by Brian Hodge
Guy heard heavy footsteps padding down a ladder behind him, and he tried to move but couldn’t make his legs work properly. The pain was shackling his pelvis and his heart was racing so swiftly he could barely think but there was something about the profusion of pictures that was driving Guy on.
He noticed a row of photos taped to the ceiling beam above him and his heart contracted into a stone. He recognized some of the faces. Innocent, wide-eyed faces. Some of them school photos. Some of them cropped from family photos. The milk carton children.
The missing.
All of them victims of a doughy-faced insurance executive named Herbert Cooley —
— who was, at this very moment, reaching the bottom of a step ladder on the far side of the crawlspace. Guy could hear his watery, heavy breathing. The Taser was making a faint crackling noise.
Guy tried to rise but it was futile. The torment of his spine and the partial paralysis kept him glued to his ass on the moist floor of the crawlspace, surrounded by the litter of a compulsive masturbator. Empty bottles of lubricant. Soiled blankets and towels. A space heater rattling, the cozy orange glow for those wintry evenings of self-abuse.
Some of the pictures — the worst ones — showed the young victims bound and gagged. Guy wondered if there were tiny bones buried somewhere?
A photo screamed at Guy from the wall to his right, a wallet sized black-and-white photo of a two-year-old boy, pasted on yellow ruled paper, an edging of compulsive doodles around it – flowers and penises and skulls — all of it flooding Guy with memories.
As a toddler Guy had slightly crossed eyes for which he wore corrective glasses from pre-school through the second grade. Right now, at this very moment, this same cross-eyed child was staring out from a black and white snapshot taken on some discount store carousel.
The picture was worse than a Taser shock, jolting Guy with a primal memory:
Alone in an empty Corvair, in the darkness, terrified, sobbing, snot on his face, shackled to his car seat, mommy’s door open, steam coming out of the car, and mommy out on the road, in the rain, waving at lights. The little boy cannot see her anymore. A scream, and then nothing but mist on the windows. The little boy sobs. And then, and then, and then—the moment that will change the little boy’s life forever—the side door opens and a ghostly man appears, a very pale, tall man with red-rimmed eyes. “Very good then,” he says, and reaches in and takes the boy. The boy is flailing and screaming. The pale man gets rough. Throws the boy in a dark trunk. And hours go by. Finally the trunk opens in a silent, dark place that smells of oil and chalk, and the man tries to lift the boy out. But the boy gets lucky. The boy bites into the man’s wrist, and the man screams, and the boy manages to slip away and run across a dark place. The boy sees an opening and squeezes through it, then tears out into the night. Into the rain. Toward the closest house. Toward safety —
— and back in the here and now, lying supine in a puddle of God-knows-what—urine? —semen? — an overturned vanilla Slim-Fast shake? — Guy put the sudden revelation out of his mind. The fleeting realization that this was how Guy became an orphan, and this why Cooley had set off internal alarms when Guy had first met him — all of it — was short lived… because Guy had more pressing matters facing him at the current moment: trapped in a hellish subterranean museum, a naked pedophile approaching with a crackling Taser gun.
“I wondered how long it would take for you to get curious,” Cooley mused as he towered over Guy, a pair of objects now aimed directly at Guy — the buzzing muzzle of a Taser gun and a crooked, veined, purple erection.
“Okay, look, let me go and, and, and —” Guy started to stammer but suddenly saw an opportunity that would probably only be available for a very brief instant.
Cooley was licking his lips. “It certainly took me long enough to find you.”
“Don’t do this,” Guy pleaded, but it was all acting now because Guy saw his only chance plugged into an exposed duplex outlet mounted on the moldy wall-board ten feet away.
“You were the only one,” Cooley wanted Guy to know.
“The only one what?”
“The only one that got away,” Cooley said with that cadaverous grin. In the gloom of the crawlspace, his teeth were the color of spoiled egg yolks.
“How did you —?”
Cooley aimed the stun-gun at Guy’s face. “The irony! After all these years, I finally find you, and look at the service you’re providing!”
“Wait, wait —”
“Pity you won’t to be able to fulfill the covenants of our agreement.”
Just as Cooley was about to pull the trigger Guy kicked the space heater over.
The glowing grille of the heater landed on the milky fluid on the floor.
Cooley’s hand froze suddenly on the Taser, the muzzle spitting a tendril of lightning off into the shadows as the space heater boiled with sparks at his feet. Guy had to shield his face as a sheath of electricity flickered up Cooley’s nude, varicose form, sending him into shuddering spasms. His mouth gaped. His blood-shot eyes bulged, and a blue flame licked up the back of his head, catching the delicate wisps of grey hair there. The stench of cooking meat was overwhelming.
Guy managed to roll away as the naked pedophile was fried to a crisp.
The conductor: Cooley’s own watery spoor, his own ritual ejaculate.
Guy covered his face until the crackling stopped and silence returned to that terrible place.
The unmarked squad car smelled of stale cigar smoke and wintergreen deodorizer. Guy sat in the back behind the metal screen, wrapped in a woolen blanket. Through the window he could see the EMS attendants carrying Cooley’s body — now covered with a sheet—across the lawn. In the pre-dawn gloom, the neighbors were gathered behind yellow tape, shaking their heads and clucking their tongues at such a spectacle unfolding in their gorgeous hermetically sealed world.
“About this so-called service you were talking about in your statement,” the cop in the front seat was saying. He was plainclothes. Fifty-ish, bad sport coat, calloused gaze. He shot a look over the seat back at Guy.
“The Porno Pal System,” Guy murmured, his forehead resting on the grimy rear window.
“Yeah, right. The Porno Pal System.” The cop smiled wanly, scratching his bad buzz cut, obviously measuring his words. “Let’s talk about that for a second.”
“I’m closing our doors,” Guy mumbled.
“What was that?”
Guy looked at the detective, wondering what kind of charges would be leveled against this clandestine little company. “I’m officially going out of business.”
“Is that right?”
Guy nodded.
The cop shrugged, then gazed back out the front window. “That’s a shame,” he said, starting the engine. “I was going to sign up for it myself.”
Guy didn’t say anything.
“Give you a ride home?” the cop asked.
Guy said that would be great, then stared back out the window as the car pulled away from the death house…
… and made its way back through the labyrinth of graceful old homes, their tasteful draperies and blinds drawn across their tasteful bay windows, ever obscuring the outer world from the secrets within.
IV. HAUNTED
“The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.”
- Elbert Hubbard
THE BEAUMONT PROPHECY
“Ahhhhhhhhhgggg!”
Buddy Ray Dothan jerked awake in room 213 of the Motel 6 out on Steel Pike Road. He was covered in sweat. The room was dark and smelled vaguely of urine and tired fabric.
Buddy was not alone. Another figure huddled in the corner, buried in shadows, watching. About the only thing you could see of this second gentleman was the glowing tip of a cigarette floating like a firefly in the darkness.
Buddy Ray sat there for a moment, waiting for his heart to quit thumping, the same damn nightmare he’d been having most of his wretched adult life still clinging to hi
m like cobwebs. The Beaumont house. Once again, he’d dreamt of that same rotten Victorian pile with its pigeon-spattered black turret rising up into the autumn sky, and that same diseased orifice of a doorway, gaping open and beckoning to him in the strobing nimbus of a jack-o-lantern’s light.
Just like it had so many Halloweens ago when Buddy Ray Dothan was a kid and got the bejesus scared out of him by what he saw in the attic window.
“I warned y’all ’bout dozin off,” said the figure in the corner, leaning forward on the Lazy Boy. Earl Spindler’s face came into partial view in the blinking neon seeping through the blinds. Earl had grown up with Buddy Ray, and had also been spooked on many occasion by the Beaumont house. A leathery man in his late forties, Earl wore faded blue mechanic’s dungarees pocked with grease. His gaunt, lined face was etched with a lifetime of disappointments and dashed dreams.
“Is it time yet?”
Earl looked at his watch. “Just about. Pretty near midnight. Y’all ready?”
“Ready as I’m ever gonna be,” Buddy murmured and scooted over to the edge of the bed. He burrowed his feet into broken-down boots, then waded through the swamp of empty beer cans. A rail-thin man with a shock of thick, greasy red hair, Buddy Ray had the stooped shoulders and tattooed arms of a career convict. He’d done two tours at Marion — one for reckless endangerment, one for assault and battery — and was currently looking at a decade of hard parole.
“You got them waterproof matches?”
Buddy gave him an annoyed nod and told him yes, for the third time, yes, he hadn’t forgotten the damned matches. They got their stuff together and left the room unlocked. Earl’s battered 4-by-4 was waiting for them in the parking lot.
They got in and took off in a thundercloud of exhaust fumes and gravel dust that rose and vanished like silvery ghosts in the moon-lit autumn air.
It took them ten minutes to find their way across their little blue-collar hometown. They rode in silence, smoking cigarettes and trying to avoid eye contact with the landmarks of their childhood. It was too painful to see the playing fields and schools and jungle gyms and Dairy Queens in which they had harbored their secret desperate dreams and goals. It was too agonizing to think of all the failures that had greeted them as adults. The ruined marriages, the lost jobs, the trails of human wreckage — all because of that cursed house.
All because they had defied the neighborhood legends and had gone up to that deserted doorway and had rung that broken doorbell on Halloween.
“What if we just drive by, toss a Molotov cocktail at the place and call it a night?” Earl was murmuring, gazing out at the side mirror as he steered the truck up a narrow macadam toward the cathedral of elms that comprised Beaumont Hill.
“Nope, gotta be just like we agreed,” Buddy Ray told him from the shotgun seat, snapping another kitchen match with the edge of his thumbnail. He sparked his Marlboro with trembling hands. What the two friends had agreed on was that they would torch the old haunted Victorian at the stroke of 12:00 AM, torch it once and for all, on Halloween night, torch it in the same fashion they had been cursed by it so many years ago — right on that slumped porch, right after ringing that silent, broken bell. Buddy Ray still remembered that horrible moment like it had happened last week — two cocky 12 year old kids, ringing that mute doorbell, then glancing up at that cracked attic window and seeing those horrible faces in the darkness behind the glass. Somehow, it seemed as though the curse on Buddy Ray Dothan’s life had started right at that moment — the endless string of bitter failure and disappointments.
Earl yanked the stick and pulled the truck over to the curb at the edge of a weed-whiskered cul-de-sac. The engine sputtered and died, and Earl sat there for a moment, looking down at his lap. “What if we’re wrong?”
Buddy Ray sniffed. “We ain’t wrong, alright, we ain’t. I got it all plotted out, have for years.”
“But what if — ?”
“Dammnit-to-hell, Earl, don’t ya’ll remember flunkin outta Rosewood elementary?! Happened one goddamn week after that Halloween. Same story with me. My daddy up and split that very Christmas. Been downhill ever since. It’s that house. I told you a million times it’s that house. The place has to go.”
Silence gripped the interior for a moment. Finally Earl flicked his cigarette through the open vent, then nodded to himself. “Let’s get it done then.”
They carried two gallons of non-leaded gas in plastic Sky Chief tanks — one for each of them — up the twisty, narrow walkway that bisected a grove of overgrown elms. A moment later the top of the Beaumont turret came into view up ahead of the boys, peering out above the dark skeletal limbs of diseased trees. Gooseflesh poured down Buddy Ray’s back and arms. Earl was just as unnerved by the sight of it, his lips pursed nervously as they approached. Here were two men who had done hard time, fought turf wars with street gangs, robbed gas stations — reduced to trembling children.
The empty house sat at the top of that scabrous hillock like a desiccated king. Its roof pitches sagging, its windows either boarded or riddled with cracks, its ancient gray clapboards ravaged with graffiti. Animals had had their cruel way with it over the years — from the frosting of bird dung along the dormers to the banquet of turds along the porch planks. In the darkness it radiated desolation — like a great monolithic stain across the shadows of the woods.
“The hell is that?” Earl whispered as they climbed the creaking porch steps, the fear constricting his voice. Some wise-ass neighborhood kid, probably earlier that week, must have come up there and put the jack-o-lantern on the porch near the door. The shriveled pumpkin had a grotesque face carved into it, serpentine eyes and a rictus of a grin that was sinking into itself. “Whattya doin’?!” Earl hissed at Buddy Ray. “The hell are you doing?”
Buddy Ray was kneeling down next to the pumpkin, removing its moldering lid. He found a candle inside its festering, fragrant husk. Buddy Ray dug for another match, snapped the little red sulfer tip and ignited the wick.
It just seemed like the right thing to do.
“COME ON! — WHATTYA DOIN’! — COME ON!” Earl was worrying off his tank’s lid, the fluid sloshing noisily. “LET’S GET IT OVER WITH AND GET THE HELL OUTTA HERE!!”
They doused the porch, the threshold, the door, the shutters, the broken front window.
There was an awkward moment when they were done, the two of them gazing dumbly at each other, wondering which one should do the honors. Buddy Ray opened the box of wooden matches, and they each plucked one from the tiny carton. Neither man saw the rotten pumpkin behind them extruding hot wax, the tear of oily accelerant pooling in its eye, then tracking down the mottled surface of the face and plopping in the puddle of gas on the porch step like a bad penny.
“C’MON, C’MON! LET’S DO IT!”
Buddy reached up to the stained panel beside the door jamb and pressed the old cracked mother-of-pearl door bell. It made no sound. They looked at each other one more time, then tossed their ceremonial matches onto the fuel-damp clapboards of the house, and watched the flames flutter, then leap up around the lip of the door. It sounded like a low, obscene whisper. It was almost sensual to watch. Buddy Ray felt the hairs on his arms stiffen, felt the heat on his forehead.
Neither man noticed the pumpkin catching fire behind them, the tiny flames licking up the side of the gourd, then hopping into the air like a luminous bird taking flight. They were too busy watching the house catch fire, the orange glow reflecting off their baleful faces. Neither noticed the fire coalescing behind them, billowing above the pumpkin, metamorphosing into the shape of a giant ghostly figure. Neither saw the radiant orange arms reaching out for them, the luminous jaws opening. Neither noticed the creature made of fire until it was too late.
Buddy Ray whirled around and opened his mouth to scream but nothing came out.
“WELCOME HOME!!!” said the glowing phantom.
“AAHHHHHHHHGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!”
The fire devoured both o
f them, their screams swallowed by the maelstrom. They staggered and slammed against the rotten facade, as the fire swallowed them, gobbled them, chewed them up, until there was nothing left but a roaring tidal wave of white hot pain. Then the blackness engulfed them both… and everything went away.
They awoke sometime later. The pain was gone, the noise was gone. They were inside the house. At least it felt as though they were inside the house. It was hard to tell, it was so dark.
Eyes adjusting to the gloom, they realized they were lying in a vestibule at the base of a narrow staircase. The muffled sounds of voices, sirens, car doors slamming, came through the walls from somewhere nearby. The air smelled of mold and swamp rot. The two men managed to rise to their feet and then feel their way in the pitch darkness along the wall to the steps. Lacking any other way out, they did the next best thing.
They climbed the steps.
The ancient risers did not creak, their footsteps completely silent.
They found their way through a door.
The attic was filled with ancient, moldering trunks and antique furniture shrouded with stained sheets. Earl went over to the tiny attic window and looked down. “Aw Jesus no, no… God no.”
Buddy Ray hurried over, crouched next to Earl, and gazed through the dormer porthole, down at the front of the Beaumont house.
An EMT unit was parked next to the hook and ladder truck, its red chaser lights flickering off the fog bank of noxious smoke from the dying embers of the dwindling fire. Buddy Ray’s heart turned to ice, his soul constricting, his whole pathetic existence distilled down this terrible moment of clarity, gaping down at his own scorched body being loaded onto a gurney next to Earl’s, then stowed into the rear of the morgue wagon.
But worse than that — far worse — was the realization that he had seen all this before, that he had been shown this by the house. Time and time again down through the years. One horrible moment replayed endlessly in nightmares: when little 10-year-old Buddy Ray Dothan had gazed up at that decrepit, cracked attic window some thirty-odd Halloweens ago…