by C. T. Phipps
You’re such a good brother, the Spirit of the Hunt said. It’s kind of sickening.
I don’t suppose you can lend me a hand, I asked.
The Spirit of the Hunt clapped.
“Funny,” I said aloud.
The game is no fun if there are no stakes, the Spirit of the Hunt said.
Is what my father said about the Fraternity true? I asked.
You know it is, the Spirit of the Hunt said. He helped it go national. Now it’s a global phenomenon. Slashers for slashers by slashers. They even have a convention.
You’re making that up, I said.
Maybe. Get ready for round two.
“William?” Nancy’s voice spoke behind me.
I spun around and assumed a fighting stance.
Nancy looked identical to how she had in Demeter’s Garden but was carrying the polearm from earlier, one of the few weapons we’d chosen to take with us before burning down the farmhouse. If my father was trying to trick me, he’d done a good job of conjuring her doppelganger. Unfortunately, I couldn’t trust anything I saw here.
“How did you get here?” I asked, staying a few feet away.
Nancy took a step forward. “You disappeared and Carrie collapsed. Gerald brought her out to the car and I got a weapon from the back. Then I touched her and appeared here. I think my Artemis powers are a bit wilder than I gave them credit for. Maybe they have a magical curse-breaking mode.”
Or I brought her here, the Spirit of the Hunt said. Maybe it was your sister’s magic or your psychic connection with Nancy. You are linked after all. Could be anything really. Oh, maybe it’s your father assuming her visage so he can get close enough to stab you to death since that’s by far the most likely scenario. I’ll never tell. It’s more fun to leave things ambiguous.
I was getting really irritated with my unseen patron.
“What the hell is this place?” Nancy asked.
“Hell,” I said, taking a step back. “Mine at least.”
“I’m here to help, Will,” Nancy said.
“Prove you’re who you say you are,” I said, not sure how she would go about doing so.
Nancy nodded, walked three more steps and kissed me.
Chapter Fifteen
My first kiss was both wonderful and embarrassing. Wonderful because it was a sense of warmth and pleasure that filled my entire body like heat from a fireplace. Parts that I’d never given much thought to were suddenly keenly aware of her body pressed up against mine and how enjoyable that sensation was. Embarrassing because I was now ashamed, for no reason that I could think of, that I’d never kissed anyone before.
I was also worried that I was going to screw this up despite the statistical probability that most human beings were terrible during these situations and practice made perfect. It’s just that their practice probably happened during middle school and I was extremely behind my peers. In the end, I decided just to enjoy it until Nancy broke away.
She held her polearm tight and leaned on it like a staff. “Are you convinced I’m not your father now?”
I nodded. “Yes, my father’s severe homophobia would prevent him from doing this.”
Nancy blinked then smirked. “Not quite the reaction I was hoping for.”
“Are you referring to the kiss?” I asked, just to be sure.
“Yes,” Nancy said.
I grimaced, embarrassed. “It was quite nice. Very nice in fact. Can we do it again?”
Nancy smirked. “Better.”
“Thank you,” I said, frowning. “I don’t have much experience with the subject.”
“You did fine.” Nancy raised an eyebrow. “Are we going to have to have a talk about the birds and the bees?”
“I’m familiar with the mechanics,” I replied, dryly. “However, if that’s going to be a subject soon then I suggest we find some place other than my sister’s brain. Her mind is dirty enough as it is.”
“Sex is only dirty if you do it right,” Nancy replied, looking around. “Seriously, we’re in your sister’s brain?”
“The Dreamlands are places mentioned in many religions as well as the writing of H.P. Lovecraft. Apparently, my father pulled me physically here. However, it’s more common for people to visit via, well, dreams.”
Nancy nodded. “Okay, got it. I’m prepped for this.”
“Wait, you are?” I asked, surprised.
“Oh yes,” Nancy said. “My mom had a friend who dealt with a dream slasher. She said the trick was remembering you were the dreamer and thus in control, not them.”
“I’m not sure that applies when you’re also intruders,” I said, pointing out the flaw in her logic. “Still, one of these days you’re going to have to reveal how much you really do know about my kind.”
“And show off all my secrets?” Nancy asked, flirtatiously.
“Yes?” I asked, not getting what she was going for.
Nancy rolled her eyes. “So, your father is still around here?”
“Yes,” I said. “I don’t know if he’s been temporarily dissipated again or not, though. I kind of hope he hasn’t been because I don’t want to wait another day for him to come back. Also, he’s draining my sister of power. I don’t know what that’s going to do to her.”
Nancy frowned. “You promised to save my sister, William. I will help you save yours. Otherwise, she’ll haunt us both and I’m not sure I could survive that.”
I gave a pained smile. “Thank you.”
Nancy took a deep breath. “So, do you think we should search the place? See if we can find your father and, uh—”
“Kill him forever?” I asked.
Nancy blanched. “Uhm, I don’t know how—”
“I’m all for it,” I replied. “Billy and I share a relationship by blood, not love.”
Nancy blinked. “Are you sure? Family is complicated.”
I wasn’t sure that Nancy fully appreciated what a monstrous pile of crap Billy was. Then again, maybe she did, and she was more concerned about the fact that I would be the one doing the killing (or she did). It was nice of her to worry about me like that, but I didn’t have any issues with how this conflict had to go down.
If there had been a time when I cared about Billy Patrick’s love, it had ended the moment he started teaching Carrie the same way he’d taught me. I could stomach the awful things he’d done to me, not the things he’d done to my sister. My biggest regret was the fact I hadn’t been the one to kill him first. This was my chance to rectify that mistake.
“He admitted he plans to take over my body and wear me like a suit to kill again,” I replied. “I’m pretty sure.”
Nancy frowned. “If you say so.”
I looked around the living room and noticed that the wallpaper was starting to heal up and the smell dissipate. “I don’t even know if he has a physical body right now, but this place is more memory and wishes than reality so we might as well try.”
“Maybe if we say his name three times in a mirror, he’ll appear,” Nancy said.
I wouldn’t joke about that, the Spirit of the Hunt said. That’s happened far too many times to people who invoked my name.
The Spirit of the Hunt? I asked.
That’s my title, not name, the Spirit of the Hunt laughed. I’ll share that when you prove yourself.
I didn’t like the sound of that.
Nancy looked at me. “What’s it like?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Having voices in your head,” Nancy replied, clutching her Medieval weapon tightly. “I keep hearing you have these one-sided conversations, like you’re on a cellphone. Sometimes it’s fascinating, while other times it seems like you’re not in control of yourself.”
“Irritating,” I replied, going over to the Christmas tree’s former location and picking up a briefcase off the floor along with a shiny new baseball bat. They weren’t real but they were real here and both were weapons I was familiar with. It was better than going after my father with b
are fists at least.
“Irritating?” Nancy asked.
“I thought I might escape this before I started hearing her,” I replied. “I can’t.”
“Nothing’s impossible,” Nancy said. “Do you want to escape it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve seen people living normal lives and the happiness they get out of it. Family, children, spouses, friendship, and boring jobs that don’t involve killing. The problem is, the more I observe them, the more I know how very different I am from them. I have never been normal, and I wouldn’t know what it’s like if it stabbed me in the chest—a metaphor I have chosen deliberately.”
Nancy frowned and looked over at the fireplace mantle, which was strange since I was pretty sure my father wasn’t hiding there. “I tried to do the whole normal thing at Hawthorne college. I was supposed to be my sister’s backup, but I wasn’t necessary. She’d already handled the campus slasher problem and it wasn’t like we had any other leads. I decided to get a poly-sci degree and just chill.”
“What happened?” I asked, deciding to wait for her before we explored the rest of the house.
“My millionaire best friend apparently sold us to an evil cult,” Nancy said, picking up one of the framed photographs. “William, if you want my advice, normal does not exist. It’s what people in denial of reality call safety and there’s no such thing.”
I blinked. “You may be right. Maybe normal is just closing your eyes and pretending there is no monster under the bed.”
“When I thought there was, my mom gave me a bat like that,” Nancy said, pointing to the Louisville Slugger in my hands with her polearm.
“She sounds like a wise woman,” I said.
Nancy frowned. “Honestly, I think Vivienne may have screwed me up every bit as bad as your dad did you but at least she was well-intentioned. Still, you know what they say about the road to hell.”
“It can be conjured with the blood of virgins at a crossroads?” I asked.
Nancy stared.
“That was a joke,” I said. “Probably.”
Nancy chuckled and showed me the photo. “Is this your mother?”
Clutching her polearm in one hand, with the other Nancy showed me a photo of myself as a young boy, holding my sister’s hand. Carrie and I had black hair and swarthy complexions, matching the woman in the photo with us. Our current looks were the result of hair dye and spending the past decade indoors. One of the benefits of the hospital and police’s incompetence was that we’d been described as, “two adults of mixed Caucasian and Middle Eastern descent.” That put images in pursuers’ heads that didn’t correspond to reality.
Our mother was standing behind us, with a hand on each of our shoulders. She was a beautiful, dusky-skinned woman with long, black hair and piercing eyes. She was wearing a brightly colored Christmas sweater and sweatpants even as there was something about her that made the clothes seem like camouflage.
“Yes,” I said. “That is our mother.”
“How did she end up with Billy?” Nancy asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied, the subject painful. “She was there for our early life and then gone the next.”
“Did he kill her?” Nancy asked, sounding afraid she’d unwittingly stepped into something dark. She needn’t have worried—all parts of my past were dark.
“No,” I said. “Sometimes I wondered but my father was afraid of her. So afraid that he refused anyone to speak of her and hit us whenever she was mentioned. Jeremiah blunted the worst of it, but he was scared of her too. I never understood why. Jeremiah regularly dealt with demons and tentacled things from the 9th dimension.”
“What could scare them?” Nancy asked, putting the picture back on the fireplace mantle.
“I have no idea,” I said. “Though my father may have just been scared by a woman he couldn’t intimidate.”
Yeah, I loved throwing shade on Billy. Could you tell?
“Well, maybe you’ll run into her again someday,” Nancy said.
I wasn’t sure that would be a good thing. “Sure.”
That was when I noticed the teddy bear sitting in the easy chair, the one marked Jeremiah. It has moved so that its left paw pointed down. There was no way it could have accidentally moved into that position.
“I think we should go to the garage,” I said, pointing to the teddy bear.
“We’re taking leads from teddy bears now?” Nancy asked.
“It’s either my sister, Jeremiah, or the Spirit of the Hunt trying to help us,” I said.
“Or your father trying to trap us,” Nancy said.
“Which is the same way we need to go anyway,” I replied.
“I just hate teddy bears,” Nancy said.
I paused. “You hate teddy bears?”
“Yes,” Nancy said.
“Teddy bears,” I repeated.
“Yes, because that’s the weirdest thing about my life,” Nancy said, looking at me sideways.
“It’s up there,” I replied.
“Yeah, well a few have tried to kill me over the years,” Nancy said, gesturing with her polearm to the garage. “Okay, let’s go see what’s inside your garage.”
“Memories,” I said, softly. “Bad ones.”
“You sure you don’t want to check out your old room first?” Nancy said. “I bet it smells like Axe Body Spray and is covered in naughty posters.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, that was me as a teenager. Not full of books on science, biology, and math stolen from the public library.”
“Surely you weren’t that boring,” Nancy said.
“I wasn’t interested in the majority of things that boys my age were,” I replied, alluding to the fact I was both asexual as well as the fact that my father had been uninterested in letting me pursue any less serious interests. Money was always tight in my family and most of our excess cash had gone to funding my father’s “hobbies” rather than my own. About the only thing I’d ever had fiction-wise was my grandfather’s collection of the Hardy Boys books. Again, in a weird way, he’d been the most “normal” member of our family regardless of the weird rites he performed in the wilderness. Perhaps another reason why I had such skewed ideas for what qualified as such.
Do you feel guilt for killing him? The Spirit of the Hunt asked. At least helping.
Is that what that feeling is? I asked, sincerely. I wasn’t sure.
That’s not an answer, the Spirit of the Hunt chided.
You’re right, it’s not.
“Well, I would like to know more about you when things quiet down,” Nancy said. “What are your interests and all that.”
“Define quiet down,” I said.
“Fair enough.” Nancy snorted and shook her head. There was some genuine bitterness there. It was amazing how much we had in common despite being on opposite sides of a war neither of us had asked to be part of.
The two of us descended the hallway to the garage and I noticed an eerie red light start to glow under the doorway at the end. The hallway began to stretch and twist, becoming almost funhouse in proportions. I could feel a sense of fear radiating outward from the garage and knew it was a place my sister would not voluntarily tread.
“What happened here?” Nancy said, staring.
“Lots of bad things,” I muttered.
The garage had been Dad’s workshop, where he’d taken many captives over the years. It had been his torture dungeon, while his car was kept in the driveway. He’d crudely soundproofed it, but you could still hear the noises of his victims inside. If I’d called the police, the FBI, or National Guard then I might have saved one of them. Instead, for most of my life, I’d just tried to drown out the noise and pretend everything was “normal.” After all, wasn’t this my normal? What did normal children do? I’d never known and never would. That made me angry.
I walked up to the door and kicked it hard, causing it to open into my father’s workshop. The red light washed over me and temporarily blinded me before I adv
anced, prepared for anything.
Much to my surprise, I found myself in a room identical to the one I’d remembered from my childhood. It was a garage with a tool bench to the back, Christmas lights decorating the top, and various bloody tools spread about. A radio was playing, “Don’t Fear the Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult.
Three Santa suits hung on a hook on the wall while a woodsman’s ax laid up next to them. There was a corpse of a man tied up to a chair, a sack over his head, and a smile painted on the sack. He was well-dressed but had clearly soiled himself. There were several holes in his pants and jacket from where a power drill had been used on him. A little white placard was in his lap, reading HO-HO-HO.
“This is messed up,” Nancy said, following me in.
“Honestly, this is better than I expected,” I said. “I thought this would look like a heavy metal album cover.”
“You see many of those in the asylum?” Nancy asked, looking around.
“You’d be surprised,” I replied. “The library had a music section too. Mind you, I was a little weirded out they had a copy of Lie: The Love and Terror Cult.”
“Not familiar with it,” Nancy said.
“Charles Manson’s psychedelic rock album,” I said, disgusted that it had ever been published. “I think there may have been something seriously wrong with that asylum.”
“No kidding,” Nancy said.
I looked at the body on the chair. “This isn’t right.”
“What do you mean?” Nancy asked, looking over her shoulders as if she suspected my father would jump out of the walls or from the floor.
“It’s a man,” I said. “My father’s preferred victims were women.”
I walked over and pulled the sack off the man’s head.
Chapter Sixteen
The mask came off the body and revealed a figure that I was momentarily put off by. It was me. There I was, showing signs of being horribly tortured with bruises as well as cuts on every portion of my face as well as a drill hole where my right eye should have been. Just for extra humiliations sake, I was wearing a ball gag as well. It was just the sort of thing that my father would do in order to make sure he made my death as ignominious as possible.