Turning, he walked back into the living room, and knelt next to the cushion beside Scott’s head. He ran the towel over Scott’s forehead, wiping away the cold lines of water that pooled beneath his hairline, dripping toward his brow. His breathing was slow and rhythmic, only interrupted by a wheezing, dry cough every couple of minutes. He couldn’t remember whether he was supposed to bring him back to temperature rapidly, or if he needed to do it slowly. It had been more than fifty years since he had actually practiced medicine, but he knew that prudence was the best course of action when it came to any form of treatment.
The color slowly rose in Scott’s face, the turnip-red, chapped skin fading to a more pinkish hue, the bright blue rings that rimmed his eyes tapering into a more normal brown. Crawling alongside the body, Harry peeled back the blankets that covered the toes, checking the fluorescent-red digits for frostbite. While not obvious at first, as the toes warmed beside the fire, he could tell that they were going to be fine.
“Thank heaven for small favors,” he said, covering the feet and creeping along the floor to where Scott’s head rolled slowly from side to side, his eyelids batting as he struggled to regain consciousness.
“Mmphrm,” Scott groaned, his lips peeling back from his bared teeth. His gums were a sickly shade of gray.
“Try not to talk,” Harry said, stroking the man’s forehead with the dampening towel. “Your body needs to rest.”
With a jolt, Scott’s eyes opened wide, a quick breath bursting through his clenched teeth. He sat upright, his head whipping from side to side as he tried to make sense of the situation.
“Where am I?” he shouted, panting, his eyes threatening to roll back into his head.
“You’re at my house,” Harry said calmly. “You just showed up at the door.”
Scott turned to look at him, his brow furrowing while he fought for recognition. Slowly, his look assuaged, his eyes softening. He laid his head back on the pillow. His eyes closed with a will of their own, and he spoke in a whisper.
“I saw him…”
“Saw who?”
“Don’t know… killed Brian…”
“Don’t talk now,” Harry said. “You need to get your rest.”
“Tore him in half…”
“Shhh.”
Scott slipped back into the unconscious, his lips parting for his open mouth to breathe.
Harry stared at him, wanting to know… no, needing to know more. But he knew that he was going to have to wait, as whatever Scott had been through that night was obviously something incredibly taxing, on both his mind and his body.
The kettle whistled from the kitchen, the ringed lids bouncing up and down as the steam burst past it. Rising, he walked into the kitchen and grabbed a potholder from next to the stove, using it as a buffer between his hand and the scalding wooden handle. Walking it over to the sink, he set it down on the Formica, pulling two mugs from the cupboard above. Pouring the tea into the mugs, he set the kettle in the sink and grabbed the mugs by the handles, walking back into the living room.
He set the mugs on the floor, waiting for them to cool, and walked back toward the kitchen, slipping down the hallway into his bedroom. He opened the closet door and changed into a button-down shirt and a pair of slacks. Stepping into a pair of slippers, he wandered into the hallway and took his first left into his study.
He flipped the light switch and walked straight to the back of the room to the desk, pulling open the top drawer. Producing a thick black leather-bound notebook, a pen lodged in the spiral spine, he walked out of the room, turning off the light. He rounded the doorway, and headed back to the kitchen. Sitting on the floor next to Scott, he opened the book to the most recent entry and brought the pen to the page.
He began to write; his cursive tightly jumbled and most likely only legible within his own mind. He wrote down every word that Scott had said as best as he could recall, glancing up at the clock atop the mantle to note the time.
The whole house moaned as the wind seemed to rock it from side to side, a loud thunk coming from the hall closet where something fell from the shelf to the floor, banging against the closed door. Harry flinched, the noise catching him off guard.
The wind ripped the decaying shingles from the roof, dragging them across the wooden surface like fingernails, before tossing them into the rapidly piling snow in the yard. A shutter broke free from its bracket beside one of the windows off the main room, slamming repeatedly against the side of the house, threatening to break through the glass.
Leaping to his feet, Harry raced to the window, sliding up the bottom pane of glass. He grabbed the shutter, not knowing what exactly he was going to do with it once he had it, but sure that the last thing he needed was for it to shatter the window. He gripped it tightly, the fierce wind struggling to tear it from his grasp. There was a loud creaking noise, and then a metallic snap. The wind tore the shutter from the siding and wrenched it from his grasp. It landed atop the snow, the wind picking it up and tossing it into the air several times before it caught in the cluster of branches of one of the evergreen shrubs.
There was movement out there, in the night. Barely visible behind the mat of flakes that filled the sky, but he could tell that it was there. A dark shape stood in front of the cluster of spruces that lined the back of the yard. It was barely visible, and only for a moment as the swirling snow washed it away, leaving only the emptiness of the night.
Closing the window, he pulled his body back through. Glancing one last time across the yard, he pulled the curtains tight, settling back into his seat on the floor. He had just begun to write in his notebook when Scott spoke.
“How did I get here?”
“You tell me.”
“The last thing I remember, I was wandering down the road, trying to keep my arms across my chest so as not to lose any more heat.”
Harry paused, nibbling the inside of his lip.
“What did you see?” he asked, peering up over the top of his notebook.
“I saw him rip Brian in half,” he said, a puzzled look sweeping across his face. “No, I didn’t see him. Brian just floated up into the air and was ripped apart.”
“Who’s Brian?”
“An old friend from when I was younger. Brian James. I haven’t really talked to him in… well, a long time.”
“Start at the beginning, and spare no detail,” Harry said, raising a mug from the floor and handing it to Scott, who sipped loudly.
Harry wrote in his journal, abbreviating everything that Scott said so that he could get it all down without forcing him to pause. His eyes never left the page as Scott spoke, starting with lying in bed trying to sleep. The lines of wear on his forehead deepened, creasing into furrows of shadow on his pale face cast by the dancing light from the flickering fire.
“… And then I just woke up here,” Scott finished, setting the mug back on the floor and looking at Harry.
Setting the notebook down on the floor and closing the cover, Harry rubbed his eyes and stared at Scott, whose heavy eyelids drooped half way over his irises. Sighing, Harry rose from the floor and walked into the kitchen.
“Get some rest,” he said without turning around. “We’ve got a busy day ahead of us tomorrow.”
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THE BLOODSPAWN
Michael McBride
© 2004 Michael McBride. All rights reserved.
PART EIGHT
Section 8
X
Monday, November 14th
11 a.m.
Scott turned the handles on the wall, the water that steamed from the nozzle slowing to a drip. Opening the opaque glass door, the stepped out onto the blue bath mat and hurriedly dried himself with his towel. Wiping a small spot on the steam covered mirror, he combed his hair and slipped into his boxers, hustling o
ut of the bathroom and into his bedroom.
Harry was waiting downstairs for him to change. After allowing Scott to sleep until close to ten, he had brought him home so that he could change his clothes and freshen up. His body still resonated with a dull ache from the exposure to the cold the night before, the throbbing in his head slowly subsiding. The shower had definitely helped; the hot water soaking through his tender flesh had been nothing short of divine. He knew how lucky he was that he hadn’t been frostbitten, but he felt far more fortunate than that as the image of his old buddy Brian being ripped to shreds right in front of his eyes had burned a permanent scar into his mind, rising up constantly. His brain choked back the image, but it was never very far off, appearing from out of nowhere every time he closed his eyes long enough to blink.
Grabbing a button down shirt and a tie from where they hung in the closet, he slipped right into the shirt, dangling the tie around his neck. Producing a pair if slacks from another hanger, he hopped into them, tucking in the shirt before buttoning them up. He tied the hanging tie, knotting it loosely beneath his chin. Walking over to the dresser, he pulled out a balled pair of socks and pulled them up to his calves, shuffling along the plushly carpeted floor to the closet and slipping into a nice pair of black leather shoes. Running his hands through his hair, he opened the bedroom door and stepped out into the hall.
He could see Harry sitting down in the living room at the bottom of the stairs, straight ahead. One of Scott’s large, rolled blueprints from atop his drafting table in the corner of the living room was spread out across his lap, and he was staring down at it quite intently, his eyes squinted as he tried to discern the thin contrast of the powder blue paper. He looked up briefly as Scott bounded down the stairs, before returning his attention back to the page.
“Well?” Scott said, grabbing his coat from the closet in the entryway.
“Just a minute,” Harry mumbled, his brow furrowing. He traced a line on the paper with his right index finger.
“What are you looking at?”
He walked into the living room and looked over Harry’s shoulder at the slightly crumpled blueprint.
“Does this show all of the tunnels beneath this area?” Harry asked.
“That’s just the location of the old mines around here. We have to be careful where we build or any one of these houses could just fall straight into the ground,” Scott said, pointing down at the plan. “You see, all of these mines have been collapsed and refilled—”
“All of them?”
“Everything that you see on this map.”
“So there could be others that aren’t on this map, or tunnels leading from one to the next.”
“Sure, this map has to be close to as old as I am.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt. Go ahead and say what you were going to.”
“All I was really going to say was that we have to be particularly careful where we place any houses or anything else of significant weight, as, even though these mines were filled, the dirt and rock that they used to fill them hasn’t settled quite right yet. The ground could just sink right beneath it, causing a house to crumble, or as you can see in some of the older neighborhoods to the south of here, driveways could fall right in, as could any of the streets. In the neighborhood I grew up in, barely fifteen minutes from here, you would see these driveways where the cement had fallen close to twenty feet into a gaping hole beneath the driveway. There was this one that I remember quite vividly, where the hole just opened up beneath the two cars they had parked in their driveway. You could barely see those things down there in the darkness.
“It was kind of cool as a kid, but as a builder, it’s really nothing you want to mess with. All of our houses were built away from the sealed mine shafts. The only ones on that blueprint in this development we built around so that they are beneath the sidewalks, and the park, neither of which has any reason to have enough weight on them to cause them to suddenly settle.”
“Interesting,” Harry said, rolling the blueprint back up and clambering off of the couch. “Does that concern you at all?”
“It would take nothing short of a seismic event to trigger these things to collapse with that little weight on them. The neighborhood I grew up in, Raven Hills, was basically built onto a hillside, the mines nearly carving the hills hollow, but there were only a few properties that actually ever had any problems. And while those properties seemed to have the same problems every five years, none of the others appeared to settle in the slightest.”
Harry walked across the living room and set the rolled blueprint next to the line of others atop the table, flipping off the switch atop the overhanging lamp.
“I didn’t see that tunnel that you said you were in last night on that little map,” Harry said, brushing past Scott and towards the stairs leading down into the family room.
“Hmm,” Scott muttered, gnawing slightly on the inside of his lower lip.
The two passed through the family room, heading toward the garage. Opening the door, the two stepped down the pair of stairs onto the cement pad of the garage.
“Do you have any flashlights?” Harry asked, staring curiously at the stacks of boxes that filled half of the garage.
Following his quizzical gaze, Scott volunteered, “I didn’t plan on living here as long as I already have. There’s no point unpacking just to have to repack after a year or so.”
“Sure,” Harry said, raising his eyebrows and his hands to his side.
“Oh yeah, flashlights.”
Scott slipped past the tightly stacked boxes and through the small wooden door behind them into the third garage. Flipping the light switch, he headed straight for the makeshift workbench consisting of a four by eight sheet of plywood braced atop three sawhorses. Rustling through the stack of tools and nails and screws, he produced a large, rechargeable flashlight, the adapter still wedged into the slot in the unit, the long white cord running straight up the wall and into the small square plug stuck in the outlet. Slipping it from the charger, he cradled it beneath his left arm, fishing for a second one that he knew was there. After a moment, he produced an old, plastic flashlight. It was nowhere near as modern and nice, just the cylindrical type with the two “D” sized batteries that drop straight down into the shaft, but as he verified by flipping up the white, sliding switch, it worked.
Heading back into the main garage, he closed the door behind him and held up the lights for Harry to see. Pressing the button on the garage door opener mounted to the right of the stairs on the wall, a loud rumbling sound ensued as the garage rolled upward against the ceiling. Harry stepped out onto the driveway, the flakes of snow bouncing into the garage from the blowing wind outside. Pressing the button one more time, Scott jogged to the end of the garage. Ducking his head and raising his left leg to step over the unseen line of the electric eye that would stop the garage if anything broke the laser line between the two units mounted to either side of the garage door, just inches above the floor.
Harry closed the driver’s side door of the old red and white Scout, leaning across to pop open the passenger side door for Scott. Transferring both flashlights to his left arm, he opened the door all the way and climbed up, closing the door with a loud thud that shook the car. His parents once had a Scout when he was growing up, and he had noticed, even way back then, that all of them had a similar smell. He wasn’t sure whether it came from the fiberglass shell of the rear portion roof, or from the black tape that ringed the roll bars, but it always smelled like the cars were thirty years old and had been kept submerged in water and then used to tan leather.
Harry backed out of the driveway, heading through the neighborhood. The Realtors were out there in droves once again, working their tails off for that seven to ten percent commission. That thought was somewhat comforting, but Scott was hardly able to steer his mind from the task at hand for more than a few seconds. They were going to go back into the tunnels he had been in last night. At first it had seemed like a compl
etely terrible idea, but now that he was somewhat used to the thought, it scared him senseless.
Turning out of the development, they headed west on the thinning, snow-covered road. The midday sun peered out briefly from behind the swelling storm clouds, only to disappear even more rapidly behind a wave of dark clouds, the precursor to the line of black that rolled over the rocky peaks to the west.
Pulling off the side of the road onto the snowy meadow, the car idled for a moment as the two stared at the house. With a sigh, Harry killed the engine and opened the door. Reaching into the back seat, he pulled out a dark blue parka, the collar and rim of the hood lined with a thin layer of fake fur. Slipping into it behind the shield of the open door, he stepped back and closed it, the flakes making a scratching sound as they bounced off of the slick material. Following him around the front end of the car, Scott handed him the rechargeable flashlight and the two stood briefly at the base of the stairs leading up to the porch.
Harry turned to Scott, and with a brisk nod, the two ascended the stairs.
“You say you came straight out this door last night?” Harry asked, staring at the lock box engaged on the handle of the door.
“Yeah,” Scott responded, noting the same thing.
“All right then,” Harry said, fumbling for his keys.
Holding out his keychain, Harry flipped through the handful of keys until he found an old, brass key. Shoving it into the lock box, he yanked it off the doorknob with a loud thunk. He set it on the windowsill to the right of the door, which he slowly opened inward.
The stale smell of dust and the water that dripped from the ceiling through the walls and onto the floor, mildewing in the rotting wood, overwhelmed their nostrils. Much of the graffiti that covered the walls in the main room was illegible as the water had dampened the drywall to the point that it appeared like an abstract watercolor collage. The hardwood floor was warping, some of the seams peeling up and inward, the floor sounding as if it could just crumble beneath their weight.
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