The excitement of the night was contagious and Carly felt it sweep her away a bit from the course of recent events. She’d talked Abigail into coming with her to try and shake off the shroud of death that had gathered about them. Her dad had balked at her going out, but she convinced him they’d be safe at the school, in a crowd. She just needed to have a good time and relax. As he’d reluctantly agreed, Carly thought Dad was starting to look a little like he needed to do some of that himself.
Carly watched Ethan on the field and couldn’t help but cheer for him and be swayed from her feelings of skepticism about their future together. His stellar performance drew the admiration of everyone. She couldn’t help feeling a little jealous at the cheers, looking over the bleachers at the girls, wondering how many of them might find him attractive.
Well, all of them, silly, she told herself and smiled. He was handsome, he was charming, he was a star; tonight every ball that came his way, his fingers found it and sent the team closer to a win. Carly didn’t think she’d ever found Homecoming quite so exciting. At each first down or every play in the red zone, the cheerleaders would pipe up; Carly made it a point not to openly acknowledge Sadie McBay. Still, she couldn’t help but sneak a barbed glance now and then. The vision of the picture that had arrived on her phone haunted her. Every time Sadie kicked up one long, tanned leg or tossed her hair and smiled with those perfect shiny lips and brilliant white teeth, she felt a stab of loathing.
“Don’t let that little bitch ruin your night,” Abigail said, reading her mind.
“Ugh, she just makes me so sick. Her flippy little skirt, her sickening smile. Every time I see her I just think about that picture, and I ...” She shook her head and stared out at the field, letting the game take her away. She wouldn’t let that little bitch ruin her night. Not this time. There was a lot going on with her, too much, and on top of everything, today marked the six-year anniversary of her mother’s death. Despite that, except for the occasional poison wave of hatred for Sadie, it had been a good day. Abigail’s advice was good—don’t let the tramp spoil a good thing. She was looking forward to seeing Ethan tonight. She wanted to feel his arms around her, to kiss him, and tell him all that had been going on.
Abigail stared glumly over the field. She didn’t seem to be watching the game, but studying the line of the horizon, the jagged black line of the mountain ridge, and the stars of the nighttime skies above it.
“Hey,” Carly nudged her with an elbow. “Earth to Abi. Aren’t you enjoying the game?”
Abi shrugged. “It is nice to get outside. To be surrounded by people.”
The Wildcats made another completion and the crowd roared.
“Thanks for inviting me.”
“It’d make me feel better if you smiled.” Carly pointed out Ryan McGuire on the field as the Wildcats’ offensive line crouched down for the next play. “You know, Ryan asked about you when you were out of school the other day. I think Wendy shut him down, so he’s dateless for the dance tomorrow night.”
Abigail nodded dubiously as the sweet scent of marijuana smoke drifted up from under the bleachers. “Awesome. So I can feed off the scraps from Wendy’s table? What an honor.”
“Oh, come on. You have to admit, his ass looks damn good in those football tights.”
That got a smile from her friend. “I’m going to tell Ethan,” she said in a sing-songy tattle-tell voice. Carly wrapped her arm around Abi, laughing.
They cheered through the rest of the game. The Rangers scored a touchdown with three minutes left, taking the lead by three points. When the Wildcats’ defense took the field, they shut down the Rangers’ attempt at a two-point conversion, but the home team had their work cut out for them; if the Carson Lake Wildcats wanted to win their Homecoming game, they had to score another touchdown before the clock ran out. It was a nail-biter. It was touch-and-go, painfully slow as the team worked its way back down the field. But with 53 seconds left, the quarterback Dave Cushing threw a bullet pass straight into the arms of none other than Ethan James, who came down with both feet in the end zone. Adding insult to injury, the two-point conversion was successful, cementing the win. Fans in the Carson Lake stands went wild. Carly was on her feet. Even Abigail, glum as she was, was clapping and smiling. The 31-26 win went down in the record books as the Cascade Rangers made a terrible mess of their last minute drive to stay alive.
When the clock ran out and the horn signifying the end of the game resonated across the field, there was cheering all around. A sudden thunderous push to get out of the stands found Carly and Abigail crushed in a flow of human traffic down onto the field and filing toward the gates.
“I’m going to wait for Ethan here.”
Abi nodded. “We should take off. My mom will be worried.”
Carly studied her friend. She was glad to see her come a little out of her funk tonight, but the vestiges of the past few days wouldn’t be so easily erased. Her features were still weary, eyes still sleepless. She wondered if Abi had been reading that spell book the witch gave her. Despite what Abi told her, Carly guessed that she couldn’t have resisted looking to see what it contained. “I think they’re almost done. Can we just wait a couple minutes?”
“Aren’t you going out with him tonight?”
“Later, after he gets home and checks on his Mom. He’s going to pick me up at my house.”
Abigail shrugged. “Okay, I’ll wait.”
The Rangers finished congratulating the Wildcats. The Carson Lake players jogged toward the gates and down the hill to the locker rooms. Carly spotted Ethan, carrying his helmet by its facemask, hair wild and sweaty. He scanned the crowd and spotted her. A smile lit his face and Carly had to admit she loved him far beyond holding any kind of grudge. He jogged over to them and wrapped her in a hug. He smelled of sweat, yet, oddly, she was aroused.
“What a game!” she said. “You’re the star of the show, Ethan James.”
“Eh.” He shook his head. “Cushing was on tonight, and the offensive line gave him time to throw. Makes all the difference.”
“Modest to the end.”
Ethan smiled at her. His elation at winning the game faded just a bit. She could see him shift gears. “We’re still on for tonight?”
“Yes.” She smiled.
He studied her face, looked back and forth between her eyes. He seemed to see something there that gave him hope.
Carly hiked herself up on tiptoes and gave him a kiss.
Sadie and the cheerleaders came by in the crowd leaving the field. Sadie tossed her hair, blowing Ethan a kiss. “Hope to see you at the party tonight, sweetheart. Great hands in the game, too—maybe you can use them to catch me later.” She flashed those supernaturally white teeth, and then laughed, head back. Christine was nearby and laughed with her. They cackled like a couple of witchy hens.
Abigail flipped them the bird. The girls sniffed and strutted away, tittering.
Carly’s cheeks burned.
Ethan was visibly pained.
“Don’t think about her, Carly. Just pretend she doesn’t exist. Let’s just have our night together, okay?” He pulled her close. She relaxed at his touch. She’d missed him terribly. She needed him tonight. Needed him to hold her, to tell her everything was going to be okay. “We need some quality time together.”
“You’re right,” she said. “I need to see you ... to talk. Not about ... that stuff. So much has been happening. I miss you.”
“I know. I’m sorry. Mom’s been pretty bad off lately. She keeps encouraging me to go out, but you know I feel bad leaving her at home alone.” Ethan’s smile ignited a flame inside her. Warmth spread from her heart. “I just need to get her going with the new nurse tonight, and then I’ll be over. I may be a little late, so I hope that’s still all right. Mom has insisted that I come to see you though. I think she’s privately hoping y
ou’ll end up her daughter-in-law.”
I think I’m privately hoping that, too. She stopped herself from saying it, but damn it, it was still what she wanted.
“How are you, Abi?” Ethan asked.
Abi shrugged. “Carly,” she said. “I’ve got to take off.”
“Sorry,” Carly said. Ethan let her go, and the cold night air rushed in to fill the void of his embrace. She gazed into his eyes, and he bent over to give her a final kiss, a final brush of his fingertips.
“Ethan James!” shouted the coach. “Hit the locker room!”
“Gotta go.”
“See you later.” Carly watched him jog down the railroad-tie steps carved into the hill leading to the rear of the school and the locker room. It suddenly seemed like everything would be okay.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The mansion in Sunshine Estates throbbed with loud music, lights glowing from the three-story glass windows of the entryway into the massive circular drive out front. Cars jammed the driveway packed with teenagers laughing, smoking, drinking, and making-out. Christine Gamin’s father was the CEO of a training company based in Canada. That meant he was never home, and Christine lived in the fortress pretty much alone but for the regularly scheduled grounds maintenance and housekeeping. Christine’s perpetually empty lavish home—not to mention her dark-haired beauty and propensity to spread her legs at the promise of a little attention—made her a popular girl, second only to Sadie McBay. They were two peas in a pod, and tonight the pod was hot. No fewer than two hundred people had shown up for the Homecoming post-game party. Four kegs, countless bottles of liquor, and none-too-few elicit substances were exchanged.
Inside the house, past the polished marble floors of the entryway hung with crystal chandeliers, the parlor was packed. Music throbbed in the air, loud conversation a din beneath the haze of smoke and smell of sex, alcohol, and perfume. Some of the girls had already gotten a little loose, turning the center of the parlor into a dance floor. They teased the crowd with long-legged lasciviousness, and Andrea Carlocci took off her shirt and danced topless on Mr. Gamin’s $200,000 Rococo-style dining table, drawing a crowd of salivating young men encouraging her to take it all off. Ben Stolfi and Justin Fackin hopped onto the table next to her, peeling off their own shirts, making a flesh sandwich out of her while she writhed like a pro-stripper in the making. Justin was a bit drunker than Ben, so when he tried to take off his pants and stood on one-leg to do so, he fell headlong onto Mr. Gamin’s velvet mirza hand tufted area rug, spilling three drinks at the same time and drawing the laughter of everyone nearby. Meanwhile, Ben had reached around Andrea’s waist and she’d let him unbutton her pants. Soon she was dancing in black lace panties and nothing else; things looked damn good for Ben that night, all considered.
Just beyond the main room, at the wet bar, Sadie and Christine and a small group of cheerleaders gathered over a silver mirror covered with white rocks and crushed crystal meth. Sadie did a blast of it with a glass tooter and threw her head back, eyes closed and watering at the burn. Everyone around the mirror did one. Raj Bhatia, who’d brought the shit with him to the party, leaned close to Sadie. She wore a tight blouse, which barely contained her breasts, and a tight leather skirt beneath which Raj boldly slid his hand. Sadie threw back her head and laughed, then leaned over and bit his ear. The Indian yelped and snatched his hand away to cup his bleeding lobe. Sadie and Christine laughed and drank straight vodka.
A drinking game ensued deeper in the house. Couples dispersed to remote rooms for sexual escapades. Some folks gathered out back in the snow around the kegs, content to hang in the near freezing winter weather to stay out of the crowded house. As the minutes wore on, Sadie watched it all with divorced interest. The drugs took solid hold, she drank more vodka, and was only vaguely aware that something had changed in the room.
It began as a change in the tint of the room’s haze—a greenish glow bleeding into the cigarette and pot smoke that lay over the crowd. Then a scent, of something slightly chemical, slightly earthen.
The lights in the entire house flickered. The music died.
The din of conversation quieted.
A hot pillar of green electricity erupted from the floor in front of Sadie McBay. She was high enough that it didn’t prompt any fear in her at first—only an increased interest in what was happening in front of her.
The crackling energy solidified into a semi-human shape, but something about it was wrong. As if such an expectation was fully reasonable in the drug-addled cheerleader’s brain, she realized the thing that appeared before her was not fully human.
It had feminine curves but no features immediately apparent upon its ghastly face, mostly obscured by clumps of hair hanging from its skull like tangles of seaweed. Its torso was shaped like a woman’s with withered breasts flat upon its chest. Its abdominal cavity was concave, ridged ribs, skin sagging over wider hips. Its legs bent backwards, its feet twisted lumps of flesh with tentacled phalanges and single claws that looked like cloven hooves. It reared its head to reveal features previously unseen—a nightmare mixture of a sharp-featured woman and demonic phantasm. Spreading wicked jaws, the thing made a noise that sounded like something between an angry roar of a hungry lioness and the cry of some fearsome bird of prey. The creature clinched its teeth, snarling black lips over sharp fangs. Its eyes burned like emeralds in starlight.
It raised gangly arms, longer than they should have been, multi-jointed fingers and razor-tipped talons at their ends. Those fingers were like the long legs of pale spiders, ready to spin webs of death.
And spin webs of death they did.
Sadie recognized her predicament too late. She screamed and scrambled backward, away from the thing. She dropped her glass of vodka which shattered on the floor like diamonds.
The wraith’s razor claws raked Sadie’s face and laid the flesh open to the bone. Four claw-tracked rips in her visage of perfect beauty displayed raw, pink meat before filling with blood. A second strike ripped into her eye sockets, slicing her eyes, leaving deep horizontal slashes across her forehead. The claws tangled in her hair and yanked. Sadie fell backward. As the creature pulled her hair, the skin of Sadie’s forehead split, lifted and peeled away from her skull like a poorly applied wig.
The wraith gave its awful howl again, a sound infused with rage. It pounced on Sadie and rammed its razor talons into her crotch, a grotesque and perverse vision for those who stared in abject horror, unable to move. The creature burrowed its hand deep into the cavity between her legs, and then yanked, pulling out the shredded lining of her sex and dragging with it a clump of wet entrails that reeked. With equal zeal the creature went in again, digging deeper, the ends of its claws slicing Sadie’s abdomen open from the inside out. When the creature’s long-nailed fingers emerged again, they brought with it a fist full of gore, and threw the dangling entrails into the crowd like gruesome confetti.
The wraith rose from the ruined body of Sadie McBay and turned to Christine Gamin, who cowered in the corner where the end of her father’s fully stocked wet-bar met the wall. She kicked one of the stools at the thing. She curled into a ball, eyes wide and shining like new half-dollars as the beast approached her, the blood of her slaughtered friend dripping onto Mr. Gamin’s exquisitely polished marble floor.
The wraith hunched over, clutched the stool, and rammed the stool’s legs through Christine’s torso like the tines of a pitchfork, nailing her to the wall. Her mouth opened wide to scream but blood gushed forth instead. The creature leaned down and clutched the girl’s face—a razored thumb hooked into her mouth and two fingers dug into her eye sockets, sending one ruined eyeball sliding down her cheek like a ghastly teardrop. It wrenched its grip and with a snap that could be heard even over the din of music and panic, it ripped Christine Gamin’s head clean off her body and sent it flying into the crowd. Trailing a stream of blood, dangling veins a
nd ragged tissue, the head bounced onto the Rococo-style table.
Christine’s eyeless head lolled at the feet of Andrea Carlocci, still naked but for her lace panties and a speckling of her host’s blood. Andrea screamed and convulsed with terror. Raj reached out to help her off the table as the crowd pressed in, but so many people were in the house that, when panic struck, every wasted person there went into a frenzy, making almost every means of escape from the packed living room impossible. Music still hammered the thick air. The monotonous heavy notes of “The Golden Walls of Heaven” with grinding guitar and pounding drums were an apropos soundtrack to the harrowing scene.
Around the carnage, the crowd cleared and fell atop each other in haste to flee from the abomination in their midst. The creature turned toward the wall of cringing teens and gave a hair-raising cry.
One of the biggest young men leaped onto the thing’s back, trying to pull it backward down onto the ground. His eyes were bloodshot, his jaw set in a hard line of determination. He was thrown to the floor, one arm severed at the shoulder, stump pumping blood while the life ran out of him and he went limp.
Butchery ensued as the creature went into a frenzy. It waded into the crowd of teens, ripping flesh, tearing skin, spilling blood, and slaughtering all who came within reach of its deadly claws. As soon as one person fell, their hot blood coating the people around them, the scream of two more followed. Bones snapped. Skulls cracked. Legs, arms, hands and heads were severed. The wraith was a whirling dervish of death. Gore caked the expensive rugs, smeared the polished walls, spattered the insides of the windows, and covered every person who slipped in it trying to escape imminent death.
The massacre continued for several minutes, a red tinged nightmare that seemed to those who survived to last an hour. For those who died, death was violent, but quick. And many died.
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