Kill Creek

by Scott Thomas

  “What is that?” he asked.

  Moore opened her mouth to respond, but whatever words she intended slipped silently into the air. They watched the tallgrass ripple, not blown by the stiff wind but drawing back and forth like ocean waves. From the house to the edge of the creek, the yard was alive, an undulating green animal.

  “Get in the car!” Sam ordered, yanking the back door open so Moore could climb inside.

  He had just started to turn toward the driver’s-side door when an incredible force rammed him from behind. Sam was knocked off his feet. He skidded to a stop on the rain-slicked grass. He gasped, the breath knocked from his lungs. He struggled to push himself up, blinking as the rain spattered his face, staring up through watery eyes at the blurry image of Daniel, blood oozing down the side of his head. He glared at Sam with milky white eyes.

  “No,” Sam managed to say.

  “Yes,” he whispered, his grimace widening to an impossibly large smile. His voice was the thousand voices, traveling through eons of time and space to purr in Sam’s ear: “Yes.”

  Sam felt the spiky pelt of a vine twisting its way up his leg. It reached his knee and constricted, the tiny sharp hairs on its hide poking through his pant leg to bite his skin.

  There was a jerk, and the vine began to retract with amazing speed, pulling Sam swiftly over the yard, away from Daniel. Sharp stalks of tallgrass tugged eagerly at Sam’s clothes as he passed.

  He came to rest beneath the beech tree. Its crooked trunk seemed to curl up to touch the low-flying clouds. From the top of the tree, another vine came winding down, so quickly that Sam’s eyes could barely follow it. He had no time to fight it off, only to feel its needlelike husk wrap ruthlessly around his neck, pulling up, up, into the air, lifting him off his back. He began to kick helplessly, his feet swishing the open air. He clawed at the vine, leaving mean red scratches down his neck as he tried desperately to wedge his fingers beneath it. The harder he fought, the more the vine tightened, until his throat closed to a thin slit, the slightest of gasps drawn through it.

  The hanging tree, he thought, and his eyes flashed to the window of the third-floor bedroom. There, framed by the jagged edges of shattered glass, lit by the wild light of the flames below, were the awful faces of Rebecca and Rachel Finch. They were hideous mirror images of each other, white eyes staring out from even whiter flesh, faces of the dead, pleased at Sam’s fate even as their beloved house burned around them.

  The vine wrapped tighter around Sam’s throat, and the black cloak of unconsciousness began to creep into the corners of his vision. Through this dark tunnel, Sam stared up at the phantasmal shapes of the Finch sisters, who in life were seduced by the power of the house and in death remained devoted, for unfathomable reasons, to feeding its legacy. With the ghost stories of believers. With the bodies of Sam and his friends.

  From what seemed like a world far away, Sam heard the vine snap. He saw a thin strand, like a piece of green twine, fall free. His body was beginning to tingle, but he could still feel something pressing against the top of his foot.

  A branch, he realized with a rush of excitement. His shoe was caught beneath it, holding him in place.

  The vine slid roughly up his neck to his chin, leaving pink burns in its wake as it attempted to lift him higher.

  Sam fumbled blindly with his fingers, finding the trunk of the tree, too thick to grasp. His face was hot with blood. He could almost picture himself turning bright purple, eyes bugging from his skull.

  With his foot wedged securely below, he traced the edge of the tree trunk until his hand wrapped around the slender arm of another branch. Desperately, he grabbed hold and pulled downward, the force so great that, for a split second, he feared he was going to break his neck in the process.

  There was a crack just above his head as the vine snapped in half, and suddenly Sam was falling, his arms slapping the rough bark of branches as he plummeted to the earth.

  He landed in a heap, staring up through the branches at the dangling end of the severed vine. Already it was whipping down toward him, readying another attack.

  Sam sprang up, hobbling away from the tree as quickly as his injured foot would allow. The tallgrass swelled around him in an attempt to hold him in place, but he broke through, ripping it out by the roots in greedy handfuls.

  Twenty yards away, Daniel stood over Moore, his hands clenched into fists.

  She was saying something to him.

  Begging for her life, Sam guessed, and the thought of Moore begging anyone for anything made him sick.

  Something on the roof of the SUV caught Sam’s attention.

  Adrenaline coursed through his veins, supplying a temporary reprieve from the pain of his wounds, propelling him to the SUV. He snatched the carpenter’s hatchet from the roof, and then he was behind Daniel, the blade rearing back.

  No! a voice screamed in his mind, from the dark place where the fires had once burned. No, Sam, don’t!

  It was his brother’s voice.

  I have to, Sam thought.

  One minute, T.C. Moore was staring up at the towering form of Daniel Slaughter, and the next, the sharp blade of the hatchet was slamming into the side of Daniel’s head. The edge of the blade cut all the way to his orbital bone, its sharp corner slicing his eye. A gooey substance, like undercooked egg white, slipped down over his bottom eyelid. And then a crimson stream began to pour out from the wound. It soaked the shoulder of Daniel’s shirt and coursed down his chest. He swiped at the hatchet, confused by the object now lodged in his skull.

  Sam caught a glimpse of a name crudely carved into the wooden handle: Goodman.

  Daniel turned to stare at Sam with his one good eye, his expression like a confused child, asking, Why? Why did you do this?

  The giant hulk of a man slumped to his knees, his face going slack, his remaining cloudy eye rolling back into his head. His fleshy lips cupped the air like a landed fish, straining to put that last bit of breath into a final plea.

  “S . . . sss . . . sorry.” The words puffed from Daniel’s mouth like smoke rings. “I-I’m . . . ss-sorry.” A scarlet bubble rose between his lips and popped. And Daniel Slaughter was gone.

  There was now only one directive—to escape.

  Sam slid behind the wheel of the SUV and slammed the door shut. Moore was sprawled across the backseat. Her breathing was steady, her color encouraging. As soon as Sam was in the car, he clicked a button, and the auto locks engaged. They could hear the tallgrass whipping frantically at the steel frame of the car, the force rocking it back and forth. Without a word, Sam pressed the ignition button, and they both breathed a sigh of relief as the engine instantly fired.

  He jammed the gearshift into reverse and slammed down on the gas with his good foot. The wheels of the SUV spat gravel. He spun around quickly, the car slipping a bit off of the driveway; then he hit the brakes, threw the car into drive, and peeled off down the path.

  In his rearview mirror, Sam caught sight of the house, engulfed in flames, just as the second-story windows exploded in multiple fireballs. The inferno had spread quickly to every floor. By the time it was finally extinguished, there would be little left of the house. “Look,” Sam said, pointing ahead through the windshield.

  Moore pushed herself up in the backseat and saw what lay ahead—the surging waters of Kill Creek washing over the wooden bridge. In one afternoon, the storm had turned this barren creek bed into a raging river. The force of the waves surging against the bridge’s support beams was causing it to sway. A few pikes had already split in nasty spear-like shards.

  “It might not hold us,” Moore called out from behind him.

  “It has to.”

  “But—”

  “It has to,” Sam said again, leaving no room for argument. He pressed the accelerator flat against the floorboard, the SUV rocketing forward as the tires found traction.

  The first half of the bridge began to collapse the second the car made contact. The crisscrossed beams bene
ath it split clean through, carried off by the whitecapped rapids. The rest followed instantly, the bridge dropping down into the creek as if chasing the SUV’s bumper.

  The back wheels bit into solid ground just as the last of the bridge fell free, the SUV leaving behind it a gaping chasm where the bridge had once stood.

  Sam did not slow as they raced beneath the canopy of trees and toward the on-ramp to K-10. But he did glance over his shoulder to see the sky painted an angry orange as the house on Kill Creek burned.

  PART FIVE

  UNDER THE RUG

  December 15

  It is easy to understand why books of this nature become bestsellers. People are just so desperate to believe in something bigger than themselves. But in the end, Adudel’s account rings false, the imaginative ramblings of a man who has devoted his life to a field that is based on speculation and garners few accolades beyond those of his equally eccentric peers.

  —excerpted from the New York Times book review

  of Phantoms of the Prairie by Dr. Malcolm Adudel

  FORTY-ONE

  10:15 a.m.

  TELL ME.

  There was the house, the way it was before the fire, back when fear controlled Sam’s life. In his hand he held a hatchet that did not belong to him. Its weight was foreign to him. It felt like the weight of a life.

  On the porch sat Daniel, his chin in his hands as if he were completely bored with the situation. At the side of his head, a deep red chasm opened. He looked to Sam with innocent eyes. He was the man Sam had met over a year ago, caring and humble and comforted by faith.

  Tell me who you are, the voice said again.

  Sam glanced down at the hatchet in his hand. It was no longer a hatchet. It was a muddy gray hand, attached to the end of an arm that sprouted like a root from the bloodstained earth.

  The silence woke him.

  Sam opened his eyes to watch his breath spill from his mouth in an icy mist. He was warm beneath the blankets, but the world outside was cold and unforgiving. Sunlight spilled in through a window still kissed by frost.

  His hand slid beneath the covers to the other side of the bed, reaching instinctively for Erin, for his wife.

  She was there, her body hot beneath flannel pajamas. She rolled over on one side and scrunched her pillow up around her sleepy face. “I don’t want to get up yet,” she said.

  Sam smiled. “We don’t have to.”

  Leaning over, Sam slipped an arm around her, nuzzling his lips into the space just below her earlobe. He kissed her lightly, feeling a shiver of goose bumps prickle his skin, not because of the winter air but because she was here, back with him, and his heart beat right once more.

  Erin came out of the door with two steaming mugs of fresh coffee. She had pulled a heavy wool sweater on over her flannel pj’s, her feet nice and snug in fur-lined boots. Sam had changed into jeans, a thick hoodie, and a corduroy jacket. A wool cap was tucked down over his ears. He sat on a metal porch chair, his hand to his head, lost in thought.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  He smiled warmly and took one of the mugs, the steam curling into the golden morning sunlight. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m good.”

  A heavy snow had fallen during the night, obscuring the brittle brown grass and hanging in fat clumps from the barren tree branches. The day was finally beginning to warm, although the thermometer on the front porch showed the temperature to be just above freezing.

  For a few minutes, the two of them sat in silence, sipping their hot coffee and looking out at the wintry paradise of their street.

  The fallout from Sam’s experience at Kill Creek had been pretty much as expected. He knew that when lying, it was best to stick as closely to the truth as possible. So when officers from the sheriff’s department came to visit him at Olathe Medical Center, just outside of Kansas City, Sam told them the story he knew they wanted to hear.

  Sam, Sebastian, Moore, Daniel, and Wainwright were eager to see one another after nearly six months, so they decided to have a reunion at the site of their first meeting. The plan had been to drive down to Kill Creek and take one last look at the house, for old time’s sake. He admitted they had planned a bit of what he guessed the officers would call “vandalism.” After pondering on it for six months, they just had to know what was behind that brick wall at the top of the second-floor stairs. So they loaded up their rental SUV with tools and drove out to Kill Creek Road. Daniel wasn’t quite himself, but the rest of the group rightly assumed he was still emotionally fragile after the death of his daughter.

  None of them could have guessed that returning to the house would make the poor guy snap, but snap he did, violently attacking and killing much of the group with a hatchet he must have found somewhere in the house. Sam managed to take cover in the crawl space, at which time Daniel used the spare gas from the SUV to set the house on fire, probably in an effort to force Sam out. It worked. Sam was able to get Moore, who had also been attacked, out of the house, only to find Daniel waiting for them in the yard. A struggle ensued and, were it not for Sam gaining control of the hatchet, he doubted they would have survived.

  It was the same exact story that Moore told, right down to the smallest detail, and once all of the bodies were retrieved, the evidence appeared to corroborate their statements. Daniel’s wife and his pastor could attest to the fact that, since Claire’s death, an unrelenting darkness had enveloped the man.

  Sam felt guilty for pinning everything on Daniel, but for the most part, it was the truth. More importantly, it was the truth that had to be told. The press, of course, had a field day with the fact that Daniel’s last name was Slaughter. Each headline was more salacious than the last, until even the journalistic reports verged on fiction.

  A few months later, after Sam had gone from front-page news to little more than a footnote in the Lawrence Journal-World, life began to take on the faintest hints of normalcy. His ankle and collarbone healed as well as could be expected. He still had a bit of a limp, and on rainy days his foot ached like a son of a bitch, but often the injury was noticeable only to him.

  Moore spent two full weeks in the hospital. The hatchet made a nice little mess of her abdomen, but somehow the blade slid right between the overlapping coils of small intestine, miraculously avoiding any life-threatening internal damage. A few stitches here, a few staples there, and Moore was on the road to recovery. Physically, at least. She had become strangely quiet. No foul remarks. No sarcastic quips. It appeared the experience had changed her most of all.

  Sebastian was memorialized in countless magazines and newspapers as the influential writer he truly was, but within two weeks, an A-list actor died when his twin-engine Cessna crashed in Northern California, and so the world’s fair-weather grievers quickly turned their tearstained faces to the fresh tragedy. There were rumors of a missing manuscript—a final novel by Sebastian Cole—but so far, no such novel had been found.

  Wainwright was remembered in countless online posts and in an official statement from his father, which proved to be less about the pain of losing a son and more about promoting Donald Wainwright’s tabloid empire. WrightWire struggled to carry on but, without the leadership and financial backing of its founder, the site quickly became just another home for hardcore genre fans.

  Sam was only in the hospital for a few days, after which he returned to his house in Lawrence with a cast on his ankle and a sling on his arm. He was pleasantly surprised to find Erin waiting for him. She insisted she was only there to make sure he got back on his feet (or foot, as it were), but after a week, she began staying overnight. By the end of August, they were once again sleeping in the same bed, and by Labor Day, the intimacy that Sam had thought forever lost was back.

  One night in late October, as the anniversary of his first trip to Kill Creek rolled round, Sam broke down crying. He needed to tell her everything, even if it meant losing her forever. So through tears that seemed to know no end, he told her about Kill Creek, and then he told her ab
out his mother. Whether or not she chose to believe him, it was the truth, down to the darkest detail. Erin silently absorbed his tale for what seemed like an eternity. And then she held him in her arms. Sam knew this wasn’t the end of his redemption but only the beginning. It would take months, even years, before the past could become just that—the past.

  Sam stared into the swirling brown coffee in his cup. A few snow-flakes fell into the hot liquid and were immediately gone.

  “What’s the matter, Sam?” Erin asked.

  Sam furrowed his brow. “Just something on my mind.” He did not continue.

  Erin brushed the snow off the bench along the porch railing and sat down. She put a hand on his knee. “What is it?”

  Tell her.

  “It’s just . . . there’s something that hasn’t sat right with me, since that day.”

  Erin took a sip from her coffee, steam billowing up around her flushed face, but she said nothing.

  “When I was in that third-story bedroom,” Sam said, “there were scratches on the walls. On the ceiling. The wheelchair was bent all to hell, like somebody had used it to try to bash their way out.”

  Another snowflake fell into his coffee. Its flawless geometry melted away in the blink of an eye.

  “That was Rebecca’s room, but she was in that wheelchair. She couldn’t have done all that.”

  “What are you saying?” Erin asked.

  Sam sighed. He knew he should let it go. For his sake and for hers, he should leave it in the past. But he just couldn’t. Not yet.

  “Adudel had a photo from when he went to the house. Rebecca was dead at that point. But the woman in the photo with him, the one who claimed to be Rachel, her hair was pulled into a bun, just like Rebecca used to wear. I don’t think . . .”

  He took a swig of coffee and gathered his thoughts.