we arrived at the creaky stairs. Ashira led the way out. Two steps up and her ass was at eye level. As if reading my mind, she said, “You know, sometime when you’re back home, we should hook up.”

  When you’re back home. I liked the sound of that.

  I didn’t even have the mental strength to think about that. I just said, “OK. Whatever. I’ll think about that if I ever get out.”

  “Oh, you’ll get out,” she said. “Do what I say and you’ll get out. Your bosses are going to want to talk with you, and when they do, I’ll be there.”

 
I said cheerlessly, “Sounds good to me.”

  At the top of the stairs, I could smell the blood. The bodies were all still there on the landing, in the exact same positions they were in when I left them. Somehow, that surprised me. I knew that my friends were all dead. They weren’t going anywhere. Still, I expected the bodies to be gone.

  As the ultimate storyteller, my brain spun stories and showed visions of what had become of the bodies. The house itself consumed them. In another tale, the bodies now wandered the halls. Or they were dragged off by dark, nameless things or carried away by faceless men in HazMat suits.

  I looked at the front door. Ashira saw me looking at it and said, “No.”

  I was about to protest, and she said, “We’re not done. You want my help, right?”

  I didn’t know. I looked at my dead friends and a part of me said yes, but I wasn’t sure.

  Ashira stood in front of me and said, “Jacob, look at me.”

  I looked at her. I looked into her eyes. There was a trace of something there that I couldn’t quite identify. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was concern.

  “Jacob,” she said, “Say you leave now. What do you think is going to happen if you stagger out of that front door, doped out of your mind, carrying a machine gun?”

  On a screen in my mind, I watched a movie of myself standing outside of the house in front of the porch. Red dots from laser sights swarmed over me like angry bees from Hell. Another step forward, and my body jerked and shook violently as it was torn apart by bullets.

  “But, if I left without the gun …” I offered.

  “Oh please,” Ashira said. “They’ll lock you up. They’ll run all sorts of tests on you and watch everything you do. When the drugs are finally out of your system, or when you no longer interest them, they’ll lock you up indefinitely. They’ll call you crazy, so nobody will believe anything you say. They’ll blame you for the deaths of your teammates. Or they might even say you killed all of these people yourself. Then they’ll just kill you and eliminate the problems posed by your survival. That would be the fastest and the easiest solution, after all.”

  Unfortunately, I knew Ashira was right, so I said to her, “What do we do?”