Kill Creek

by Scott Thomas

  Sucking the last of the vodka from his glass, he fished a handful of ice from a bucket in the freezer and poured himself another. He was starting to feel the buzz of alcohol fogging his brain.

  He stepped into the narrow hallway that cut down the back side of the house like a spine. The space was alarmingly tight, unlike any other part of the house save the steep stairs leading up to the third-floor bedroom. Wainwright was surprised that the Finch sisters had not widened the hallway, if only to make room for Rebecca’s wheelchair. She could have gone through the study to get to the kitchen, but it would have been a bit out of her way. If they went to the trouble of installing an elevator for her, why not add two feet to each side of this suffocating hallway?

  He wondered if Rebecca was ever envious of her sister’s good legs, able to go anywhere in the house she pleased, enjoying the simple pleasures of climbing stairs or taking a shortcut through the back hall.

  Wainwright’s mind wandered. His feet carried him farther down the hall.

  On his phone, he scrolled to the comments section of the Kill Creek video. There were already over a hundred comments. Most were from overzealous fans trying to get the attention of the authors through passionate vows of support. There were words of praise for how raw and intimate the interview had been. But peppered among the positive entries were comments he was beginning to find familiar, a trend that he found troubling.

  “Wainwright is full of shit.”

  “Fucking poser.”

  “That little bitch Wainwright thinks he’s famous.”

  They’re just trolls, he reminded himself. Pathetic losers who have no lives so they try to tear you down.

  But it’s starting to work.

  He hated to admit it, but it was true. With each hateful comment, he felt more and more isolated, even as his empire grew.

  They’re all going to turn on you. You’ll be alone.

  “No,” he said aloud. “I have Kate.”

  The thought warmed him. He took another drink.

  Someone was at the far end of the hall. Through the bottom of his glass, he saw her distorted image.

  A woman with black hair.

  He quickly lowered the glass.

  No one was there.

  Pull yourself together, mate. You’re letting this place get to you.

  Beside him, the candelabra bulb went out like a candle. A second later, the next in the row of mounted wall lights was mysteriously snuffed out.

  Wainwright watched as each light went out one by one, darkness engulfing the hallway in two-foot chunks. Soon the entire hall was swallowed by the dark.

  “What the hell . . .”

  His first thought was that the generator was running low on fuel again. Like a car, it would sputter for a few more minutes before completely kicking the bucket, but it should have had enough juice for the lights to stay half-lit. He peered over his shoulder, toward the kitchen. The lights there still burned brightly.

  It couldn’t be the generator. That would affect the entire house. So what was it? Bad wiring, maybe. The house was old. But these lights had been on since four in the afternoon. Why hadn’t they experienced problems earlier?

  From somewhere in the darkness around him, there came a scratching sound, like claws on stone.

  Wainwright quickly took a step backward, but the back of his foot collided with something. He lost his balance and tumbled to the floor.

  There was a pale light beside him.

  My phone.

  It was still in his grip. He thrust it forward, shining the light of the phone’s touchscreen onto the floor where he had tripped.

  There was a woman’s black shoe. A long white sock extended up a leg that disappeared into the darkness.

  They’re standing right over you!

  Panic rippled through Wainwright, a million icy pinpricks on his flesh.

  He let out a pathetic whimper and desperately heaved himself up. He sprinted through the lightless space. He could see nothing. He was running blind.

  The glass of vodka. It was still in his hand. He let it go and heard the glass shatter on the hardwood floor. He sprinted toward the light of the kitchen, and as he reached it, his right knee buckled.

  Falling. He was falling toward the light.

  Wainwright crashed to the floor, sliding to a stop against the base of the island. He was back in the kitchen, safe beneath the bright recessed lights. His heart thudded wildly in his chest, his lungs filling with desperate breaths.

  He sat up and spun himself around on the cool floor. He stared into the hallway.

  The lights were on. Every single lamp was illuminated. He could see the archway that opened to the foyer and past that, the doorway to the living room.

  On the floor, something sparkled.

  It was the tumbler he had dropped, shattered into jagged glass teeth.

  Moore stood at the bottom step of the staircase, a half-full whiskey bottle dangling loosely in one hand. She stared up at the third-floor bedroom, or rather the brick wall that blocked it. She assumed the others were asleep; she hadn’t heard a peep from them since Sam and Sebastian had come up from the first floor.

  She checked her watch. Eleven o’clock, on the dot. She wanted to go to bed, to fall into a deep, dreamless slumber, and wake up in her own bed. But there she was, alone and restless. Moore squinted up at the brick wall. She had known some crazy bitches in her life, but never one who walled off the bedroom of her dead sister.

  She set the whiskey bottle on the bottom step and took hold of the rail before very carefully climbing the steep staircase. She reached the top of the stairs and crouched down next to the wall, running a finger over the mortar between the bricks. It was remarkably uneven, the bricks haphazardly thrown on top of each other. It was obviously the work of an amateur.

  Did Rachel Finch do this herself?

  With the nail of her pinkie finger, Moore scratched at the mortar below the middle brick, expecting the aged material to crumble. It did not.

  Screw this. She needed to get some work done. She could sketch out some scenes for her new book in her notebook until either she fell asleep or the sun rose, whichever came first.

  Planting her hands on the top step, Moore began to push herself up. One of her fingers slipped between a brick and the wooden step.

  She glanced down. There was a tiny hole, just large enough for her slender finger to slip inside.

  Twisting her finger slightly, she worked it deeper into the hole until she felt her fingertip break through to open air.

  The third-floor bedroom.

  She imagined standing in that pitch-black room, staring at the other side of this brick wall. She pictured the tip of her finger protruding from a hole at its base like the head of a pale worm.

  The image made her uneasy. What if something were in that room? What if it saw her fingertip and decided to grab hold? What if it would not let go?

  Enough, she scolded herself. She was already angry that she had let her imagination get the better of her in the basement; she didn’t need to rattle herself further.

  Moore went to pull her finger from the hole in the brick, but it would not budge.

  It was stuck.

  “Oh, come on.”

  She pulled hard, twisted it back and forth, but the wall would not release her.

  On the other side, something scratched against the brick.

  Someone’s in there! Moore thought, her heartbeat quickening to a gallop.

  Stay calm, dummy, her mind commanded. There’s no one there. Just get your finger out.

  She took a deep breath and slowly worked her finger out of the hole. In a matter of seconds, it was free, covered from nail to knuckle in gray mortar dust.

  Moore brought her cheek level with the last step and peered into the black hole. Whatever was beyond the wall, it was too dark to see. She leaned in closer, her eye less than an inch from the hole. Her eyelashes fluttered against the mortar.

  Something moved in the dark.
>
  “Everything okay?” a voice called up from behind her.

  Startled, Moore spun around on the step, her back pressed to the wall.

  Daniel was at the bottom of the stairs, his plump body as wide as the staircase was narrow.

  “Aren’t you a little old for Halloween tricks, Slaughter?” Moore snapped as she hurried down the stairs, her fingers skimming the walls for support.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “You didn’t scare me,” she assured him as she reached the bottom step. She snatched up the bottle of whiskey and pushed past him, out of the alcove and into the hall.

  Daniel pointed to the top of the staircase. Only half of the last step was visible under the layer of brick. “Why do you think Rachel Finch bricked up the door?”

  “Who cares?” Moore snapped.

  “To keep someone out? Or maybe . . . to keep someone in?”

  Moore was already halfway down the hall. “You tell yourself whatever story you want, Slaughter. Maybe you’ll dream up something that scares adults for once.”

  “Good night,” Daniel called out sarcastically.

  Without another word, Moore slipped into her bedroom, the door clicking shut behind her.

  Daniel gave one last look at the brick wall and then turned back to his bedroom door.

  Something squeaked, like the turning of metal wheels.

  He glanced down the long hallway and, for the first time, noticed that the elevator car was still parked there on the second floor. The accordion door was open.

  The squeak came again, closer this time.

  There was nothing before him, nothing that could be responsible for the sound.

  Daniel took a step farther into the hall.

  The squeak moved closer.

  He took another step, his door only a few feet away.

  The sound matched his movement, seemingly coming to a stop on the exact opposite side of his bedroom door.

  Daniel’s heart pounded deep within layers of fat and muscle and bone.

  Three fast steps, as quickly as his large body would allow.

  Three fast squeaks, the wheels rolling right up to the edge of his bedroom doorway.

  Daniel turned the doorknob with his clammy hand and sighed with relief as the latch clicked open. He paused for a moment, leaning in slightly to stare at the empty space in front of him.

  There was nothing in his bedroom, nothing in the hallway. Nothing.

  And yet that sound, it had stopped right there.

  Daniel pushed the door open wide and shuffled into the bedroom.

  As he closed the door behind him, he thought he could hear the faint, steady squeak of wheels retreating to the far end of the hall.

  SEVENTEEN

  1:00 a.m.

  ALL WAS SILENT. Even the howling autumn wind knew to lower its voice as it gently tossed the naked treetops. The great, pale moon cast a ghostly pallor upon the wisps of cloud skirting below it. Their phantom forms curled from nothingness only to dissipate into the ether moments later.

  The nocturnal creatures of the forest went about their early-morning routines. A raccoon trudged beside the ravine that once was Kill Creek with only the faint memory of cleaning its hands in the cool waters of the now-extinct stream. A mother opossum waddled through the woods with her young clinging tightly to her coarse gray pelt. An owl lifted its great wings, catching a gust of air to send it swooping down on an unsuspecting field mouse, its talons snatching the prey with a startled squeal, the darkness swallowing them both in an instant as if neither had ever existed.

  Yet none dared cross the boundary formed by Kill Creek. The owl let the breeze carry it safely a quarter mile to the west before settling on a branch to devour its breakfast. The opossum steered its fat body toward a hollowed-out elm tree on the far side of the fifty-acre lot. The raccoon, sensing a shift in the roots beneath its feet, their woody bodies twisting like a bed of snakes, scampered out away from the creek and up a massive oak tree. Casting a glance back at the massive form of the dark house, the animal gave a confused whimper and quickened its pace.

  Crickets chirped the last few bars of their nightly song. But Kill Creek circled the house like a moat, and within this keep, this stronghold of silence, nothing stirred. Only the tallgrass made a sound, swaying even when there was no breeze, its dry, husky top bristling like the warning rattle of a viper.

  In the house, only the clocks broke the absolute stillness. Their march went unimpeded, hands inching dutifully forward, carrying everything around them onward into the future. It was as if the house were also sleeping, conserving its energy for a greater task, someday down the line.

  This was not entirely true, of course. The house dozed, but it had not completely forgotten its crass party of trespassers. And as the hands of the clocks clicked to eight past one, the house awoke to the sudden and definite realization that now was the time.

  It had waited long enough.

  It was time to play.

  The blunt tip of a pencil raced across the yellow page, words spilling out in wild, curving lines.

  T.C. Moore held a bottle of whiskey in one hand and the pencil in the other. She sat on the floor, her back against the bed, knees bent, a legal pad propped up on her lap. Her hair was unfurled from its braid. It draped across her lowered face as she hovered over the page.

  She was lost in her story, lost in the woman she had named Sid, in the painting that Sid was meticulously uncovering, in starting with that single, staring eye hidden within it. Moore now knew who the eye belonged to: Kubaba, the Sumerian Queen. And yet Sid would soon learn that the painting she had discovered beneath the colored oils of another work of art had been created centuries before Kubaba lived, the creation of a cult that worshipped a woman not yet born.

  Not the woman, Moore realized. A power. An ageless power that would one day transform a tavern owner into one of the most powerful rulers in the world. A power that at that moment was revealing itself to an art history major and newly appointed museum curator named Sid.

  The pencil came to a sudden stop, the graphite tip pressing a tiny indentation into the yellow paper.

  It came to Moore, a revelation, as all of the words folded in on themselves like a collapsing black star.

  The cult was not to Kubaba at all. It was to Sid. Three thousand years ago they worshipped the being that this modern-day woman would become. The bringer of vengeance. The eradicator of weakness. The rebirth of the power.

  Moore lifted the whiskey bottle to her lips and drank. She set the pencil down on the ornate rug upon which she sat and flipped through page after page of prose. Random notes filled the margins. She had managed to write fifteen pages since returning to her bedroom. Her body was still warm with the excitement of creation, but she knew she was done for the night. The puzzle of this novel was nearing completion, the profundity of its image revealed. Yet Moore knew when to press forward and when to let the story alone.

  You grow in your sleep, she had once been told. The same was true for a story. She would leave it alone for the night, allowing it to become more fully formed in her psyche. On her flight home, she would attack the novel with a clear head.

  After setting the legal pad on top of her bag, Moore pulled her shirt off and then stepped out of her jeans, crossing the room in nothing but her underwear. Her skin was pale in contrast to her black bra and panties, the result of spending way too much time indoors despite living in one of the sunniest cities in the world.

  She lifted the whiskey bottle and gave it a swirl. Brown liquid spun at the bottom, enough for one more swig. She swallowed it down.

  With the exception of the work she had done in the past hour, Moore suspected this trip would end up being a complete waste of time. What had she been trying to prove? That she could hang with a decrepit old has-been? A mainstream hack? A Christian bullshit artist?

  She had nothing to prove to them. What she wrote was unpolished by their standards, but it was pu
re. It was raw. And this new novel . . . it was something completely unexpected. It was mature and powerful and epic in scope, yet it had all the trademarks of an unforgivingly brutal T.C. Moore story.

  It would not be easily dismissed; she was sure of it.

  The room began to dance before her eyes.

  The whiskey. She had drunk most of the bottle herself.

  “Time for bed, girlfriend,” she said to herself.

  Moore crawled onto the bed, lying flat on her stomach, her arm dangling off the side. The whiskey bottle was loose in her fingers, threatening to fall.

  She listened as she drew in slow, steady breaths through her nose.

  Her eyes began to close.

  A floorboard creaked behind her.

  “Hello, Theresa . . .”

  Moore spun around in time to see the fist coming straight at her face. It collided with her eye and she was thrown back onto the bed, sprawled out stupidly like a tossed rag.

  The whiskey bottle crashed to the floor, shattering into a million pieces.

  The beast was upon her. The smell of cheap beer on his breath gagged her. The beast’s fist smashed down over and over and over, bashing her eye until it began to swell shut.

  “You think you’re so fucking smart,” the man growled. She could see his lips moving, but the words seemed to lag a half second behind them. It was like the sound wasn’t actually coming from him, even though she could hear it loud and clear.

  “When will you learn to keep your bitch mouth shut?”

  The fist came down and her pupil split under its weight. She heard a crack as her orbital bone fractured.

  “Please!” Moore shouted. “Stop! STOP!”

  A fist slammed into her gut. She folded up, the air forced from her lungs. She wanted to scream—