by Rod Redux
“Gah!” he spat, and then the roots stole him away.
Raj and Jane watched in stunned disbelief as he was lifted into the air. He kicked his legs, prying at the tendrils tightening around his throat. Like Laocoön battling the sea serpents, he wrestled with the writhing coils, and then he was jerked greedily into the darkness.
Raj shined his flashlight after the man.
There, suspended against the far side of the cavernous chamber!
Allen’s pale hand waved—almost as if he were bidding them goodbye—and then he was swallowed by the undulating wall.
“What is that, Raj?” Jane shrieked. “That can’t be real!”
Raj swung his light around, turning in a circle, his eyes growing wider and wider with dawning despair.
“Did it eat him? It ate him, didn’t it? Raj, what’s down here?”
“I don’t know what it is, love,” Raj said grimly. “But it’s all around us.”
“What?” Jane squeaked.
Jane looked toward the circle of his flashlight and saw a forest of twitching tree roots illuminated in its glow. They were everywhere he swung the beam, writhing on the walls, crawling across the ground. Some as thick as her thigh spanned from the ceiling to the floor, sunk into the dirt like the house was rooted to the earth.
That’s what the rustling sound was! Jane thought. Not rats. Roots!
Trembling all over, Jane brought her own beam to bear. She swung it up, saw bare roots sprouting from every floor beam and floorboard, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to believe what her eyes were telling her. She swung the light back and forth, and then she found Little Dan, suspended near the ceiling. His body was caught like a fly in a web, cocooned and already half eaten. His flesh had been stripped to the bone in several places.
“I think we need to get out of here,” Raj said in a low voice.
Jane yelped as a greedy tendril whipped through the air and snatched her flashlight from her hands. Another drifted into her hair and seized hold of her, jerking her back by the head.
Raj grabbed her before she could be pulled into the wall of wriggling roots. He cupped the back of her head and pulled.
She wailed.
“Sorry!” he grunted.
Then her hair ripped loose and she was free—for the moment. Raj gripped her hand and ran, dragging her behind him as more of the tree roots wavered blindly after them.
“Run!” he yelled back to her.
“I’m running!”
“Run faster!”
They headed back the way they’d come, sliding in the muck, stumbling over clods of dirt and hunks of mortar and refuse.
A root snagged ahold of Raj’s arm and jerked it so hard it felt like his shoulder had been dislocated, but the root was slick and lost its grip, and Raj was able to continue.
Another hissed through the air like a whip and slashed across his back, cutting through his clothing and the flesh underneath. It laid open his skin in a four inch incision. Droplets of blood splattered in the dirt.
“Ai! Rundi ka bacha!” Raj cursed.
“Raj!” Jane cried.
“I see it!” Raj growled.
The arched doorway they’d come through was blocked by a network of interwoven tree roots. As Raj and Jane faltered, several more of the fibrous tendrils snaked across their escape route, winding in and out of the fervent living lattice.
Raj twitched his flashlight back and forth, chest heaving. He spied an alternate passage.
“This way!” he barked.
Jane’s head snapped back as he jerked her after him.
9
Tish pushed her way through the underbrush, the sharp tips of broken sticks gouging into her flesh and tearing her clothing. Her right eye was swollen shut where she’d fallen and nearly put her eye out on a tree branch. She pushed a tangle of vines and brush out of her way, whimpering as its thorns bit into her palms, and then she fell through into a clearing, landing in a graceless sprawl.
Sunlight on her back and shoulders, she rolled over, blinked at the sky with her good eye.
“Oh, God,” she panted. “Please, get me out of here. I don’t want to die!”
She waited for a response, the minutes ticking by in silence.
If there was some supernatural being up there whose job was supposed to be answering prayers, he was apparently on a coffee break. Her limbs were not flooded with superhuman strength. No beam of holy light shafted from the heavens to illuminate her path.
She wondered if God was even watching. For all He’d done to help so far, He might as well be sprawled on a cloud like it was some cushy La-Z-Boy recliner, feet kicked up, a bowl of popcorn in his lap. Maybe He got his kicks watching all the little insects suffering down below. His stories, she thought bitterly, thinking of her mother, who’d seemed more invested in the lives of her favorite soap characters than the tribulations of her own family. Who knew—maybe God had gotten bored of The Tish Gudino Show and changed the channel? Maybe He was watching Animal Planet.
“Thanks for nothing, God,” Tish snarled.
She swore, if she made it out of this godforsaken wilderness alive, she’d never ask Him for anything again! Never! He was dead to her now!
A shadow fell across her.
She sat up, shading her eye with her hand. Someone had found her! God had answered her prayers after all!
“Oh, my God! Thank you! I can’t believe you found me! Please, you have to help me! I’m lost in these woods!” she babbled.
She couldn’t make out her savior’s features—the sun was directly behind him, flashing in her eye from just above the crook of his shoulder—but it was a man. That much she could tell. He had a stocky, muscular body, skin the color of coffee with cream, and he was dressed in strange leather boots trimmed in fur and a pair of ragged tan shorts.
No… not shorts, she thought. He was wearing a loincloth! The kind of primitive garment some jungle-man might wear. Fashion by You Tarzan, Me Jane. But that couldn’t be right, Tish scowled. It was too goddamn weird!
“Who are you?” she asked.
The man didn’t answer, just stared down at her, the sun glinting around his head like a corona.
She started to rise, but he pushed her back down.
“Hey!” she cried angrily. “Don’t put your fucking hands on me!”
He didn’t move after pushing her, but she could make out his features now. Broad nose, small dark eyes and high cheekbones. He was staring at her chest. Her blouse had been shredded during her flight through the forest. But for her lacy, cream-colored bra, her breasts were completely exposed. Her jungleman was riveted by the sight.
He tilted his eyes to meet her gaze, smiled.
Tish shook her head.
“No,” she said.
The thing stirring beneath his loincloth insisted otherwise. In fact, it was rising quite rapidly to refute her denial.
She stamped down on her horror. She had used sex all her life to get what she wanted. She’d fucked for money, for jewelry, for jobs. She’d sucked a sixty-year-old man’s stinking cock for her role on the Ghost Scouts. Hell, she’d even fucked her stepdad for something as pathetic as a little attention!
And now she was going to use her body to win her survival. So what? It was dignity or death. Her life or her pussy.
She snuffled, nodded her head. “Okay… okay, you bastard. I’ll give you what you want… but then you’ll get me out of here, right? I want to go home!” Her voice hitched. “I want to go home!”
He sank to one knee as she lay on her back, looming over her, blocking out the sun completely. She didn’t notice until he reached for her that his hands were covered in blood.
She stiffened at the sight of his dripping hands, moaned as a rain of red droplets fell from his palms and spattered her breasts. His bloody hands left bright hot smears as he tore away her bra. He pinched a nipple between his thumb and index finger, sullying her with the copper-scented fluid. Then he tugged her pants down roughly, ripped o
ff her panties and settled between her thighs.
Tish yelped as he entered her, pleading with him to be gentle. She closed her good eye. Felt his hands encircle her throat as he thrust himself inside her.
She began to cry.
Shortly after that, she began to scream.
10
The horrible living roots pursued them halfway down the corridor, whipping in the air like the tentacles of some awful Lovecraftian deity. They ran until the writhing tendrils could extend no further, and Raj and Jane began to put some distance between them and the murderous vegetable matter. They skidded around a blind turn and came to a sudden stop, confronted by a huge pile of refuse—old rotten books and magazines, children’s toys and broken furniture.
“There’s no way around it,” Raj panted, “and we can’t double back.”
“We can climb over it, but it won’t do us any good unless there’s a way out on the other side.” Jane wheezed, squeezing the painful stitch in her side.
“Here. Help me climb up on this desk. I’ll see what’s on the other side.”
“Okay. Be careful, though, it’s wobbly.”
Raj climbed on an antique secretary desk to get the lay of the land. Past the barricade of debris, the corridor hung a right. There seemed to be sunlight coming from just around the corner. Faint. Inconstant. But sunlight all the same. It was the most glorious sight Raj had ever seen.
“I can see light,” he said down to her with a grin. “I think there’s an exit just past the bend. I can see it shining on the wall.”
Jane climbed onto the back of a sofa. She tottered for a moment, grabbed an old pole lamp. “I see it!” she laughed.
Raj returned her happy glance. He licked his lips. “Listen… I, uh, I have something I need to confess,” he stammered.
Jane’s relief only dimmed a little. “What?”
He could feel his ears flaming. He couldn’t breathe suddenly, and it wasn’t because of the stench in the cellar. “I just want you to know… you know, just in case something… well, we’re not going to talk like that but…”
“Just spit it out,” Jane said. “What, are you gay or something?”
“Gay?” Raj said sharply. “No! I’m not gay! I’m trying to tell you I love you.”
“Oh,” Jane replied. “Well… That’s good, ‘cause I always seem to fall for the gay--” His words finally sank in and she stared at him in surprise. “--guys,” she squeaked.
“So?” he said, when she didn’t respond in kind.
“So what?”
“What do you think?”
Jane turned away from him. She began to pick her way over the heap of garbage. “You not being gay, or you loving me?” she asked over her shoulder.
Raj followed. “The latter. Of course.”
Jane’s hand slipped and she almost impaled herself on an upside down barstool with broken legs. She kicked the barstool over so her new fella didn’t fall on it and puncture anything she might need. “It’s about time you said something,” she teased. “Jeez, what’s it going to take for you to seduce me? Armageddon?”
Raj laughed. “I’ll do you right here, girlie.”
“Pass.”
They had reached the apex of the junkpile. Without saying much else, they descended carefully to the other side. When their feet were safely on the ground, however, Jane threw her arms around his shoulders. She stood on tiptoes and kissed him on the mouth. Raj hesitated, then returned her embrace.
“So what took you so long to tell me how you felt?” she asked when their lips finally parted.
“I thought you and Billy had a thing going. Everyone did.”
“What?” Jane cried. “No, Billy’s gay.”
“Billy’s gay?”
“Yep,” Jane nodded. “Billy’s gay.”
“I didn’t know…” Raj murmured, trying to process that.
They started around the corner, saw a set of stone steps leading up to slanted wooden doors. Bright sunlight gleamed around the edges of the doors, motes of dust swimming in the golden shafts of light.
“It killed everybody else, didn’t it?” Jane asked, suddenly glum.
“I don’t know.”
Now that they had a way out, she couldn’t help but think of everyone they’d lost. Poor Francis. And Little Dan. Allen, too. And who would believe what had happened to them? Nobody would believe it. She didn’t believe it herself.
“Do you think it might still get us?” Jane questioned him. “In all the horror movies, the people who make it to the end always bite it right when they think they’ve gotten away. They walk off into the sunrise, believing everything’s going to be roses from there on out, and that’s when the monster comes back to life and gets them.”
The muscles in Raj’s jaw twitched. “I’m not going to let that happen,” he said.
“And how do you intend to do that?”
Raj dug into the pocket of his pants and drew out his stinky clove cigarettes.
“Remember what Francis said right before he died?” he asked, then he flicked his Bic.
The little flame flickered in their eyes.
“It burns,” she said, and there was triumph in her voice.
Addendum
From the Southern Illinoisan, dated September 3rd, 2011:
ANOTHER BODY IDENTIFIED IN FORESTER HOUSE TRAGEDY
[AP]-- Police are officially declaring their inquiry into the Forester House tragedy a homicide investigation following the positive identification of William Elmore Kasch.
Known affectionately as Billy on the popular cable television series Ghost Scouts, the identity of Mr. Kasch’s remains were confirmed using dental records. He is the last victim of the Forester House tragedy to be officially identified.
Mr. Kasch’s family gave a brief press statement this morning, acknowledging the diligent efforts of Illinois County and State Police, and thanking Mr. Kasch’s fans for their continuing support.
Chief Investigator Harold Farrell, in a separate press statement, explained that the police inquiry was upgraded to a homicide investigation following the forensic examination of Mr. Kasch’s remains, which indicated that Mr. Kasch died as the result of a stabbing injury before the Forester House was set on fire.
The only survivors, paranormal investigator Jane Rivers and television producer Rajanikanta Chandramouleeswaran, were interviewed by police at Marion Memorial Hospital, where they are being treated for exposure and smoke inhalation. Chief Investigator Farrell says he has no plans to charge either of the survivors for any wrongdoing.
The confirmation of William Kasch’s identity brings the death toll to eleven-- including two firemen, who perished while battling the blaze that burned down much of the Sawtooth Hills region in Johnson County, Illinois.
Police believe that the fire, which leveled Forester House and spread throughout much of the surrounding wilderness, was deliberately set…
“And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
About the Author
Rod Redux lives in Southern Illinois with his wife, his kids and all the voices in his head. He is the author of seven novels, including Mort and The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All. He is currently at work on his next novel.
Table of Contents
Prologue: Tanka, 1392 A.D.
Part I: The Fearless Ghost Hunters
Part II: The Belly of the Beast
Interval: Oy’he
Part III: Kobold
er>