Kill Creek

by Scott Thomas

  The brick.

  “You did it,” Sam said with disbelief. Then, louder, the excitement palpable: “You did it!”

  And then a wave of dread blew over Sam like a cold wind. You did it. You’re going to open that wall, and whatever was tugging on the other side of that brick will be there, nothing between you.

  He stared at the brick, still clutched in Moore’s hand. Each of their stories had led them to this point, to the secret room beyond the wall, four different paths converging at a crossroads, a hidden place not on any known map. They were in uncharted territory. Stepping beyond the staircase into the third-floor bedroom meant giving in to the power of the house, acknowledging its invisible pull on each of them. It had lured them back for a reason. They were about to discover what that reason was.

  The missing brick left a gaping hole at the center of the wall, black like a necrotic wound. From this, there came a sudden sucking sound as air was drawn sharply through the gap and into the secret room. A whistling rose to their ears, the air rushing faster and faster. They could feel it passing by them, pulled down the hallway and up the staircase to disappear through that small brick-sized space.

  “We have to get the rest of that wall down,” Moore said finally.

  Sam gave a small nod. “Okay.”

  They were halfway up the steps when they heard the voices. Sam slowed, fearful that it was his mother again, or something pretending to be his mother, something that wanted to mock him from the darkness. But as they regained their position on the top step, the noise began to transform, splitting from one sound into several discernable sounds, each with a different rhythm, the uneven tempo of words. It reminded Sam of standing in a hushed crowd, a ripple of disobedient whispers rising and falling around him.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  Moore shook her head. “Hell if I know.”

  Sam lowered his ear to the hole. The suction was intense, pulling his head toward the wall. He fought it, listening as the voices collapsed upon each other like waves. He could not make out what they were saying, but their pace was urgent, as if what they had to share could wait no longer.

  “I’ve heard this before.” It was Sebastian, once more at the base of the stairs. Neither of them had heard him approaching.

  “Sebastian?” Sam asked, confused. “Where were you?”

  The old man ignored the question. “I heard it in my room, the last time we were here. I heard it in my sink. Down the drain.”

  In any other circumstance, Sam was sure Moore would have scoffed at this. But not here. They both nodded as if Sebastian’s admission were the most natural thing in the world.

  Without warning, the voices changed position, the whispering behind the wall cutting out like a radio being clicked off. They picked up a beat later, down in the second-floor hall, muffled slightly by the closed doors.

  Sam cocked his head toward the new location. “Now it’s coming from the bedrooms.”

  The noises leapt from room to room, first confined to the bedroom at the end of the hall, then relocating instantly to the door nearest the main staircase. The voices alternated at random, hitting each room like the off-key bars of a broken xylophone.

  Soon the spaces between the shifts began to grow briefer, the noises coalescing into one voice, the words spoken in unison, a chant, still too low to make out yet spoken with that same unnerving urgency. They whirled around Sam, Moore, and Sebastian like an aural cyclone.

  Sebastian tugged on the sleeve of Sam’s shirt. “We need the others. They should be here.”

  He’s right. Best to band together, to enter the third floor as a group.

  Moore was already on her feet and squeezing past Sebastian in the narrow stairwell. “I’ll find them. You two get the rest of that wall down.”

  Sam retrieved the smaller hammer. Crouching down so that he was level with the hole, he peered into the darkness, trying to make out anything, a single detail, a hint of what may await them once the wall was down. The dim light outside tried to slip between the cracks of boards covering what Sam assumed was the front third-story window, that all-seeing eye perched atop the house. From what he could tell, the room was bare except for a single piece of furniture. Some sort of chair. Two circular posts flanked it. Wheels.

  Rebecca Finch’s wheelchair.

  Other than that, the room was empty.

  THIRTY-THREE

  4:08 p.m.

  THE CHORUS OF whispers rolled across the first floor like fog, billowing up in the corners of the foyer before folding back in the opposite direction. Moore could hear them more clearly down there, away from the others, the words seemingly directed toward her. They were voices, she was sure of it. Hundreds of them. Male and female. Old and young. At one point, she even thought she heard the terrified wail of a baby.

  Wainwright and Daniel were nowhere to be found. She moved from room to room, calling out their names. There was no response.

  In the kitchen, she found the back door locked tight. She parted the heavy velvet curtain that hung over a nearby window, peering out through the pouring rain at the woods behind the house. There was no sign of movement, only the heavy branches swaying as the fat raindrops pelted them. The storm had given the world outside a sickly greenish-yellow hue, the flora deepened by several shades, leaves cloaked in shadow. It was not the kind of thing one saw in Los Angeles, where a single crack of thunder was enough to send motorists skidding off the road. No, this was a warning of worse things to come. The rain would not let up, the wind would grow more intense, hail would pelt the roof’s weathered shingles.

  The purr of a woman’s voice snaked around Moore’s feet, murmuring something unintelligible. Glancing down, she instantly zeroed in on the source—an electrical outlet just off to her left. The sound emanated from the outlet’s tiny slits, the soft buzz of electricity carried beneath it. Her jaw and her fists clenched simultaneously. The damned voices made her mad. The house was taunting her, thumbing its nose at her, daring her to fight back.

  Fight back against what? she wondered.

  She kicked the outlet, hard, hoping the voice would falter, retreat farther back into the wall. It did not. The words poured out, whispered so quickly that they became one long series of jumbled consonants and vowels. With some concentration, she was able to pick out a recognizable word here and there. “That,” the woman said. And “House.” And “Bad.” After a few minutes, Moore began to recognize the same words again and again, consistently repeated in the precise order. At one time, an entire sentence became clear—“You kids, stay away.” She waited another full minute, watching the second hand on her watch as it spun past the quarter mark. There it was again, right on time. Whoever this woman was—a past inhabitant, a frightened neighbor—her warning appeared to be on a loop, repeated over and over by the house, infinitely.

  But there was an end, abrupt and unexpected. The woman cut off mid-sentence as two new voices, those of young boys, took over. “Dare you to knock on the door,” the first one said. “I’m not scared,” replied the second. It played like an audio snapshot, a moment in time captured by the house. It had overheard this, a dare between two friends.

  Overheard? Seriously? How the hell can a house hear?

  “Dare you to knock on the door.”

  “I’m not scared.”

  Then, suddenly, the whispering from the outlet ceased and Moore became aware of a new voice, calling out from another room. She turned toward it, attempting to discern its location. Moving across the kitchen, her footsteps soft and silent, she followed the sound to the basement door. Resting one hand on the knob, she pressed her ear up against the door, surprised to find that her pulse had quickened, that fear was bubbling just beneath her anger.

  “Help!” It was a young man’s voice. He was clearly in distress. “Anybody up there? Please, I need help!”

  Wainwright, Moore realized. Throwing open the door, she rushed down the rickety stairs into the absolute blackness of the basement. She recalled
the last time she had done this, hesitantly creeping down with a camera and flashlight to illuminate her path. Now she raced into the void. She yelled his name out loud, “Wainwright! Where are you? I’m coming!”

  The ambient light from the kitchen did little to brighten her descent, but it was just enough to reveal the arch of a person’s back, rising from the darkness at the foot of the stairs like the hump of a white whale. Her first thought was that Wainwright was injured; perhaps he had slipped on a step and tumbled to the basement floor. But something wasn’t right. The body before her was too pale, too cold, a lifeless color, like flesh completely drained of blood.

  She slowed her pace. “Wainwright?” With an unsteady hand, she reached for the crumpled form resting oddly on the cool cement.

  It seemed to anticipate her touch. It shifted, pushing itself away from her. At the same time, its face twisted toward her, into the light.

  Above her, the door began to swing closed, the light on the stairs quickly reduced to a mere sliver.

  Moore recoiled, whipping her hand away from the thing at the foot of the stairs.

  The face staring back at her was not Wainwright’s; it was barely recognizable as human. It grinned with cracked, dirt-crusted lips pressed tightly against rotting black teeth. Its flesh was gaunt, cheekbones poking sharply beneath skin bruised purple by pools of trapped, coagulated blood. A few thin strands of ratty black hair hung over its eyes; the rest had fallen out long ago, its scalp dotted with red fleshy craters, like the volcanic surface of some distant moon. A low, raspy chuckle seethed through its clenched teeth, its body quivering as it laughed at her.

  “Theresa,” it hissed.

  Moore’s stomach clenched into a fist. She thought she was going to vomit.

  “Oh God . . .”

  The faint outline of a tattoo covered the rotten flesh of the thing’s back. She knew it well. It was the snarling face of a tiger. Bobby had been so proud of that piece of shit backpiece, just another pathetic attempt to feel like a man.

  I’ve made a mistake, Moore thought.

  And then the door slammed shut, the light extinguished, the darkness engulfing her. She could hear that thing, that abomination, pulling itself up the stairs toward her, its splintered fingernails digging into the wood.

  Its voice bubbled up through the wall of mucus in its throat:

  “Why do you make me hurt you?”

  Instinctively, Moore began to retreat, taking a step back. Then another. And another.

  The door. She could make it. But she had to run.

  Now. Run!

  She was turning to make her escape when something darted out from between the steps and slammed into her left ankle, biting deeply into her flesh. She heard the crack of breaking bone, but it was too late to stop her forward motion. The weight of her body came down on her left foot and there was a sickening snap as her ankle split clean in two. She roared with pain, hands grasping blindly in the darkness as she lost balance, teetering backward, her broken ankle folding at an unnatural angle.

  She was falling. Back down the stairs. Back toward the dead, rotten thing waiting on the basement floor. She could hear that awful, gleeful chuckle rising, and with it the wet crackle of phlegm-filled lungs.

  Her right shoulder hit the ground first, ramming into the merciless concrete, the ball of her humerus popping clean out of its socket. Muscle tore as her body came down on her dislocated arm. The pain was excruciating, momentarily distracting her from the white-hot throb of her ankle. She gave a frightened whimper, disgusted by the weakness she heard in it but unable to stop herself.

  T.C. Moore had written of absolute terror. Her characters often found themselves being tortured by godlike beings from other worlds, their flesh peeled back with pliers, their fingernails snapped off, their orifices defiled in unspeakable ways. She had relished in the suffering of her hapless heroes, convincing herself that there was a crossroads where pain met pleasure. She insisted that this was what it meant to be truly alive, the sensation of agony transformed into ecstasy. What Moore’s fans did not know was that she had never experienced such a moment of transcendence. She had suffered horrible beatings at the fists of her ex-boyfriend, one bad enough to split the pupil in her eye. But it had never broken through into pleasure. Pain was pain. There was nothing wonderful about it.

  The anguish she was encountering on the basement floor was beyond anything she had ever imagined. It was mentally blinding, her mind filled with an intense white flash even as the blackness of the surroundings smothered her. Her arm flopped uselessly at her side, her foot bent against the broken bones so that it jutted away from her body at a ninety-degree angle. Her entire body seemed to throb, the pulse of her speeding heart captured in her swollen arm and leg like a hive of angry bees ramming her flesh to escape. She could feel a wetness on her ankle, the open wound where something had sliced into her.

  With her left hand, Moore pushed herself up, propping her back against the wall. The dead thing was nearby; its giddy laugh had ceased, but she could still hear it breathing. She swiped at the open space around her, wanting to make contact and not make contact at the same time. Touching it would be awful, perhaps too awful for her frazzled mind to handle, but not knowing its location was somehow worse. She could picture it—rotten flesh stained by the damp earth, those terrible teeth exposed in a lipless grin, cloudy eyes staring hungrily through the abyss.

  She swung her arm around to her side, and her hand collided with something almost rubbery in texture. With her fingers, she traced the object, attempting to determine its dimensions. Her fingertips slid across something slick. The dampness of breath heated her palm. The thing leaned closer, and Moore realized what was happening.

  She was touching a face. Her fingers were on its teeth. And it was smiling. She could almost see it through the darkness, a pale orb hovering inches away from her.

  “I found you, Theresa,” it chuckled as sickening black bile poured down over its lapping tongue.

  With her dislocated arm and broken ankle screaming in protest, Moore scrambled madly away. The edge of the first step smacked into the base of her back, and she pushed herself up onto it, trying to scoot up the stairs like a child who had yet to learn to walk.

  The thing did not follow. It shrank back into the shadows.

  Moore sat on the step, her chest heaving as she drew in fast, frightened breaths. As if from another world, a sound filtered down to her—the muffled clank of a hammer on brick.

  Rearing her head back, she yelled up the stairs, “Sam!” She tried again, drawing out the word until her voice cracked: “Saaaaaaaaaam!”

  “He can’t help you,” someone spoke in the darkness.

  Moore turned toward the voice, trying to force her eyes to see in the pitch-black room. “Who is that? Who’s there?”

  Feet shuffled, the grit of the concrete floor scraping beneath shoes. “It doesn’t have to be bad. I can make it quick. I promise.”

  “Daniel?” Moore’s mind tried to make sense of it, but she found that she couldn’t. It was beyond sense.

  What doesn’t have to be so bad? Make what quick?

  “I have to,” Daniel said. “You understand, don’t you? You know that I have to do it?”

  “Do what, Daniel?”

  There was that scrape again; he was moving closer. “I have to. I’m sorry.”

  “Daniel, I’m hurt. I need your help. Help me up the stairs.”

  “You saw her, didn’t you?” From the sound of his voice, he was now only a few feet away.

  Moore winced as she pushed herself up another step, trying to put distance between them. “Saw who? Daniel, what are you talking about?” She managed another step, groaning as her mangled foot knocked against the post of the handrail.

  “I saw you touch her face,” Daniel said.

  “Her?” Another step, her arm trembling weakly under her weight. “Who do you think that was?”

  There was a long pause. Moore had the ridiculous notion that
Daniel had exited the room, her mind temporarily forgetting that the staircase on which she was sprawled served as the only way out. Leaning on her elbow for support, Moore craned her neck to look up the stairs. She was halfway to the door. She could just make out the sliver of light beneath it. She grasped the back edge of another step. Her muscles bulged beneath the sleeve of her shirt as she pulled her aching body farther up the staircase.

  She was close, so close. The light beneath the door was brighter now, almost within reach.

  The bottom step squeaked loudly, and Moore knew that Daniel was coming after her.

  “It was Claire.” The voice seemed to hover over Moore in the darkness like a spider dangling from its web. “It was my Claire.”

  All of the traps Moore had ever set in her mind, those glorious mental contraptions designed to position others right where she wanted them, they were nothing compared to the trap this house had set for her.

  The hatchet struck Moore in the stomach, a powerful blow that drove her back against the stairs. There was a cracking noise. The world began to tremble. Something snapped beneath her.

  She was falling through the shattered stairs. She landed back on the hard floor of the basement.

  Daniel was coming back down the stairs, down to finish what he had started.

  Blood seeped between her fingers as Moore clutched her stomach. There was nowhere to hide.

  Then, from within those impenetrable shadows, came a voice. Not the gravelly voice of the thing pretending to be Bobby.

  It was a woman, prim and proper, an iciness to her words.

  “You come into our house, you have to play by our rules,” the voice said.

  Moore peered into the darkness, trying desperately to make out the person speaking.