by Rod Redux
Jane read:
“Belief in kobolds dates to at least the 13th century, when German peasants carved kobold effigies for their homes. These pagan practices may have derived from beliefs in the mischievous kobalos of ancient Greece, or the household lares and penates of ancient Rome.
“While the kobold's origins are obscure, most historians agree that the beliefs represent the survival of pagan customs into the Christian era. This offers a hint of how pagan Europeans worshipped in the privacy of their homes. Religious scholars have suggested that kobold beliefs derive from the pagan tradition of worshipping household deities, which were thought to reside in the hearth, while others believe that kobolds were tree spirits.
“Some legends claim that every house has a resident kobold, regardless of the owner’s needs or desires, and while kobolds were generally believed to bring the family good luck and wealth, legends tell of slighted kobolds becoming quite malevolent and vengeful.”
“Cool,” Little Dan said when Jane had finished reading. “You think this house might be haunted by an evil kobold?”
Jane closed the book and said, “I doubt that. I think it’s more likely that the legend of the kobold is simply an alternate explanation for human hauntings. Kobolds, the Greek and Roman worship of ‘house deities’… I think they’re all the same thing—ancient cultures dealing with the phenomena of haunted houses.”
“Sort of like how every culture has different vampire and werewolf legends,” Little Dan said.
Jane nodded.
“They all seem to agree on one thing, though,” Tish said.
“What’s that?” Jane asked.
Looking back at the effigies on the mantle, Tish said, “Whatever you call them—kobolds, house spirits… poltergeists—the one thing you don’t want to do is get on their bad side.”
A few minutes later, Allen leaned through the door and said, “You guys ready to hit the hay? It’s three in the morning. We need to do the sleepover bit before it starts getting light out.”
2
They changed into their pajamas and switched the cameras to night vision mode, then turned on the IR floods and killed most of the lights.
Despite the oppressive atmosphere of the house, none of the Ghost Scouts team were actually afraid for their lives. Even if they should doze, they all knew Raj and the Dans would be watching over them from the command center below. They were safe, or so they believed, even if the air of menace that permeated the house curdled their dreams and filled their sleeping thoughts with ravening monsters.
Their guardian angels were watching.
Jane and Tish took the four poster bed on the second floor, sliding into its fresh linens in shiny silk pajamas—the fabric of their clothing just sheer enough to hint at the undergarments beneath and sure to quicken the interest of the program’s male audience when the episode finally aired.
Allen and Billy took the room next door, both men in conservative shorts and white tees-- and Allen a pair of white socks to keep his cold feet cozy under the covers.
Francis retired to the bedroom directly across the hallway from the girls, stretching out his aching limbs in a child’s narrow bed.
The house’s owner, Robert Forester, took part in the Ghost Scout’s sleepover, too, lying alone, like Francis, in a single bed just around the corner of the hall. Although they’d told him he didn’t have to take part in the sleepover, Robert had volunteered to do it.
“I‘ve never slept here,” he’d said. “I own this place, but I’ve been afraid to stay overnight ever since I got here. I just want to see if I can do it. It feels safer with all of you here.”
Although the quasi-darkness cranked up the sense of danger the house exuded from every crack, all of them felt secure in the knowledge that their friends would be watching over them if they dozed, and that if they slept, they’d wake to morning’s light and the cheery prospect of packing their gear and leaving not much later. It was not surprising then that several of them slipped immediately off to sleep, exhausted by their travels and the excitement of the past 48 hours.
Allen was the first to drift off.
His physical and emotional weariness weighed down on him as soon as his head hit the pillow, pressing him into sleep’s dark trough. He dropped off while thinking about his wife, replaying their last conversation in his mind. His recollections turned to dreaming, and dreaming to nightmare, a nightmare that she was lost somewhere in Forester House, crying out, “Please, Allen, find me! I can’t see! It’s so dark!”
He chased the echoes of her voice in his dream, but the hallways had become a maze, and the faster he ran in search of her, the more frustrated and frightened he became.
The winding halls grew more twisted and confusing as he searched, as if the shape of them changed each time he turned a corner. Each blind turn led him down another blank corridor; each room he examined was empty save an echo of her cries.
His eyes began to twitch back and forth under their lids as he dreamed, his lips curling down at the corners, beads of sweat popping out on his flesh.
Beside him, Billy Kasch lay awake, waiting for a whistle.
As Allen snored to his left, Billy thought about Ben and couldn’t help feeling a hot rush of shame. They’d never promised one another exclusivity, and he knew for a fact that Ben was not faithful, but Billy had never cheated on his lover before, not when they were together. He worried that he would feel guilty if he actually went through with what he was contemplating, that Ben would see that guilt on his face when he returned home and know what he’d done.
He also feared that somehow, some way, hooking up with Forester would betray his secret to his friends. He knew they’d understand. They’d be shocked, of course. He’d kept his secret from them for so long, but none of them would feel any different toward him, except maybe Allen and Big Dan, who considered him “one of the guys”. The only thing that kept him from coming out of the closet to his friends was the paralyzing shame his father had instilled in him. His father was dead, but his brothers had inherited their father’s bias against queers, and he couldn’t stand the thought of his family knowing what he was.
What if I get caught? Billy thought. It would be so humiliating!
But even as he lay there, trying to talk himself out of doing what he was thinking about doing, he knew he was going to follow Forester when that whistle came, and he would do it despite all his fears because he wanted to do it. Rob was sexy as hell.
Next door, Jane dozed off almost as quickly as Allen. It had been a long four days, and she was bone tired.
As Jane’s breathing softened to a sonorous whine, Tish lay awake beside her, contemplating the fantasies that had gripped her thoughts in the dining room, wondering why she’d done the thing she’d done, and trying to figure out how a sexual relationship with the show’s star might work to her advantage.
The house had insinuated those fantasies into her head, of course. Anyone with half a brain could put the pieces of that puzzle together. Tish had been in haunted houses before, enough to recognize the presence of the supernatural when she sensed it, the feeling of been surrounded, pressed in on, the tingle in the gut that came from unseen eyes boring into one’s back. Finding all those dirty photos had been no accident, she was sure, and the house had used that incident to get inside her head. What she’d done to Allen was unfortunate, but the deed was done now. Question was: where did she go from there?
The advantages of an affair with Allen were debatable at best, she knew. Allen might be the show’s star, but Raj held the real power in their social dynamic. Tish had always been very good at figuring out who had the power. She’d always had an instinct for finding the men who could advance her, and with her looks, it was never hard to seduce them.
But not Raj.
She’d tried several times to pique the interest of their producer, but Raj had always rebuffed her overtures. He was only interested in Jane, whether Little Miss Smarty Pants realized it or not.
; What to do? What to do? Tish wondered in the dark.
Allen might be fun to play with for a while, but she couldn’t see it going any further than that. Flirting with him was amusing, always had been, and she enjoyed making him follow her around with those puppy dog eyes, but she was afraid she was going to have to set him straight, and a lot sooner than later.
Up the corridor and around the bend, Robert Forester lay awake as well. He was too anxious to relax, his thoughts hot on Billy, who was waiting down the hall for him, waiting for his signal… waiting, Robert hoped, as eagerly as he.
He lay staring at the ceiling, listening to the house creak and groan around him. Subsidence, he told himself, but it seemed to him that the house he had inherited was like a living organism, and he a virus in its guts.
What had the guys called it earlier, when the women were in the library? A paranormal ecosystem. That’s what the little psychic said. That the house was alive in a very real sense, and all the spirits haunting it were parasites feeding on the energies of their host.
Not a pleasant image.
All his life, he had known that he would one day inherit the house. And he’d always known that it was not just any old house. It was The House. The famous ancestral home.
Paranormal investigators had contacted him from time to time, asking him questions about the house, asking him for interviews, but he’d always declined their invitations. He couldn’t answer their questions. He’d never visited Forester House. His mother, who’d conceived him out of wedlock, had been disowned by her parents and moved to the West Coast to birth her bastard child—moved to Seattle, which was about as far from here as she could get and still be in the United States. That was where he’d grown up, there in gray, drizzly Seattle with its coffee shops and underground culture, just him and his hippie mom and her endless parade of weird, grungy boyfriends.
When he learned that his aunt had died and he was now the owner of the legendary Forester House, he’d decided to return to the land his forebears tamed. He had no wife and children to tie him down, so he’d loaded up his car and drove across the country, the wind in his hair, the prospect of a grand adventure tingling pleasantly in his belly.
He fantasized about restoring the ancestral home. Claiming it for his own. Living in it. He would turn the biggest, brightest room into his studio and become a famous artist. He would work hard, but he would also make time for pleasure. He would walk the forest paths. Take a lover if he chanced to find one. And perhaps he might still have all those things, if he could only make peace with the ghostly company that haunted this place. Surely they would recognize him as one of their own, maybe even welcome him here, partake of the joy he brought to these blighted halls and find some relief in his living presence after years of idle loneliness.
When Robert sensed that everyone was settled, he swung his feet gingerly to the floor.
He winced at the squeak of the bedsprings, though there was little reason for him to be cautious. He was the lord of the manor now, wasn’t he? Free to indulge himself, like his great uncles had done so long ago. There was no mother here to disappoint, no grungy boyfriends to sniff at him in derision if they chanced to guess his secret (or sneak into his bedroom after his mother was passed out drunk, to slide their clammy hands clumsily down his underpants).
Robert rose, felt his way to the door and let himself out into the hallway.
If anyone chanced to question him, he thought, he’d simply claim he was too nervous to sleep after all.
Just going downstairs for something to drink, he mused. That’s what I’ll say if anybody asks.
And when he passed the open door of the room where Billy had retired, he let his knuckles brush against the doorframe. A tiny knock. An invitation to join him in the guiltless dark.
He whistled, low and tunelessly.
Across the hallway, Francis sensed a dark mass pass his doorway in the gloom, but he gave little thought to the shadow that swept through the corridor. He lay stiffly in his child’s narrow cot, covers pulled up to his chin. On the man’s cherubic face was an expression of absolute fright. The hands that clutched his bedsheets trembled in the dark.
On the monitor in the command room below, anyone watching would have seen the medium staring toward the foot of his bed, his pupils gleaming on the fuzzy green display. It would have looked like he was gaping in horror at his own two feet, but it wasn’t feet that inspired such a look of abject fear. It was the man in the pig mask that had frozen his soul with dread.
Francis had no sooner drifted off to sleep than a soft and scabrous sound alerted him to movement in his bedchamber.
It was a sneaky sound… the scrape of something heavy and fleshy creeping across the floor.
His stomach twisting itself into knots, knowing before he even looked what he was going to see at the foot of his bed, Francis had craned his neck. He’d glanced down the sheets his diminutive form lay beneath, breath caught in his throat like a jagged ice cube…
There, peeking at him between his toes, the pig-man crouched in the shadows, only his eyes showing overtop the foot of the bed.
Anyone watching the monitor would have seen Francis draw in a breath to cry out, his eyes growing wider and rounder.
They would have seen the sheet sink in, pulling taut across the frail limbs beneath them, as if something large and invisible were climbing atop the bed.
But no one was watching.
And no sound came from his throat when Francis opened his mouth to scream.
3
“You guys mind if I step outside?” Raj asked the Dans after everyone had turned out the lights and climbed into bed. The monitors showed only snowy green screens, night vision views of the Ghost Scouts slumbering upstairs.
“You going out to smoke again?” Big Dan asked, giving Raj a conspiratorial wink.
Little Dan peered around from the sofa he’d been dozing on. “Did you start smoking again?” he asked.
Raj sighed. “I suppose the proverbial feline has escaped from the metaphoric bag.”
“The what…?” Little Dan asked, and Big Dan laughed.
“No problem, boss. Smoke one for me, too,” Big Dan said.
“Thanks.”
As Raj rose from the table, Little Dan sat up, “You want me to go with you?”
“No need. I’ll only be a minute.”
“I thought we were supposed to stick together.”
“In the house,” Raj replied. “I’m going outside. I think I’ll be safe, but I’ll take a walkie talkie just in case I run into any monsters.”
Little Dan slumped back. “Suit yourself, dude.”
Raj scooped one of the radio units from the table and attached it to the waistband of his pants. Big Dan nodded as the lanky man crossed the parlor and exited the room.
“I can’t believe he started smoking again,” Little Dan commented after the front door opened and closed.
Big Dan shrugged. “Some habits are hard to break,” he said, then he put his chin on his palm and glanced toward the monitors, his eyes heavy-lidded.
He flicked between the camera feeds with his free hand, checking on his teammates sleeping on the second floor. Everyone seemed to be resting peacefully.
I could do with some rest myself, Big Dan mused.
It was four A.M., and his eyelids felt like they had lead weights attached to them, but he knew he wasn’t going to get any sleep until daylight, not until they’d packed all their gear and headed home. They’d return to the hotel before driving back to Massachusetts, of course. Until then, he needed to stay on his toes. Maybe he could talk Little Dan into making a coffee run.
Yawning, Big Dan watched the feeds.
Across the room, Little Dan’s stomach made a loud gurgling sound.
“Uh oh,” Little Dan murmured.
“What do you mean, ‘uh oh’?” Big Dan asked.
“I gotta shit again.”
Big Dan chuckled.
“I shouldn’t have eaten those
cookies. Say, um… you mind walking to the bathroom with me?”
“No can do, little buddy. I have to watch the monitors. Just go. I have the foyer and the east hallway on screen. You’ll be fine.”
Little Dan rose, holding his belly, and headed across the room.
“Watch that rotten spot in the foyer floor,” Big Dan reminded him.
“I know,” Little Dan replied.
“And try not to shit your pants.”
“Ha ha.”
Big Dan shifted in his seat, watched his partner walk swiftly across the foyer. His eyes felt like they’d been scrubbed with sandpaper. He blinked a few times, trying to moisten them. As Little Dan trotted down the corridor toward the bathroom, Big Dan closed his eyes and let them stay closed.
That feels good, he thought, smiling faintly. I’ll just leave them shut for a minute. So goddam sleepy…!
Outside, Raj mashed out his butt with the toe of his shoe. He hesitated, enjoying the cool breeze feathering through his curly black hair, then slid another coffin nail from his pack.
Just one more, he thought, and lit up his smoke. You’re not hurting anybody but yourself.
Revenants
1
Francis tried to yell for help, but when he sucked in breath to give birth to the cry, darkness plunged its icy claws down his throat, tightening its skeletal fingers around his heart, choking him with the chill of the void, with hopelessness and despair. He pushed against the icy dark, his mouth agape, trying to force out the horror, the hopelessness, but no sound issued from his lips save a rasping sigh, a sound like a death rattle, only worse for lack of death’s promise: release from fear and pain.