by Rod Redux
Out in the hallway, Jane pretended to examine the wallpaper, ignoring Robert Forester’s muscular buttocks and impressive bulge. It wasn’t easy. The house’s owner wore bright red briefs.
Francis stirred. “We need to hurry, Jane,” he whispered urgently.
“Why?” she asked, squinting down at him.
Francis looked pale and frightened. “It’s getting ready to do something.”
“Who?”
“The entity.”
“What’s it going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
Jane leaned through the doorway as Robert was changing. “Uh, Rob. Francis says we need to leave now.”
Rob bolted from the room, pulling his shirt over his head. “Let’s go then!” he said.
“You want to turn the lights off?” Jane asked as Rob slipped back under Francis’s arm.
Rob shook his head. “Fuck that.”
The three started down the hallway, headed toward the staircase.
Francis hung between them, his feet dragging in exhaustion. Jane and Rob both looked over their shoulders as they retreated, goosebumps racing up and down their bodies. The corridor behind them looked empty, but it didn’t feel empty. It felt like something was right behind them, something cold and malicious… and huge.
Its menace swelled with each step they took until they were almost running, dragging Francis down the hallway between them, his feet sliding over the carpet. Jane glanced back again and saw the walls of the corridor rippling, flexing in and out as something invisible shouldered its way through in hot pursuit. She tore her eyes away, heart hammering, and then they were at the stairs. They pelted down the staircase, all but carrying Francis between them.
“Try to hurry, honey!” Jane pleaded as their feet thudded on the risers.
“I’m sorry! I’m trying!” Francis gasped.
“It’s right behind us,” Rob wheezed. “What is it?” The hair on the back of his neck was standing straight up.
As they descended the stairs, the unseen presence turned away. Perhaps it was confined to the second floor. Maybe it was just too big to squeeze itself into the narrow stairwell, but they felt its menace fade as they scurried down the steps.
They met Allen and Raj in the foyer.
“Have you found them yet?” Jane wheezed, trembling from adrenaline.
“We saw them heading toward the east side of the house,” Raj answered.
“They both went that way,” Allen said.
Francis raised his eyes. “You have to hurry. We’re running out of time,” he hissed.
Allen had been peering up the stairs with a frown. For a moment, he thought he’d seen something at the top of the steps. He’d only glimpsed it from the corner of his eye, but it was big and dark and ugly, whatever it was. When he turned to look at it directly, however, the staircase was empty.
He tore his gaze from the stairwell, thinking he was going crazy, seeing things now. He addressed Francis. “Can you tell if they’re okay?”
Before any of his teammates could voice an objection, the medium stood without support and opened his mind.
“Here… let me try,” he said.
Hell House
1
Tish’s entire body stiffened as Dan wound the electric cable around her arm. Her eyes widened, and all the color drained from her cheeks. She was looking at something behind him, and the expression of surprise and terror on her face was so stark, so complete and total, all the fine little hairs on his body stood straight up.
“D-D-Dan!” Tish gasped.
Big Dan spun around, dropping the last length of cable so he could make fists, ready to fight or fly, but as soon as he saw what had frightened his partner so badly, he let them fall to his sides. Relief transmuted his alarm to annoyance.
“Very funny, Danny-boy!” he snarled. “I ought to kick your scrawny ass right here and now!”
A small figure stood at the head of the table, draped in one of the dusty white dropcloths that had covered all the furnishings when they first arrived.
“What are you doing? Waiting for the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown?” Big Dan smirked. “You forgot to cut eyeholes in your Halloween costume, brainiac.”
The figure in the white sheet didn’t respond, didn’t move so much as a finger. It just stood there, draped in its sheet, staring at them through the mesh of the musty old fabric.
“Oh God… Dan, no…” Tish moaned.
“All right, kid. Playtime’s over. You’re scaring the missy,” Dan said.
“I don’t think that’s Little Dan,” Tish whispered.
Big Dan glanced over his shoulder at her. “What do you mean? Of course it’s him. Everything’s gone to shit, we can’t find Bill, and Dannyboy here’s sneaking around in a sheet, acting like an arsehole. Typical behavior, you ask me.”
The figure beneath the sheet still hadn’t moved.
Big Dan started around the table with a sigh. “I hope you’re ready to eat that blamin’ sheet!” he growled, pushing a chair out of his way.
The entire table shifted toward him.
It only moved an inch or so, its thick legs screeching across the hardwood floor, but no one had touched it.
Big Dan faltered halfway across the dining room. His eyebrows had risen, wrinkling the pale flesh of his forehead.
The hand carved table weighed several hundred pounds, easy. No amount of subsidence was going to make it scoot like that, not without the rest of them reeling across the floor with it.
“Take that sheet off now, Danny,” Big Dan hissed, watching the table like it was a rabid dog.
The table began to vibrate.
It was barely discernible at first, but within the space of a few heartbeats, its perturbations had become violent. Its feet hammered on the floor hard enough to make rotten plaster rain down from the ceiling. The chandelier began to tremble, its prisms tinkling.
Big Dan opened his mouth to cry a warning to Tish, realizing what was about to happen, but he didn’t have time to utter the first syllable. The table flew from the floor with horrific force. It turned in midair in one smooth motion and crushed him flat against the wall.
Big Dan’s blood sprayed out the sides of the table. Junk food packaging and paper plates went swirling through the air.
Tish screamed his name as displaced air blew back her bangs. Blood stippled her cheeks and blouse.
She let the electric cables slither to her feet. She could hear Francis screaming in some other part of the house, but his cries barely registered on her consciousness. She could only gape at the spot where Big Dan had been standing only seconds before, her brain unable to process the gory image her eyes were transmitting to it.
Big Dan, who she’d always secretly thought of as sort of a second dad, was dead. Squashed like a bug. He hung pulped between the wall and the table, his blood splattered all the way to the ceiling. Only his booted feet were visible beneath the bottom edge of the table. Bodily fluids were coursing down his pant legs. The giant dining room table had smashed into him so hard it was embedded in the wall.
The wind of the table’s flight had stirred the bottom edge of the ghost’s white sheet. Tish tore her eyes from the killer table sticking out of the wall and gaped at the specter standing at the far end of the room. She realized there were no feet sticking out of the bottom of the sheet. The sheet was hanging in midair in the shape of a human body, but there were no feet. There was nothing holding it up.
“No,” she whimpered, shaking her head in denial.
A hundred little roses were blooming on the sheet-- Big Dan’s blood spreading through the fabric.
This isn’t happening! Tish thought. I’m still sleeping upstairs. Having a real doozy of a nightmare, too, but I’m going to wake up any second now!
The corner of the sheet rose, crumpling back as if shifting upon a rising arm. The sheet rose toward the crown of the ghost disguise. Tish watched in disbelief as invisible fingers plucked at the cloth on top of its h
ead, preparing to sweep the costume away.
She knew if those invisible fingers jerked that sheet away and nothing was standing there, she would go stark raving mad. Her brain would simply shatter into a million gibbering shards, and nobody was ever going to be able to glue them back together again.
Wake up! Tish screamed inside her head. Wake up wake up WAKE UP!
2
In the Upanishads, the philosophical texts of the Hindu religion, a human being is likened to a city with ten gates. Nine gates (the eyes, nostrils, ears, mouth, urethra, and anus) lead outside to the sensory world. The third eye is the tenth gate and leads to the inner realms of the mind, housing the myriad spaces of human consciousness—memory and intellect, desires and dreams, the ego and the id.
Francis stepped away from his teammates and opened his inner eye, preparing to send out his astral form and locate their missing friends. He knew they could only leave once they’d found Billy and Little Dan, and he wanted to leave so badly! He was so tired he could barely stand, so weak he couldn’t think straight.
The moment he lowered his barriers, the entity which inhabited the Forester House was on him.
It had withdrawn to gather its strength, hiding itself from the unusual power of the medium’s mind in the deeper layers of the Ism, reluctant to engage such a powerful foe until his formidable mental defenses had been weakened.
The powerful little being had repelled it before, when it attacked him at the fringes of its hunting grounds, but now it was sure of its victory.
It had worked subtly and from a safe distance, sending its sycophants to harry the interlopers, enjoying their suffering, and feasting on the energies released by their failing flesh, but now the powerful one was vulnerable. Their group was divided. They were exhausted and panicked. It was time to play its final gambit. Time to pounce, like a spider from its lair, and feast on the foolish creatures who had wandered too close to the predator’s fangs.
Francis shrieked as the darkness invaded his mind. It was like being devoured, drowning in a fetid black tide, and being raped—all at the same time.
He tried to bring his mental barriers back up, but it was already too late. It was inside him, worming its way through the entirety of his soul, cold black tendrils of concentrated malice encircling his brain and his heart, spreading like poisonous vines through his torso, his limbs, all the way to his very fingertips.
Robert and Jane tried to catch hold of Francis as he reeled forward, clutching his head. Before they could get a firm grip on him, however, he flung himself backwards.
He collided with horrific force against the risers of the staircase, hitting them hard enough to fracture several of his vertebrae. He jerked back up like a puppet on a string and pelted across the foyer full tilt, eyes empty of all but pain and terror.
“Grab him!” Raj barked, but he barely had time to speak the words before Francis had shot past him.
Francis collided with the wall hard enough to punch through the gypsum. The force of the collision fractured his cheekbone and pulverized his nose.
Francis could hear Jane screaming. He saw his own blood splattered around the edges of the drywall he had bludgeoned in with his face, but he was helpless to resist the malevolent being that had taken possession of his body. He was doomed and he knew it. The only thing he could do now was try to save his friends, so he turned his consciousness toward the thing that had taken control of his body. He peered into its lightless heart, hoping to discover what it was, and how it might be defeated.
Old… it was so old! Not a human spirit. Something primal and alien. Almost god-like in its perfect hatred.
Francis saw primitive humans worshiping a totem-like carving of a forest deity. He saw cadavers hanging in trees. Sky burials. Generation upon generation of aborigines lifting their dead into the trees, thinking that they honored them. The creature that possessed him had fed on the prayers of those primitive men and women, prayers fueled by some kind of hallucinogenic drug, and then it had fed on the bodies of their dead, and finally their souls, growing more and more powerful, more and more intelligent and cruel, evolving from a simple, unthinking elemental being to something huge and potent and ravenous.
Its cruelty was as vast as its hunger. It snared the souls of some of its victims without devouring them, keeping them as sycophants to do its bidding. Sometimes just to torture them for its own perverse amusement.
But it was not all-powerful. It was inextricably bound to the region it inhabited. Some of its victims had managed to escape it, like the little boy at the creek, the one who’d tried to warn Francis away. It was not all-powerful, nor was it omniscient. It needed to feed on the flesh and souls of the living to perpetuate its existence. A vampire god. A psychic parasite.
Francis saw a man sitting on horseback, surveying the land that the dark entity inhabited. The man was tall and proud, a Scot named John Forester. He’d just purchased the land and planned to build a home at the summit of the saw-toothed hills. He had fled his homeland a thief and a murderer, but he was free and rich now here in this untamed country, an ambitious man, resolute.
Francis watched as the entity, which called itself Kho’Bouldh, revealed itself to the Scotsman.
Forester was riding through the wilderness, returning to the room he’d rented at the inn in the nearby village. Suddenly the trees began to toss as if disturbed by a powerful storm. The leaves on the ground lifted into the air, twirling. The man’s horse reared and threw him. Before he could rise, he was engulfed in a tornado of spinning leaves and whipping tree branches. He cried out to God to forgive him for his sins as he stood on his knees in center of the whirlwind, overwhelmed by superstitious terror. He enumerated his crimes as he sobbed like a child.
This is my flesh. Make of it a shrine and your rewards will be plentiful, the entity seduced the awe-struck man. It shall be a home to you and your descendants, and an altar of sacrifice to me. Swear your soul to me and you will have riches. You will know all the pleasures of the flesh. I will elevate you above all other men.
The trees! Francis thought. It’s the trees!
And what is a house but an assemblage of dead trees—felled by man, and shaped and nailed together by human hands?
He built this house as a shrine to his new god, Francis thought, but it was not just a shrine to his new god, it was a shrine of his new god, constructed of the entity’s own flesh and blood, a house built from the wood cut down from a haunted forest!
For many years, the Scotsman prospered. He married and began to raise a family, but the entity reneged on their pact. It took his firstborn child, unable to resist its own appetites, and Forester went mad. He killed his wife and took his own life. Only his two youngest children survived, but they were taken away and the house sat empty, year after year, until that brief season when it managed to tempt the descendants of the Forester bloodline back to the family estate, the Twins, the grandsons of the Scotsman, but always its schemes ended in tragedy, as the entity’s gluttony unerringly compelled it to violence and murder.
But there was one simple way to destroy it.
Francis tried to wrest control of his tongue, tried to share with his companions the secret he had discovered, but the elemental moved quickly to put down his rebellion.
Clever meat! it crowed, sinking its claws into Francis’s mind. So you see me as I truly am… but it will do you no good! Nor will it help your tribesmen. I will suck the marrow from your bones. Your souls will writhe in agony inside me for all eternity!
Francis spun on his heel as his friends rushed to save him. As Jane’s fingers curled into his clothing, he drove the upper half of his body forward, smashing his face into the marble top of an antique table.
“Francis, stop!” Jane screamed, thrown off balance by the violence of his movements. She landed on her knees, and Raj stumbled over her.
Francis stood straight, droplets of blood misting in the air, then he slashed his upper torso forward again.
The marble
tabletop cracked in half.
“Oh God!” Jane cried out, covering her face with her hands as Francis’s skull crumpled.
Francis stumbled back, his face a dripping red pulp, and then he smiled at her, his glistening lips twisting upwards. He had no teeth. They had all shattered. One blue eye glinted at her from the tattered flesh of his once cherubic features.
“It burns,” he gargled.
3
Tish didn’t wait for the ghost to pull the sheet away. She turned with a shriek and fled from the dining room.
She didn’t know where she was going, only that she had to get out of this house. She pelted down the corridor, blinded by her tears, screaming again as the doors ahead of her slammed shut, one after another. Wallpaper peeled from the walls at the end of the hallway, straining toward her, and she wheeled to her right, trying to dodge them, stumbling into the kitchen.
She ran into the bar with her hips, yelping in pain as she sprawled across it. She pushed herself up, shaking all over.
Out! Have to get out! she thought desperately.
Across the kitchen was the door to the mudroom, and beyond that, the side lawn. She could see dim blue light outside—dawn breaking across the world, the promise of escape just a few paces away.
Tish skirted around the kitchen bar and stumbled through the open doorway into the mudroom. The exit was just a couple feet away. Tantalizing.
“Thank you! Thank you!” she sobbed in relief. She shambled toward the light.
“Where ya going, baby?” Billy Kasch asked her, lurching through the doorway of the servant’s quarters.
Tish fell back, screaming, at the sight of her teammate.
Billy was naked, battered, his body covered in tacky blood. The handles of several kitchen knives, some with very large blades, protruded from his chest.
His head was hanging at a weird angle, his eyes rolled so far back in their sockets only the sclera was visible, yet he lurched toward her anyway, his gore-streaked body able to move even though he was obviously quite dead.