Slattery Falls

by Brennan LaFaro

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. His tone, his body language, his stature. How could this be the same man that had terrorized us? He stood, defeated.

  “And what if I refuse to come?” said Weeks with resignation in his voice.

  “Oh darling,” and here Tabitha looked at me, looked at Elsie, looked at Josh before continuing. “You’ve been around for centuries and centuries. When it comes to a woman’s request, do you really believe you have a choice?”

  She leaned in and kissed him. Weeks stood stock still at first, then gave in and wrapped his massive arms around her. The white light that had been issuing from her all along became more and more intense until it culminated in a flash. When the brightness cleared, they were gone.

  With Weeks having left this plane of existence, the concrete holding our feet in place let us go. We ran to Josh, hoping that there was still life in him, but I think we both knew. He was gone as soon as Weeks’ fist connected with his head. He’d saved us, though. Without his last ditch effort to summon Tabitha, Weeks would have murdered us in a gruesome fashion.

  Holding his limp head in my arms, I lost a few minutes, but that paled in comparison to having my best friend stolen by a monster. I remember screaming, cursing. I remember Elsie there, but the whole world was a vacuum in that moment. Any pain that she projected, any comfort she tried to give was lost.

  I don’t know how long I remained in that state. I don’t know how much longer I would’ve stayed in that state, except the earth started shaking.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  When Weeks disappeared, his power did too. The instant effect being that our feet were no longer bound in concrete. The more lasting problem was that we were in a house, a basement anyway, whose size and scope defied physics. Natural law didn’t care for that. Unfortunately, it also didn’t care that we were still inside.

  “We have to leave him,” said Elsie. She yanked my arm before I had time to argue. Smart, because I would have and we had no time for that. I grabbed the book he had read from and stuffed it into my back pocket.

  We ran in the direction Tabitha had come from. The red light Weeks had conjured remained in place, allowing us to see cracks forming all along the walls and ceilings, racing alongside our path. We ran harder. A large crevice formed in the wall to our left, so we took it on a whim and emerged in the dining hall. The tapestries had all fallen to the floor; the chairs strewn about the room, and we kept moving. Where the stairs had been earlier, there was now an entrance to a tunnel with several small rooms off it.

  Inside every room, and there must have been more than a dozen, stood a… creature—all of them gaunt with long, dark, dirty hair. The workers, perhaps? Rather than defiance, the creatures appeared lost in panic, unable to leave their quarters and doomed to be buried under the hill. Recognition dawned right before we passed the last room. I’d seen one of these workers before, in the basement of the Hale House. Weeks told the truth. He had been keeping tabs on Josh and me there.

  Josh.

  No time to dwell. We followed the tunnel as it got thinner and thinner, the light dimming, until the floor vanished, dropping us into a pool of water.

  The grotto! We were back in the grotto, next to the wall with the underwater tunnel. We swam for the opposite end, no longer caring what might be underneath our feet, and pulled ourselves up onto the shore. We stopped for the first time, listening and taking in the surroundings.

  Above us, we heard the house creaking and moaning. Ready to collapse on itself. We chose the path to the left, feeling the ground change from concrete to dirt under our feet. A light appeared directly ahead and became our target. When we arrived, it was barely large enough to crawl through. Elsie went first, and I followed, putting my head through first with the rest of me following. I realized two things quickly. One, I was outside and two; I was on the side of a steep hill. The latter, I realized as I rolled down, eventually coming to a rough stop at the bottom next to Elsie.

  We sat together and watched as the Weeks House gave up the ghost, so to speak. The hill, no doubt hollowed out and supported by some otherworldly force, collapsed under the weight of the house above, transforming into a crater that consumed the house. Wood shattering and glass breaking harmonized in a symphony of destruction. Cathartic music to our ears after everything we’d been through. I don’t think I’ll ever see anything like that again. God, I sure hope I don’t.

  Elsie and I sat for a long time, hand in hand, eyes locked on the wreckage. The decision to leave, knowing Josh remained under there somewhere, hurt. Still does. A morbid part of me thinks that he might have been okay with being left there. Being present at his own wake would have been the last thing Josh wanted. All those people gawking at him, pretending they knew him, knew who he really was. Thinking of his sacrifice broke my heart, but I managed a smile at that moment.

  “We have to go,” I said to Elsie, taking her by the wrist.

  “Yeah, Tedeschi might have us arrested,” she laughed. “Although, I don’t know. Maybe this town will just be glad to have this place off their hands. Can you imagine? No more living in fear of a house?”

  “I can imagine very well. Come on.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  We made it home without incident, but the car ride felt, well, empty. We tried music, half-hearted conversation, even silence, and nothing worked, so we gave in to the heaviness. It didn’t help that when we got home, Josh’s car was still in our driveway. We would have to figure that out tomorrow. We settled in as best as we could; had a drink to take the edge off, and just tried to keep thoughts about the next day at bay.

  Then I remembered Josh’s book, still in the car. I told Elsie I’d be right back and went to get it so we could flip through it together. The plain black notebook contained a lot of notes about Robert Weeks and Slattery Falls, some of which we had covered together. The remainder of the notebook comprised entries taken between the first time we met about this and today. There were three pages mixed into these newer notes that only contained symbols or runes, no words. I assumed these were the pages Josh must have been reading from. Nothing of great importance in here, but I liked the idea of having a memento. After the symbols, the rest of the book was blank, except for the last page.

  Here it read:

  Elsie and Travis,

  I wrote this in a place you won’t find it unless I’m not there to stop you. I guess what I’m saying is that if you’re reading this; you made it back from the Weeks House, and I didn’t. Given what I’ve discovered in the last week, that’s definitely a possibility. I looked tirelessly into the possibility of a ritual to banish a ghost, and it’s pretty much all bullshit. I made up a ritual because I didn’t think I’d be able to get you guys to go otherwise. I’m sorry about that. Sorry for exploiting your faith in me. You deserve to know the two things that made me do that. First, I had a Hail Mary up my sleeve. Two, we’re a great team, always have been, and I knew we’d figure it out.

  You can probably see from the beginning of this book that I kept doing research after we had completed our initial round. Tabitha Weeks caught and held my interest. It’s mostly because of how little there was about her. Slattery Falls’ history painted her as some kind of witch complicit in everything Weeks was up to, but unlike him, there were records of her birth and life in Bristol. She was the well-to-do daughter of a shop owner, and she met and fell in love with Weeks. I even found a record of their marriage in Bristol. I just had to know where to look. The marriage took place a month before Weeks first showed up in Slattery Falls. I took a gamble. But I suspected she had been a pawn in the whole ordeal, drawn in by his prowess. I hoped that with the way things ended up, if I could contact her, she might be on our side. Maybe looking to get some revenge.

  Oddly enough, as difficult as finding a spell to banish a ghost was, finding a summoning spell was easy, although the pronunciation proved difficult. I guess I should be thankful I don’t have to deal with the aftermath of doing i
nternet searches for all those weird things. The one thing I kept finding was that it took a lot of energy, a lot of life force. It was not something I wanted to try alone in my apartment as a test run. I’d have to play to my strengths, study the theory and trust it to work in practice. Again, if you’re reading this, I’ll assume it did.

  I can’t thank you enough for being in my life. I’ve always felt like an outsider in every aspect of my life, but you guys are family. You make me feel like I belong.

  With Love, Josh

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  That Sunday will go down as the second worst day of my life. We worked hard and somehow pulled it off with little to no suspicion. We notified authorities that Josh, and here we really played up the family angle, had been spending the weekend with us. We took a day trip to the Blue Hills for a hike, settled in for some lunch, and Josh went off to piss behind a rock. Then he never came back. The police started a search. Elsie and I took part, knowing full well we would find nothing. The worst part was seeing Mr. and Mrs. Costa there, knowing they’d never get closure on their son, and not being able to tell them anything. They were good parents, loving parents. Their son had just been different, and the connections between them and Josh didn’t fire on all cylinders. They never really understood him.

  The search didn’t turn up anything, and they declared Josh missing. They put posters up, and all that jazz. How fucked up that all this started with people going missing and here we are again?

  Elsie and I miss him every day. We’re comforted by the fact that he was relatively confident he would die when he walked in that front door. Less so by the fact that he had to hide it from us. He did it so we could get out, so that a few more parents could get up in the morning and find their children still asleep in their beds, never having to know the fear and heartbreak that comes with inexplicably losing your child.

  Josh was the fact-based person, yet he accepted the intangible, far better than I ever could. Nearly 600,000 children go missing in the United States every year. Many of those kids return home alive and well, but not all. It’s fucked up. First, I had trouble wrapping my head around the notion that a ghost could be responsible for any of them. Now that we know it’s true, I can’t accept with absolute certainty that we actually stopped it. Sure, we saw a big white light and then the monster was gone, but don’t monsters sometimes come back? Is there any way to know definitively that we made the lives of some kids a little bit safer?

  Elsie believes it with all her heart. A husband can tell. Josh believed it too, and part of me thinks I owe it to my friend, my brother, to be less of a skeptic. Besides, Elsie and I are expecting our first child in a few months. If it’s a boy, I think we’ve got the name all set. I want to believe so badly that we made the world safer for our child. I want to believe that.

  Acknowledgements

  As I write these acknowledgments, I’m looking at a sticker on my laptop that says “Write Epic Shit”, a gift from Aron, my wife of twelve years and the love of my life. Great encouragement, yes, but also a constant reminder of her unyielding support. When she found out I wanted to try this writing thing, she didn’t laugh or tell me I was already too busy. She selflessly gave me the time to pursue it, and is a key reason you hold this book in your hands.

  Thank you to Ken McKinley at Silver Shamrock Publishing for believing in this book and helping me make it the best it could be. Credit also goes to Patrick McDonough, my brother in horror, an early supporter of this story, and the loudest voice telling me to keep going.

  Kealan Patrick Burke is one of the best cover designers in the business, and I’m honored to have his work grace the front cover of Slattery Falls.

  Janine Pipe, Michael Tichy, and Kayla Meehan proved essential beta readers, steering the story home, and providing essential insight on what worked and what didn’t.

  In my short time here, I’m in love with this community of horror readers, writers, and enthusiasts. To name a few, and unfortunately forget many, thank you to the people who cheerlead at every corner and make the genre a better place—Laurel Hightower, Ronald Kelly, Brian Keene, Hailey Piper, Cassie Daley, Erica Robyn, Kenneth W. Cain, Eric Raglin, Briana Morgan, Shane Hawk, Todd Keisling, Tyler Jones, Kevin Whitten, Gabino Iglesias, Cina Pelayo, Jonathan Janz, Daron Kappauff, Nico Bell, and many more.

  I never would have finished this without the support system we’ve built here.

  About the Author

  Brennan LaFaro is a horror writer/reader living in south eastern Massachusetts with his wife, two sons, and his hounds. An avid lifelong reader, Brennan also co-hosts the Dead Headspace podcast. Slattery Falls is his debut novella You can find his short fiction in anthologies such as Shiver, edited by Nico Bell, and ProleSCARYet, edited by Ian A Bain, Eric Raglin, et al. Connect with him via Twitter or Instagram at @brennanlafaro or at www.brennanlafaro.com.