Scary Stories: A Collection of Horror - Volume 1 (Chamber of Horror Series)

by Billy Wells

  Suddenly, the phone, ringing on the end table beside her, startled her so much she spilled a third of her martini. Picking up the receiver, she heard Harry’s voice mingled with a crowd of unhappy commuters in the background.

  “Can you hear me, honey?”

  “Barely. Where are you?”

  “I’m at Penn Station in Newark. The commuter trains on the Northeast Corridor line have been delayed two hours due power outages because of the storm. I decided to park the car at Trenton rather than Hamilton, which gives me more choices on the trains.”

  “Harry, I told you to leave early. I made dinner. Malcolm did a wonderful job on the Christmas tree and the decorations. The champagne is chilling. And you know I hate to be alone in this big, old house at night.”

  “The special meeting went on forever, and I didn’t know there was a blizzard going on outside. The conference room where we met didn’t have windows.”

  “Well, I’m sure you’re doing the best you can, but don’t fall asleep waiting for the train like you did last month. Set the alarm on your cell.”

  “I promise I’ll be there as soon as I can. Do you think you could drive over to Laura’s house until I get there?”

  “I couldn’t get the car in the garage, and now I can’t even see it in the driveway the snow has drifted so high. I can’t get out, and I’m worried you won’t be able to get here even if you get to Trenton.”

  “Wild horses couldn’t keep me from spending Christmas Eve with you, darling. I know you’re disappointed in me, but wait till you see the surprise I have for you.”

  The lights flickered for a moment, and Helen gasped.

  “What is it?” Harry quaked as a background of static crept into the line.

  ”The lights flickered. Maybe the power is about to go off.”

  “Don’t think about the bad things that could happen. You’ll whip yourself into a frenzy. Do you have your medication with you?”

  “Yes, I have it, but I can’t drink alcohol if I take it,” Helen lamented. “I want this night to be romantic and special.”

  She heard the front door creak and paused a beat so Harry wouldn’t hear a tremor in her voice, “Well, I’ll see you when you get here. Let me know if you are delayed any longer than expected. Love you. Bye.”

  Helen turned the channel on the TV to a news station with the remote. Immediately, she heard the weather report. “South Jersey is calling for thirty inches of snow by morning,” the announcer said, showing off his pearly white teeth. “The highway department issued a travel advisory to stay off the roads unless it is a medical emergency. This could be the largest snowfall in thirty-one years.”

  On the strip scrolling across the bottom of the screen she saw the following alarming words, “A criminally insane patient committed for murdering two people fifteen years ago has escaped from the Princeton Sanitarium.”

  “Whoopee. A lunatic is on the loose to add to the list of creepy things that will make me crazy in this noisy, old house,” Helen muttered. She changed the channel to reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond to lighten the mood.

  Heavy snow continued to fall outside, and the wind continued to howl. She watched the reflection of the Christmas lights blinking on and off in the large picture window overlooking the frozen lake for a time. Then, feeling too exposed to the darkness outside, she got up and pulled the curtain. She did not want the maniac to know she was alone in the house if he was out there.

  Sitting back on the sofa, she chuckled to herself about how long any person would last if they were outside in this hellish snowstorm.

  The levity ended abruptly when someone rang the front doorbell. Helen rose from the sofa and felt the hairs rising on the back of her neck as she pondered her next move. No one in his right mind would be out on a night like this. No one, that is, except an escaped maniac who had no other place to go.

  She crept to the door and tried to sneak a peek through the peephole. The front door light was not on, and all she could see was a shadow moving across the opening.

  “Please help me,” said a desperate, raspy voice from the darkness. “My wife is pregnant, and I’ve run out of gas on Route 70 on my way to the hospital, and my cell died. I need to use your phone. Please let me in.”

  Helen remained silent, fearing the man was lying, but still fearing the consequences if she didn’t help the poor couple in distress.

  “Please. I know you’re in there. I can hear the television.”

  Helen stammered, “I can’t open the door. The news just said there’s a maniac on the loose in the area. I’ll call 9-1-1 for you, but I can’t open the door. You say your car is on Route 70?”

  Helen saw the shadow move away from the door. She listened for a reply, but the howling wind was the only sound.

  “I really want to help you. Give me your name, the make of your car, and I’ll call 9-1-1.”

  Helen listened, but there was no answer. She turned on the porch light, and to her surprise, saw no one at the door. She could only see the steady torrent of snow drifting onto the porch. Her heart raced as she tried to make sense of what had just happened. “The stranger must have been lying about his pregnant wife,” she thought, “he only wanted her to open the door. Could the maniac really be outside?”

  She ran to the phone and listened for a dial tone. Nothing. Were the lines down, or did the stranger cut the connection to the house? Opening her purse, she rummaged around for her cell. Finding it, she punched in 9-1-1 and could not believe it when she heard a voice on the line, “Hello, what is your emergency?”

  Helen spoke in a flurry, relaying the details of what the man who had come to my door had said and added, “Now that it’s clear he didn’t need to use the phone, I’m deathly afraid the man outside is the maniac who escaped from the sanitarium.”

  “What’s your name and address?” asked the emergency operator.

  “Helen Pierce. My address is 928 Lakeshore Drive, Medford.”

  “I’ll call the sheriff’s department and try to get someone out there, but the number of calls we’re receiving due to the weather are….” The voice ended abruptly. She tried several more times, but there was no longer any service.

  Helen turned off the television, plunging the house into darkness except for the Christmas lights on the tree and the glow of the logs in the fireplace. A moment later, she jumped when she heard a cinder fall through the grate. The bushes scraping the windows and the whistle of the wind seeping in from under the thresholds caused her to turn the television back on to hide the mixture of creepy sounds that continued to unnerve her.

  The stranger at the door was the only thing on her mind. Could she or Malcolm have left a window or door unlocked? It was such a big house, and there were so many windows and doors.

  If only the police would come. If only Harry would come. Then, a terrible thought gripped her, “What if Harry came home, and the maniac attacked him before he could get inside the house? Someone could easily be lurking in one of the outbuildings just a stone’s throw away.”

  Every fifteen minutes, she picked up the phone and tried to get a dial tone. She also tried her cell, and as before, there was still no service. Whatever happened, she was on her own.

  The front doorbell rang again. Hoping, by some miracle, the police had actually responded to her 9-1-1 call, she ran to the door and looked through the small opening. Helen couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw a man in a blue uniform wearing a hat in the glow of the porch light.

  “This is the Medford police. Did you report a prowler?” the man said, trying to see through the peephole.

  Helen immediately sensed that the policeman’s raspy voice sounded very much like the voice of the stranger who had come earlier. “Can you show me your badge?” she said, stalling before opening the door.

  The police officer stepped back into the light, and Helen noticed a spray of blood on the silver badge fastened to the chest of his uniform. She stood paralyzed in fear as the officer looked down at his
shield, and wiping away the blood with his glove, he said, “I‘m sorry you had to see that. It’s dark out here, and I didn’t see the splatter until I stepped under the light. In any case, I’m freezing my balls off out here and need to come inside. Make it easy on yourself. Open the door, or I’ll kick it in. I promise I won’t hurt you. It’s Christmas, isn’t it? It’s the season to be merry. What do you say?”

  Helen remained silent and moved away from the door. Picking up the remote, she turned off the TV and the Christmas lights.

  When the lights went out, and Helen did not open the door, the man made several futile attempts to muscle down the thick, solid oak door. She heard him cursing after each thunderous kick.

  Time passed, and then came the earsplitting report of a gun on the front porch. A large hole appeared in the right panel of the door, followed by another blast that created a similar hole in the lower left panel next to the jamb.

  Helen stifled a scream and ran into a dark recess off the foyer. Opening a door that she assumed had not been opened for years, she inched into the black hallway that led toward the section of the house where her bedroom was located when she was a child. The light from the fireplace dimly illuminated the hall. Clouds of dust motes filled the opening as she closed the door and locked it, plunging the hall into total darkness.

  She felt the sensation of déjà vu sending shivers up her backbone. Even in the complete darkness, she remembered this hallway like it was yesterday. She had played hide and go seek with her siblings countless times, and she knew every inch of the space even in the dark. Memories of the past returned as she felt for the first doorknob on the right side of the hall.

  When Helen touched the cold, round doorknob, fond images of Jimmy, her younger brother, flooded her mind. Poor Jimmy. She could see his bushy red hair and his big brown eyes, but most of all; she remembered how blue his lips were when Malcolm covered him with a piece of tarp the day he drowned in the lake.

  She heard more gunfire in the main house and the sound of breaking glass. She heard the muffled shouts of the stranger behind the locked door as she moved deeper into the long corridor.

  Touching the second knob on the right, she saw her younger sister in her memory, running playfully through the green grass in the yard. Poor Gillian. She had died when Helen was twelve. She fell through the ice on the lake. The image of her being taken away in a black body bag haunted her to this day.

  She trembled when she touched the third knob, which had been her older brother’s room. Helen had loved him dearly until the day he tried to strangle her in the bathtub. Thank God, Malcolm had come home unexpectedly and saved her. Poor Hugo. She had never forgotten the look on his face when the police took him away in handcuffs. During the trial, he confessed to killing their parents and later Jimmy and Gillian on the lake. He was such a handsome boy until he ravaged his face with a butcher knife. He had been committed to the Princeton Sanitarium for what seemed like an eternity.

  Suddenly, the possibility that it could have been Hugo who escaped from the institution registered for the first time. “Wouldn’t that be an incredible coincidence?” she thought. “The news flash did not give the name of the person the police were searching for, but she remembered the reporter had said he’d been committed fifteen years ago.” Her face darkened when she did the math and found Hugo went to the insane asylum about fifteen years ago. If it was Hugo who escaped, could he find his way back to this house in the middle of a blizzard after all these years? She hoped not, for her sake.

  Finally, Helen touched the last doorknob at the end of the hall and opened it. This was the room her parents said to go to if someone ever broke into the house.

  Inside the outer door, the wall looked like a bank vault. Turning on the light, she spun a cylinder and pushed open the heavy steel door. Helen crawled through the center of the opening and turned on a new set of internal lights and a generator switch to activate the heat and air conditioning, and then closed the door. The interior of the space had a sink with running water and a telephone. The space was initially created in the ‘50’s as a bomb shelter and updated as a place to go in an emergency just before her parents were killed in 1995.

  She picked up the telephone and found it as dead as the phone in the living room. She remembered her father telling her this was a dedicated line that would not be affected even if someone cut the connection to the house. She wondered if Malcolm had continued the service even after her parents died. If he had, once the outage was repaired, she would be able to call 9-1-1 and have someone come to her rescue. The intruder could destroy the rest of the house, but he would not be able to reach her in this bomb shelter without high explosives. This room was both bomb and fireproof.

  She was safe, but she still had to find a way to protect Harry from the intruder if she couldn’t call for help soon.

  She sat down at a desk and turned on a series of surveillance monitors she had loved to play with years ago. She was amazed they still worked. Possibly, Malcolm had been maintaining the system as one of his chores, and he had never mentioned it. In any case, this was a godsend. She wished the old caretaker was here now, but she had left strict instructions for him to take the weekend off.

  The monitors showed the rooms inside the house, the parking lot, the porches, and several out buildings. The first screen showed a police car parked at the entrance of their circular driveway in a snow bank under a streetlight. When she panned to a closer view of the side window with the zoom feature, she saw a man in a tee shirt with his face pressed against the side window and another man in a police uniform slumped in the passenger seat next to him. There was a splatter of blood on the glass, and neither man was moving.

  In the monitor that showed the living room, she saw the man in the police uniform thrashing about shouting for her to come out of hiding. Then, she saw him looking into the camera lens at a distance and seeing something that tipped him off she was watching him.

  He walked up to the camera and said grinning from ear to ear, “Helen, I know Harry is on his way here. If you don’t come out, I promise I will cut off his fingers and toes and then his balls right here in the living room so you can see it in your monitor. You don’t want that to happen, do you? So…if you’ll open the safe in the den, I’ll be out of here. Nobody needs to get hurt.”

  “Who was this killer?” she thought. “He didn’t sound like a maniac from the sanatorium. Was he the stranger at the door? Did he overhear her conversation with 9-1-1 when she told them to send the police? How did he know their names and the location of the safe?”

  The intruder reached up, and grabbing the camera from its perch, disconnected the line. The monitor in the living room went black. Helen tried the phones again to see if service had been restored, but nothing had changed. She tried to think of a Plan B if Harry arrived before she could reach the police.

  She had several rifles in the shelter, but she had never fired a gun and had always hoped she never would.

  As the hours passed, the snow continued to fall relentlessly across the landscape outside. She could hear the killer ranting for her to come out on several of the inside monitors, but she continued to stay within the safety of the impenetrable shelter.

  Then, Helen’s worst fears were realized when she saw headlights approaching through the swirling snow in the monitor. She recognized Harry’s Hummer fishtailing up the hill. After pausing at the police car that was completely covered in a drift, the Hummer proceeded past two other abandoned vehicles and plowed its way toward the circular driveway leading to the front entrance.

  Helen punched in Harry’s number, but just as before, she could not get through. She watched Harry struggle to open his car door, and after exiting, lost him in a snow bank between the driveway and the front door. Poor Harry was walking into certain death. She had to act fast and take drastic action if she had any chance of saving his life.

  She opened a cabinet on the wall and taking the Glock from the shelf, verified the gun was loaded. Mo
ving to the entrance, she wasted valuable time trying to figure out how to unlock the massive door. Finally, when it clicked open, she scurried down the dark hallway to the door opening into the foyer.

  She heard gunshots explode behind the locked door. Terror gripped her as the thought of Harry being another victim of the killer who’d broken into the house. Determined to blow his ass away if he had hurt poor defenseless Harry no matter what the consequences, she quietly opened the door to the foyer and peered into the dimly lit expanse of the main house.

  The embers in the fireplace provided the only light as she moved forward as stealthily as she could. The same irritating noises that had plagued her all night clouded the sound of anyone moving in the dark living room. She slid down onto the ceramic tile floor, and crawling slowly toward the center of the enormous room, she listened for the slightest unfamiliar sound.

  Trembling with a level of crippling fear she had never experienced, she pointed the handgun into the darkness and inched forward.

  Suddenly, Helen’s hand felt something wet and slippery on the tile. A dark shape lay motionless on the floor in front of her. Unable to avoid the pool of warm blood surrounding the body of a man, she shimmied forward on her stomach. Then, she made out the outline of the silver badge and saw the distorted face of the killer in the light that remained from the flickering firelight.

  With a burst of elation, she stood up and screamed, “Harry! Where are you?”

  “I’m here, my darling,” came a shout from the center of the dark living room.

  “I thought I’d lost you. Thank God, that awful man is dead. I was so afraid. He killed the policemen, and I was certain he would kill you, too.”