by Rod Redux
“Only I get explosive diarrhea instead of going into an insulin coma,” Little Dan said.
Half the group erupted into laughter.
“T.M.I!” Tish cried.
Light conversation in a very dark place. Another paradox.
2
Francis looked from face to face as everyone ate. How could they joke when the atmosphere was so thick with malice? He couldn’t fathom it. He could feel the house coiling around him, coiling around all of them, a seductive serpent. He could sense its coldly calculating scrutiny. And something else… something very close to avarice.
Or hunger.
His dinner—chips and a chicken salad sandwich-- sat half-eaten on his paper plate. Try as he might, he couldn’t work up the appetite to eat any more than that, although he knew he was supposed to take his evening meds on a full stomach. If he didn’t manage to choke down a little more, his meds were going to nauseate him… not that he wasn’t already woozy.
Surely they could feel it, too. All human beings, he knew, shared at least a rudimentary level of psychic sensitivity. It was how a person could tell when someone was watching them or a friend was going to call a moment before the phone rang. Perhaps his companions were simply covering their anxiety with banter, burying that tingle in their bellies with junk food and soda pop.
For about the tenth time that evening, Francis contemplated retreat, just jumping in his Bel Air and getting the hell out of Dodge. He’d warn them, of course. He’d try very hard to persuade them to leave, but he knew they’d only scoff at him. For all the bizarre phenomena they’d witnessed over the years, the Ghost Scouts crew remained stubbornly skeptical of the paranormal. They’d stay, thinking Forester House was no different from any other haunting, just a few creaky floorboards and some moldy ghosts in the attic.
They had all grown jaded over the years, Francis included, thinking just because none of them ever had been physically harmed by the supernatural, none of them ever would be. They didn’t understand just how much danger they were in here. But Francis knew. It’s why he hadn’t fled already. Anything that happened to them if he bugged out would torment his conscience forever.
He wished he could talk to his wife Ruthie. Ruthie would know what he should do. She was very intuitive. He’d tried twice in the last hour to give her a ring, but his cell phone wasn’t getting a signal. They were too far out in the boonies.
He tried to picture what Ruthie was doing. Was she sitting on the couch watching TV? He visualized her relaxing on the sofa in her housecoat, watching Wheel of Fortune while stroking one of their enormously fat cats, Buddy or Princess or Smokey. Or maybe she had retired early and was fast asleep in their comfy queen-sized bed upstairs.
He was suddenly uncomfortably homesick. He felt ill, and he was exhausted from blocking out the terrible thing that resided here in this awful house, the presence that was prying at his thoughts even now, as he sat and pushed his food around his plate, listening to his companions’ inane chatter.
With a frown, Francis strengthened his resistance. He felt the insistent little fingers that had been plucking at his scalp falter and fade from his awareness. A thread of pain began to pulse in the center of his forehead, but at least he had banished the intruder from his thoughts.
For the time being.
He would have to be more careful. He knew it wouldn’t stay away for long, and it was getting sneakier. It had started working on him this time while he was distracted by his thoughts, pining for comforts of home and hearth. A subtle attack, it had almost insinuated itself inside his mind before he even realized what it was up to.
Perhaps that was a good thing. He knew now, at least, that he dare not abandon his friends. He could not leave them at the mercy of something so devious and persistent.
He would stay.
And he would do his best to protect his friends.
3
For some reason, Tish could not get those photographs out of her head. Her mind kept returning to the depravity she’d stumbled across like a killer returning to the scene of a crime. Perhaps those old photos had disturbed her more than she thought, or maybe it had just been too long since she’d made love to something other than the little pink dildo she kept in her bottom dresser drawer back home. She tried to put the images out of her mind, tried to bury them, but the grotesqueries in those dusty old photo albums just wouldn’t stay dead. Like reanimated corpses from some cheesy horror movie, they kept lumbering out of her subconscious, relentless, single-minded.
Tish shifted uncomfortably in her seat, trying very hard to keep up her side of the conversation. She thought she was doing a pretty good job of it, too. Replying to the others when they spoke to her directly. Laughing when everyone else burst out laughing. Meanwhile, all she wanted to do was jerk her panties to one side and shove her fingers knuckle-deep inside her pussy.
Find that ache inside herself, that terrible throbbing that was driving her to distraction. Find it and mash it until all that burning need exploded into a million sizzling sparks.
Damn! she thought. What is wrong with you, girl! She couldn’t believe some old photographs had gotten her so horny.
She had never thought of herself as an overly sexual woman. She enjoyed sex just as much as the next gal, sure, but she had never allowed her desires to dominate her ambitions. In fact, she had been known to use her sex appeal to get the things she wanted. And why not? Men dominated the world. Sometimes the only chink in their armor was their zippers. Should she let one of the most effective weapons in her arsenal go to waste simply because society said it was unscrupulous? Who do you think crafted society’s rules? Answer: men who knew their cocks were their greatest vulnerability. If anything, she was a dispassionate, calculating woman.
So why then this sudden distractibility?
Looking at her friends gathered around the table, Tish thought, I wonder what they’d do if I just climbed up on the table and tore my clothes off. Spread the kitty and yelled, “All right, boys! Come and get it!”
It was an amusing thought, but it also made her shiver with lust. It wouldn’t be the first time this house had hosted such perversity. She had seen the proof of that with her own eyes.
Right then, right there, Tish Gudino was so hot she wanted to fuck them all. Every single one of them: Allen, the Dans, Billy and Rob… she’d even let little Francis have a poke at her. She wanted to suck them and fuck them, baptize herself in the spurting founts of their passion.
She looked from face to face, visualizing their cocks as she rhythmically squeezed her thighs together. Who would have the longest one, the fattest one… the smallest? She actually preferred the smaller ones, so long as they were not too small to get the job done. Large penises had always intimidated her, left her feeling achy and ill-used.
Francis would be the smallest, Tish decided, but she knew how to make a little man feel like a giant-- and let him read her thoughts if he wanted! She hoped they made him blush! Rob Forester would be the biggest, if he’d inherited his uncles’ impressive wedding tackle. And Allen, of course… She peeked at him. Allen’s would be the fattest. Him being the stocky, alpha male type.
As Tish Gudino thought these things, her heart racing, her hand drifted of its own accord to the lap of the man seated beside her. It was almost as if some invisible thread had moved it, puppet-like, without her consent.
Allen twitched as her fingers sought out his crotch and squeezed it. He shot her a surprised look, then leaned forward, putting his elbows on the table so the others could not see what she was doing.
Her fingertips traced the contours of his rod. She slid her hand up, then wriggled her fingers down between his waistband and his belly. She twisted her fingers through his pubic hair, searching out his cock.
I was right! she thought. It is a fat one!
Uncircumcised, too. That was sexy as hell.
She found the tip of his prick and squeezed it. Allen had stiffened almost instantly at her touch. Now, with her hands
in his pants, she found that his prick was already drooling. She smeared his sap down the shaft with her fingertips.
Allen’s brow began to gleam with sweat and patches of red appeared on his cheeks and throat.
Tish almost laughed out loud.
She had always reveled in the power she held over men, the weakness they betrayed in the grip of their own desires. She had used her sexuality from the age of twelve to get the things she wanted: social status, money, gifts, promotions. Any woman who didn’t take advantage of their sexual mystique was a fool, in her opinion, but tonight she didn’t want anything from Allen. Just gratification. She wanted to see him cum.
She pressed her hand deeper inside his pants, seeking a fuller grip on his turgid organ. He was slick with arousal, hot and throbbing.
She thought of all the sex that had gone on in this house, the depravity… the murders. She thought about the Halloween massacre. Some of the bodies had been desecrated, Jane had said, after succumbing to the poisoned punch they’d drunk, their lifeless bodies used to satisfy the lust of those who had not yet perished. Disgusting. Disgusting and immoral, and yet…
Allen trembled, ready to explode. She could feel him quaking beside her, smell his musk. His cock was hot and slippery in her grip, covered in blood.
Not blood! Tish thought with a frown. Wait… What am I doing?
Grotesque imagery flooded her awareness—a man in a pig mask rutting with a cadaver, a sobbing nymph smearing excrement across her naked breasts, whippings, torture, madness, murder.
She ate her own shit, Tish thought. The woman in the photos. Their “wife”. The night they had the masquerade, when they poisoned all their guests, she ate her own shit, and the brothers watched her do it. They all watched her do it, and then they raped her. They all had a go at her.
Allen covered his mouth with his palm, face bright red. Rob Forester was talking about some children’s book that he’d illustrated. He’d won some kind of award for his work. Big fucking deal. Allen looked at her, his eyes bulging. Tish felt the organ in her hand gulp, the hot rush of his seed. In an instant, her hand was lathered in his semen, and her own pussy began to throb in sympathetic orgasm.
“I do art for websites, too,” Rob Forester was saying. “I do book covers, comic books…”
“Like DC comics? Superman and Wonder Woman?” Little Dan asked.
“Mostly horror comics,” Forester answered.
Allen jerked as she continued to squeeze him, ticklish, then he smiled at her moonily. His pupils had dilated. They were so big his irises were almost completely black. He grabbed a roll of paper towels and tore off several sections of it as she pulled her hand out of his pants. He passed the paper towels discreetly to her underneath the table.
I shouldn’t have done that, Tish thought, wiping her fingers. She cleaned her palm and the back of her hand. She stuffed the sticky wad of paper in her pocket to flush down the toilet later, but she could still smell him, the mushroomy odor of his spunk. Why did I do that? This is just going to complicate things.
Then Raj and Jane came into the room… and all hell broke loose.
4
“Who moved the chairs from that soft spot in the foyer?” Raj inquired as he entered the dining room. He frowned at the blank stares that swiveled in his direction. It was immediately obvious that no one had moved the chairs.
Well, if none of them moved the chairs… then who did? he wondered.
If not for the fact that he had nearly plunged through the rotten floor, he would have been excited by the mystery, but the malice implied by such an act unnerved him. Someone could have been severely injured.
He had forgotten all about the soft spot when he and Jane returned inside, and he’d started across the foyer to the bathroom to wash his hands. Get the smell of tobacco off them. Luckily, his reflexes were pretty sharp, and he’d jumped back the instant he felt the floorboards sag beneath his weight.
Poor Jane had frozen in horror, too surprised to shout out to him, but he had leapt back before the floor collapsed, and they had pulled the chairs and tables back into position, marking off the mushy spot in the floor as soon as they caught their breath. He was still trembling a little.
“No one moved the chairs, did they,” he sighed, and then he exchanged a glance with Jane, who was standing a bit behind him.
“Do we have a camera on that area?” Allen asked. He looked oddly flushed, sweaty, like he was coming down with a fever.
“Not on that area,” Big Dan answered. “We have a camera pointed down the east hall, where Danny-boy saw his spook, but nothing on the rotten patch. Sorry, boss. We’ll set up a minicam as soon as we finish eating, just in case someone decides to move those chairs again.”
“Someone? Or some thing?” Jane said grimly.
“Not ‘some thing’,” Francis spoke up, his voice uncharacteristically forceful. “It’s this house… or rather, the entity that resides within this house. It’s only playing games with us right now. Testing our mettle, if you will, while it gathers its strength. I think we should leave before it decides to quit toying with us and someone gets seriously hurt.”
Allen opened his mouth to speak, but before he could spit anything out, a tremor rocked the house.
It struck without warning, and was powerful enough to make the table jump an inch or two off the floor. Tish and several of the men gathered around the table cried out as the shockwave rolled from the front of the house toward the rear. The chandelier over the table swung wildly, its lights flickering, while the tacky painting of the green nudes and pink forest jumped off its nail and hit the floor with a sharp report, like a gunshot.
The tremor was accompanied by a great groan from the building around them and a bass whoomph! of displaced air. For a moment, Raj feared the entire house was going to collapse on them, and the image of all of them crushed like bugs beneath ten tons of rotten plaster and wood and stone and wiring flashed through his mind’s eye like a scene from a disaster movie.
Little Dan, who had been leaning on the back two legs of his chair, went over with a cry, feet pedaling comically in the air. Jane stumbled forward and Raj caught her in his arms. Rob Forester, who had been standing at the head of the table talking about his artwork, reeled into a wall and fell to his hands and knees. Francis clutched his temples with a shriek of pain, eyes squeezed shut.
Then, just as quickly as it had struck, the trembler subsided. Their shadows jumped and cavorted on the red and gold wallpaper as the chandelier swung, its chain creaking. Some of their drinks had spilled, and soda dribbled over the edge of the table onto the floor. Plaster dust drifted from the ceiling.
Big Dan was the first to speak, his voice overly loud in the incredulous hush that followed the shockwave.
“Holy fuck!” he exclaimed.
His exclamation reanimated the eight other people in the room, broke the spell of their frozen disbelief. Suddenly everyone was rising and babbling at once.
“What the hell was that?” Rob Forester gasped.
“Can somebody help me up?” Little Dan inquired from the floor, still stuck in his chair and wagging his legs.
“Is everyone okay?” Allen called out, rising to his feet in concern.
“Was that an earthquake?” Billy asked with disbelief, his eyes wide.
“That was no earthquake,” Francis said softly. Despite the excitement that followed the tremor, everyone heard him and turned as one.
“What do you mean?” Allen asked.
Francis was ashy, a diminutive cherub of a man, his face drawn, large blue eyes sunk deep in their sockets, but he smiled at them, the sick smile of a condemned man standing at the foot of the gallows.
“That was just a demonstration,” he said. “It wants to impress us. It knows why we’re here, and it doesn’t want us to leave.”
Investigation
1
Despite his dire warning, the entire group was electrified by the tremor, and they ran to the parlor en masse to see if
the video cameras they’d set up throughout the house had captured any proof of the quake.
Little Dan was the one who started the stampede. After Billy and Robert pulled him up from the floor, he grinned at his companions, eyes wide, and asked, “Did we get that crazy shit on tape?”
A moment later, all eight of them were in motion, babbling as they raced for the video equipment in the parlor. Even the house’s new owner, Robert Forester, seemed to catch their fever, and he crowded behind Billy as they pelted from the room, pushing on his back. It reminded Francis of the Keystone Kops.
Francis waited until they had shoved their way into the corridor, then he rose tiredly to his feet and followed his friends.
Why doesn’t anyone ever listen to me? he wondered with a sigh.
He needed to take his medications. His body ached; his legs in particular. Felt like he was walking on ground glass. He was drained, and his forehead throbbed where the ghost boy had whacked him with a creek rock. He didn’t know where he would find the strength to persevere, but for the sake of his friends, he would have to dig deeper, find some strata of vitality to help him endure.
The team had already gathered around the video monitors in the parlor when Francis joined them, the whole group jockeying for position as Raj worked the DVRs.
Peering over Raj’s shoulder, Allen pointed at one of the screens suddenly. “There!” he said, and everyone ooh’ed and ahh’ed at the same time.
“The whole house shook!” Tish exclaimed.
Grinning, Raj said, “You can’t claim that was figment of anyone’s imagination!”
“Did you see those books fall off the shelf?”
“Yes, but was it paranormal?” Billy asked.
Billy’s comment sparked a short but lively debate. Jane tendered a natural explanation, reminding everyone that Southern Illinois sat directly over the New Madrid fault line. “If I remember right, the New Madrid fault is pretty active,” she said. “There’s always little tremors going on around here. Not to mention the possibility of a collapsed mine. They did a lot of coal mining back in the day.” Little Dan sided with Francis. He believed the dark force that inhabited the Forester House was baiting them. Judging by his expression, Robert Forester was leaning toward a supernatural explanation as well. Raj ended the debate by proclaiming that is was useless to speculate. They could check with the local seismology center tomorrow morning and see if any tremors had been logged. Regardless of the source, he argued, the quake would make for some dramatic TV. He was almost gloating.