Kill Creek

by Scott Thomas

  Sam was the first to excuse himself.

  While the others talked, he casually but quickly drank down the last of his beer. He held up the empty bottle.

  “Going for a refill. Anybody need anything?”

  Wainwright picked up his glass and rattled the ice.

  “I could use another. I’ll go with you.”

  He started to push himself up from the table, but Sam moved around to his side. “No, I can get it.”

  “Thanks, mate,” he said, handing the glass to Sam.

  Sam could feel Wainwright watching him as he moved into the dark hallway. And then the dining room was behind him, out of sight. Sam stepped into the light of the kitchen.

  Wainwright’s copy of Phantoms of the Prairie was still on the counter.

  Sam hurried across the kitchen and snatched up the book. He set Wainwright’s glass down next to the collection of liquor bottles, making sure his back was to the hallway, and opened the book.

  It looks like a textbook. He didn’t read it—he studied it.

  The book had been marked up in the same way that his students marked up the books for his class: the corners of pages dog-eared, various sentences and key phrases underlined or highlighted in yellow, random notes scribbled in the margins.

  He flipped through the book. The pages came to a hard stop halfway through, and something fell out, fluttering to the floor.

  Sam bent down and picked it up.

  It was a photograph. An original, by the looks of it. The color was fading, everything taking on a slightly jaundiced tone. In the photo, two women sat side by side, one on a rather uncomfortable-looking couch, and the other in a wheelchair. They both had black hair, although the woman in the wheelchair had her hair pulled back into a tight bun while the other let her dark locks fall like curtains around her face. In Wainwright’s penmanship, a name was written above each woman: “Rebecca” above the one in the wheelchair, and “Rachel” above the one on the couch.

  The Finch sisters.

  Rachel was staring straight at the camera, her dark eyes contrasted by the extreme paleness of her skin. Rebecca, though, was glancing at something to her left, something just out of view of the camera. A curious smile played at the corners of her thin lips.

  There was something familiar about them. Sam had heard many stories about them, but this was his first time seeing the sisters. Their faces struck a chord that Sam could not quite place.

  Their flesh. It seems too smooth. Artificial. Like clay or rubber. Like . . .

  “Wainwright’s face.”

  The sound of his own voice made Sam’s heart skip a beat.

  Sam slipped the photo into his back pocket and replaced the book on the counter. He was unscrewing the cap from the vodka bottle when he heard footsteps behind him.

  Wainwright stood on the edge of the light, a step in from the shadowy hallway.

  “Everything okay, Sam?”

  Sam conjured up a smile and nodded, hoping he wasn’t overplaying it. “Yeah. Fine. Just getting you that drink.”

  Wainwright nodded. “I think we’re ready to move to the living room. The interview will be starting soon.”

  Sam filled Wainwright’s glass to the halfway mark and carried it over to him.

  “Thanks, mate.”

  “No problem,” Sam said, but he did not release his hold on the glass.

  Wainwright cocked his head curiously. “Something wrong?”

  His face. It looks just like theirs.

  “No,” Sam said, letting Wainwright take his drink. “I’m good.”

  Wainwright had been quite busy before dinner, arranging the furniture in the living room to accommodate his guests, strategically placing it to encourage conversation. He had also started a fire in the living room’s large stone fireplace, which burned brightly as twilight wrapped the outside world in a wine-colored cocoon.

  Sam felt a hand touch his elbow. It was Moore beside him.

  “Check it out,” she said, motioning to the coffee table.

  A black iron candelabra sat at the center. Several wireless cameras were strapped to the candleholders, transforming the candelabra into a bizarre metal bug with five eyes, each trained exactly where a guest would be sitting. Hovering over the space was a boom microphone on a long, crooked arm. A cable ran from there to a makeshift command center of external hard drives and a notebook computer near the back of the room.

  Sam watched the others as they settled into their seats.

  Sebastian lazily swirled his Bordeaux. “So, Mr. Wainwright, when does this little production begin?”

  Wainwright checked his watch. “In about ten minutes. Seven thirty sharp.”

  “And until then?”

  “You relax. Enjoy your drinks. Make yourselves comfortable.”

  “Before the firing squad,” Moore muttered, her eyes on that multi-eyed creature on the coffee table.

  Ask him about the photo, Sam ordered himself.

  Not yet. Wait.

  “Something on your mind, Sam?” Wainwright asked.

  Sam hadn’t been aware he was staring at the young man. He shook his head. “No. Just getting my thoughts together, I guess.”

  Kate took a position close to her command center but still with a clear shot of each member of the group. She leaned back against the wall and busied herself with the camera in her hand.

  From a pile of wood just to the right of the fireplace, Wainwright grabbed two thick logs and set them carefully into the fire. The flames fed greedily, devouring the dry wood and growing higher and higher. The entire room flickered with their gluttony. The group sank deeper into their chairs and their drinks. A heavy sense of inevitability settled over them.

  Sebastian checked his watch. “Almost time.”

  “I’ll start with an introduction,” Wainwright explained. “Then I’ll ask some questions to get everyone talking. Ideally this will be one fluid conversation with everyone participating, everyone sharing.”

  Everyone but you, Sam thought.

  Standing with his back to the fire, Wainwright was nothing more than a shadow. “I’m not interested in serving up the same cold dish of previously told anecdotes. I want to know why you write, what truly drives you, what scares you, how you differ, how you’re the same. What pisses you off? What keeps that fire burning? I want to dig deeper. Otherwise what’s the point, mates?”

  The fire popped suddenly. One of the logs exhaled a breath as the flames found a hollow space to invade.

  “This is live. Online. To the entire world.” Wainwright settled down into a high-backed chair just off the main circle. “Let’s make it bloody count. I’d hate to think we all wasted our time.”

  Sam looked at the clock on his phone: 7:29. “Here we go.”

  Daniel drew in a deep breath and folded his hands awkwardly in his lap.

  “You’re going to be marvelous,” Sebastian assured him. Then the old man looked to Sam and winked.

  Sam nodded, but his hand was already gripping the scarred flesh of his left arm. He glanced to Wainwright, who was rapidly tapping his leg, his body buzzing with energy.

  He’s anxious. For this moment. His moment. Sam warned himself, Watch him. And be ready for anything.

  Kate, her face glowing green in the light of her laptop, tapped the space bar.

  Sam listened as a short pre-taped intro played. The sounds were tinny through the computer’s miniscule speakers, but from the theatrical gravitas in Wainwright’s voice-over to the jolting screeches of jump cuts, it was obviously similar in style to the introduction the writers had received at the library in Kansas City. The pertinent information was covered: a quick bio on each author, a few lines celebrating their most famous works, and finally an appropriately creepy description of the unique setting for the interview. The house was, after all, the hook.

  He knew we’d all four show up, Sam realized. If one of them had dropped out, this pre-interview sequence could have been re-edited, but Wainwright produced it with all o
f them included. He knew they would not be able to pass up the opportunity.

  He has us right where he wants us. But for what? What exactly does he have planned?

  Sam slipped a hand to his back pocket and felt the edge of the photograph tucked there.

  A discordant note announced the end of the intro.

  Kate clicked the trackpad and pointed to Wainwright.

  Around the room, a series of red lights blinked on as the cameras went live.

  Firelight danced in Wainwright’s eyes as he spoke directly to the camera before him.

  “Happy Halloween, and welcome to the house on Kill Creek. You are on WrightWire.com, and I’m about to share a bloody sweet Halloween treat with all of you. Because here in this house, the location of one of the world’s most famous hauntings, I have gathered four of our greatest living horror authors: Sam McGarver, Daniel Slaughter, T.C. Moore, and the legendary Sebastian Cole.”

  Sam nodded awkwardly toward the camera facing him, as did the others. It was an uncanny sensation, the camera’s red light burning in the blackness to let him know that his image was being broadcast to millions of viewers around the world. And here he was in an old, dark farmhouse somewhere in the middle of the Kansas countryside, about to have a casual conversation with four new acquaintances, the occasional silence broken only by the sound of ice clinking in glasses and the crackling fire. If there were spirits in the Finch House, they had to be impressed with the wonders of modern technology.

  Taking a poker from a wrought-iron stand beside the fireplace, Wainwright leaned forward in his chair and nudged the burning logs, stoking the flames higher and higher. Were it not for the fire, the group would have been sitting in almost total darkness.

  “You are all incredibly different writers and people, but you have one thing in common.” He turned to the thin sliver of a man that was Sebastian. Half of Wainwright’s face fell into shadow. “Mr. Cole, you first: out of all the genres, why horror?”

  Sebastian took a moment to ponder the question. And then in a steady and confident voice, he said, “The goal of the written word has always been to explain to man those things which seem unexplainable. We write to understand the world but, more importantly, we write to understand our place in it. I never set out to be a writer of fantastic fiction; I simply understood the dichotomy of the world. Good cannot exist without evil. Light without darkness. It just so happened that when I first sat down at my old Remington No. 5, my very first typewriter, the darkness interested me most. It wasn’t intentional.

  “A Thinly Cast Shadow began with a simple image: a boy wandering alone in a New England field. He discovers what appears to be a cow skull, but, upon closer examination, he finds that the skull has strange features: protrusions where there should be none, teeth made more for chewing flesh than cud.”

  “But,” Wainwright interrupted, waving a finger in the air, “that’s about as graphic as the book gets. It’s a classic psychological ghost story, not a graphic tale of man-eating creatures run amuck.”

  Sebastian clasped his hands and pulled them close to his chest. It was a curious reaction; it appeared he wasn’t aware he had even done it, but its intent was unmistakable. It was the motion of a father protecting his child, drawing it to him to keep his story from slipping into harm’s way. He was, in a sense, guarding the mystery of his beloved story from the gnashing teeth of definitive interpretation.

  “I always keep one thing in mind when I write,” Sebastian said. “‘The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.’ Lovecraft said that, and for good reason. When our fate is uncertain, our minds naturally lead us to the worst possible scenario. Any writer worth his or her salt does not need to titillate the reader with fetishistic bloodletting.”

  Sam noticed Moore cock an eyebrow. She thinks that comment was aimed at her. He couldn’t say for sure that it wasn’t.

  “Think of that skull the boy finds in the field,” Sebastian continued. “As he turns it over in his hands, he realizes this is no earthly beast. Whatever power spawned such a creature could not have been the benevolent deity we know as God. The boy realizes simply by running a finger over the multiple sets of jagged teeth lining the jawbone that this abomination was capable of unspeakable acts. And the reader suspects that on this land—the land to which the boy’s family has just moved, the land on which an unfathomable evil birthed a monster—terrible things await those who trespass.” He tapped his temple, just below a few thin strands of white hair fighting a losing battle against time. “All in the reader’s mind,” he said. “All by the power of suggestion.”

  There was a reverent beat of silence as they hung on the voice of this literary giant.

  This is why he’s a legend, Sam thought. He owns us with every word.

  Wainwright swung his hand around to point at Moore. “And on the complete other end of the spectrum, we find T.C. Moore, a horror writer who, it’s safe to say, has never even heard the word subtle.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment, sweetheart,” Moore said. Her words curled from her lips like smoke.

  “You started in self-published erotica, but each one of your books proved to be darker than the last. Your brand of horror centers around obsession and perversion and fetishes too extreme for something as fragile as the human body. It’s no surprise that you’ve made the leap from novelist to screenwriter; your books are almost disturbingly graphic, leaving absolutely nothing to the reader’s imagination. They’re also consistently polarizing. People either love a T.C. Moore book or they hate it.”

  Moore’s body tensed at the comment. “I would phrase that another way: they either get it or they don’t. People hate what they don’t understand.”

  “Are you saying that anyone who claims to not like your books just isn’t intelligent enough to understand them?”

  “Yes,” Moore said without hesitation. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  Daniel gave a snort and shook his head. Moore resisted taking the bait, but she watched him out of the corner of her eye.

  “So,” Wainwright continued, “how do you react to Sebastian’s take on horror?”

  “As a rule, I don’t react. I act. Sebastian’s style is elegant. Quaint. I suppose you could say out of all of us, what he writes is the closest thing to honest-to-god literature. But, no disrespect, the golden days of Beaver Cleaver and Good Humor Bars and ‘There’s nothing to fear but fear itself’ are over. They’ve been raped and tortured and left for dead. The only thing to fear these days is everything. Strangers. Neighbors. Your friends. Your family. Yourself. You think there’s nothing subtle about my work? Well, take a look at the world all of us—except maybe Sebastian—live in. You want to see the victims of genocide decomposing in mass graves? Turn on the Nightly News. You want to see a girl blowing a zebra? Hop on the internet. You want a badass bitch in black leather to come over and piss on your face while you jerk off into a pair of panties you stole from the local Wash-O-Rama? Well, that’s just a phone call or DM away. Subtlety is dead.”

  “Goodness,” Daniel said under his breath.

  This time, Moore did turn to him. She was on a roll, blood pumping, teeth grinding.

  “Too much for you, Mr. Slaughter? Good. Welcome to the real world.”

  She leaned in to stare directly into her camera, to speak to that unseen, phantom audience they had been assured was there. “Horror no longer goes bump in the night. Horror stuffs the bodies of dead hookers in his crawl space and then pulls a twelve-hour nursing shift taking care of your sick mother. Horror sits in his cubicle and fantasizes about sucking the toes of the high school cheerleader he plans to strangle after work. Horror stays awake at night dreaming up ways to hurt you and your family and your pets and everything you hold dear. Horror is perversion.”

  “And why celebrate that?” Daniel asked.

  Wainwright sat back in his chair, thick hair falling around his eyes. He rested the fireplac
e poker across his lap, his hand gripping its handle and tightening as if he meant to swing it at any moment.

  Sam watched this nervously, his body tensing.

  “Celebrate it?” Moore scoffed. “Are you honestly that simple? While you look to the heavens and sing hymns about rolling away the stone, I’m lifting up rocks to expose the pale writhing worms beneath. They’re there, Slaughter; you just don’t want to admit it.”

  Moore paused to collect herself, running the nail of her pinkie slowly up and down the powerful curve of her jaw. When she spoke again, her voice was even and calm. Paradoxically, this made her more intense than before. “And here’s the kicker: we’re all sick fucks in some way. Even the morally righteous Daniel Slaughter. Our most deviant desires have been around for eons, regardless of the fact that Sebastian’s nostalgia and Daniel’s religion have whitewashed a period in history when black people couldn’t even take a piss with the white folks and Jews were being marched by the millions to their deaths. That may be the most perverse thing of all: ignoring the horror, even as it happens around you.”

  Wainwright allowed the uncomfortable moment to hang heavily in the air. And then he sat abruptly forward. The sudden action caught Sam off guard, his hands clenching into fists. But Wainwright went no farther than this. He stated simply and evenly, “This is from the Washington Post: ‘In the case of a reprehensible pseudo-novel like Cutter, Moore is less.’”

  Moore’s head whipped around so quickly, it seemed in danger of snapping clean off her neck. “Baby, my competition is the most talented writers in the world. Yours is a cat that plays the keyboard.”

  Wainwright did not look away. Even with Moore’s ruptured pupil boring into him, the young man held fast. His finger was tapping his leg again. He had another bullet in the chamber.

  “And this is from a review of your previous book, Flesh Forward: ‘Moore is once again trying too hard to offend in an admirable but misguided attempt to prove a woman can write filth just as well as a man.’”

  The sound of Moore’s scotch tumbler slamming down onto the coffee table made Daniel flinch. “If Barker or Palahniuk had written that book, if Cronenberg had made the film, no one would’ve batted a goddamn eye.”