“What do you want?” Sam screamed.
“He's here,” she whispered, but her lips never moved. The haunting words echoed through their minds.
“Did you hear that?” Mark asked, his voice higher than usual. Sam nodded slightly, though his eyes never strayed from the dead girl at the foot the stairs. Her lips parted, mouth hanging open to reveal the darkness inside of her mouth. Soundlessly—without gagging or choking—her mouth began to leak. A trickle of water at first, and then a steady torrent gushing from her throat. She didn't clench her gut or double over in pain; she didn't heave. She simply stood there, mouth agape, water spilling from her like a spigot. It soaked her dress, slicked her skin as it pooled beneath her on the floor.
“Fuck this!” yelled Mark. He bolted down the staircase and dashed past the girl, nearly slipping. “Come on, Sam!” he screamed over his shoulder.
Though he was horrified, Sam couldn't look away. “Who's here?” he asked, descending the stairs. “What are you trying to tell me?” The sound of Sam's voice seemed to pull her from a daze. She closed her lips, turning, and pointed toward the main door of the hospital. She stayed that way, levitating with her toes inches from the floor, pointing the way for Sam, motionless aside from her wild hair which seemed to have a life of its own.
Sam's heart lurched as he slipped past her and made his way for the door. The air around her was so cold it made his muscles tense up, a chill jolting his spine. He maneuvered himself swiftly around the massive puddle. He hated the idea of putting his back to a ghost, but there was only one way out of this place. The girl's dead eyes burned into his back as he retreated. He looked to the stairwell as he swung open the door, but she had disappeared. The puddle was gone, too.
He stepped into the daylight, flooded with relief. Then he saw Mark standing near the car and knew their troubles weren't over. Mark cursed at the top of his lungs, balling his hands into fists. “God damn motherfucking shit!” he screamed. He delivered a swift kick to the Nissan's frame, planting his hands on the roof of the car and softly banging his head against the metal.
“What's the matter?”
“The tires,” Mark mumbled without lifting his head. Sam looked down, turning his attention to the wheels of the car. His jaw dropped. The tires were completely flat, a jagged gash through each rubbery ring.
“Did we hit something?”
Mark raised his head, shaking it. “No. It's all four tires. Looks like the work of a knife.” He rubbed his temples the way he always did when a headache was creeping up on him. “And I don't think it was your ghost friend in there.”
“By the sound of it, I see you've met Anna.” A stranger's voice caught the two friends off guard, and they turned to see an old man saunter out from behind a patch of sycamore trees. In his wrinkled, liver-spotted hands was a Smith & Wesson revolver, aimed directly at Mark.
“Woah, woah! What's with the gun? What did I do?” pleaded Mark.
“Who are you?” asked Sam, his voice shaky.
“Me? I'm just an old man who has grown tired of playing games with a ghost.”
Mark and Sam glanced at each other through the corners of their eyes, quickly turning their attention back to the old man who approached them with a shambling, hunched over gait. “What games?” they asked in unison. This encounter was becoming a game of Twenty Questions.
“Her games. Always trying to tell her sad story and destroy my good name.”
Sam rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. He scrunched his brow and bit down on his lip, thinking. “Are you... Dr. Walters?”
A series of chuckles exploded from the old man's withered throat. He looked to be around ninety years old, and his entire body shook with the maniacal laughter. He wiped a tear from his eye. “No, certainly not! Dr. Walters has been dead for many years. The man was thirty years my senior, and just take a look at me!” He smiled. “I'm the one nobody knows about. The nameless assistant... the underling.” His lips curled into a look of disgust. “And that's how I'd like it to stay.” He attempted to steady the revolver in his shaky hands, aiming it back and forth between the two younger men. “You shouldn't have come here.”
“I'm sorry, really I am,” Sam said, keeping his tone as calm as possible. “Here.” He moved slowly, as to not upset the wild-eyed geriatric. He reached down to unzip the camera case.
“Stop moving!” the old man screamed.
“I'm just offering you my camera,” Sam said in an act of desperation. He pulled it from the case, held it out to the stranger. “All the footage I've taken... it's yours. Just have it. My friend and I will drop the project. We'll never speak of Harper Hill again. Whatever bad memories lurk in this place, we'll leave them be. It's not our story to tell anyway.”
“I'm afraid that's not possible. You've already seen my face. And you've already met dear Anna.”
Sam gulped. He put every ounce of his strength behind it as he chucked the camcorder at the old man's hand. Mark and Sam were both shocked when the flying camera hit its mark. It slammed into the man's bony fist, sending the gun skidding over the gravel drive.
The old man's eyes widened as he dove for the gun. His knees buckled under the sudden movement, and he fell to the ground, jagged rocks digging into his skin. Mark got to the gun first. He plucked it from the stranger's grasp as he stretched his arms, reaching for it. Mark stood over their former assailant with a victorious smirk on his face.
“Why'd you do this?”
He didn't answer, but a swift kick to the ribs got him talking. “I heard you coming. I live in the house down the road. I've stayed there... many decades... protecting my secret.”
Sam joined Mark. Their shadows fell over the man as he looked up at them with dark brown, malevolent eyes. “Look,” Mark said, closing one eye to look down the barrel of the gun. “I'm tired of being forced to ask so many questions. So here's one more: Why don't you tell us this 'secret' of yours and I might consider letting you go.”
“What's the point? If the truth gets out, I'll lose the respect of my family, of my friends. I'll be remembered as a monster, a murderer. Just kill me now.” Silence fell over them. As if sensing the somber moment, the sun dipped behind a patch of clouds, throwing everything into grayness again. The man began to weep, tears trailing down his cheeks. “So many, many years I've lived with the guilt of what we did to beautiful Anna. She was the first to die at the hands of Dr. Walters and his brutal methods. He thought stopping the brain, then jump-starting it again was the best way to eliminate mental illness. I followed in his footsteps, but I never meant to hurt her.”
He sighed and bowed his head in shame, still seated on the gravel driveway. “After Anna, we started using the crematorium for proper disposal of the bodies, but at the time of Anna's death, the crematorium was still being constructed.” He paused to wet his throat with saliva, head hanging low on his neck to avoid eye contact with his captors. “Dr. Walters didn't want to risk being shut down or forced to discontinue his work over one accidental death. So we buried her, burned her files, made it so she never existed. The doctor insisted on perfecting his resuscitation skills, and with some patients the process seemed to work. But as the death toll rose higher and higher: two, three, four, five, six—I began to worry we were doing more harm than good.” He wiped his nose, cleared his throat. “That's when I started to see her. She was everywhere I turned, mocking me with those blue lips and sad, lifeless eyes.”
Sam glanced up at the hospital, picturing her in there, listening. Mark kept the revolver trained on his target. “So I got the place shut down by reporting the other abuse that went on here. It wasn't hard. And no one ever suspected me. I had Harper Hospital condemned before the authorities had a chance to discover the truth behind the missing patients. I only wanted to be rid of the past, to keep the name Frederick Stout from going down in history as a monster... a madman.”
His frail shoulders shook as he began to sob harder. “You're not the first, you know. There was another young man
who came here poking around. He saw Anna. He followed her, discovered my secret. He wasn't aware of me watching him, had no way of knowing I see everything that happens on Harper Hill. Up here... this is my world... just me, my house, and the asylum. I heard him coming, the same as I heard you. And I buried him down there with Anna.”
Sam shivered as the grisly details were revealed. “And where is Anna?”
“Ask her yourself,” growled Frederick. He lunged for Mark's legs, ramming his knees with all the force he could muster. Mark lost his footing as the blow knocked him sideways. He hit the ground, and Frederick was upon him, his speed shocking for a man nearly a century old.
They grappled on the ground, pebbles flying through the air. They were momentarily lost in a cloud of gravel dust. When Sam could see again, the old man was straddling Mark. In his hands was a pocket knife. He held it in the air, the blade shining in his shaky grip as he prepared to plunge it into Mark's chest.
Mark rolled sideways, crying out as the knife's blade grazed his arm. He reared back with both fists and delivered a double-punch to Frederick's sternum that sent him flying backwards. The old man hit the rocks with an audible thud. Sam approached, ready to dive for the Smith & Wesson that was just within Frederick's spindly reach.
But he had fallen unconscious when his skull hit the ground.
Sam watched as Anna's body was excavated. It was nothing more than a skeleton in a tattered, knee-length dress. The wild blonde hair had fallen away from her scalp. Even the word “scalp” didn't apply, he thought. No skin remained on the cold, hard skull. Her facial tissue had long ago turned into dust, a ghoulish grin where her lips had once been. Sam hoped it wasn't too late for the dead girl to find solace. He hoped she could finally rest in peace.
Officer McRyan strolled over, thumbs tucked into his belt. He stood next to Sam. “How did you know she was down here?”
“Easy. I asked her, and she showed me.”
The cop wrinkled his brow, puzzled by the statement, then shrugged and made a beeline for the group of officers who formed a semi-circle around the corpse. The cellar was alive with conversation as they discussed the bizarre findings: a hidden room with a pool dug into the ground, a large well-sweep device looming over it.
The police had doubted Sam when they arrived on the scene where two young men held an older man hostage. Their self-defense allegations were hard to believe. Fredrick Stout, a frail geriatric of a man, didn't appear to have the vigor for an act of violence. But there was proof, irrefutable evidence. When Sam had thrown the camcorder to disarm the old man, miraculously the record button had been pressed. Frederick's entire confession was caught on video, and though Sam kept it to himself, deep down he knew a pair of unseen hands had caused this stroke of luck.
Frederick Stout had refused to cooperate with the police, not speaking a word to incriminate himself further. But someone else had provided all the information they needed. Someone who remembered every terrifying detail, who led Sam through the hospital as Mark waited for the police with the Smith & Wesson leveled at Frederick. She led him here, to Dr. Walter's hidden chamber of torture, where she had drowned, where she'd been buried and forgotten.
Photos were snapped and evidence was collected. The young girl's body would leave the asylum today. If only Sam could be certain this was enough to set her free.
Then he heard it. “Thank you,” her voice whispered in his mind.
“You're welcome,” Sam whispered back.
He sighed and felt a gigantic weight lift from his shoulders—until he noticed the dead man in the corner. He looked around, but no one else seemed to notice. Mark stood outside the door, attempting to flirt with a disinterested female officer. The investigators went about their business. Sam turned his attention back to the apparition.
The dead man hovered there, above the dirt floor. A gunshot wound exposed a portion of his brain. Blood leaked from the hole in his cranium as his dark eyes bore into Sam. The ghostly figure reached out with a cadaverous hand, pointing to the soil with the other.
“Officer McRyan!” Sam called. The tall man jogged over. “Do you see that?” he asked.
“See what?”
Sam gulped. “The old man confessed to a second murder, and I'm pretty sure you'll find the body over there,” he said, pointing.
The officer cocked his head. “How do you know? Did he tell you?” There was an awkward silence as Sam tried to determine if McRyan meant the killer or the dead man. He had a feeling the nerve-rattled cop phrased the question in such a way to avoid the haunting truth.
“Yes,” Sam replied, leaving it at that.
The team set to work on digging up the second corpse, carefully removing the soil. Sam hoped this was the end, that there were no more souls trapped here. An eternity at Harper Hill was a punishment too severe for even the likes of Frederick Stout.
What Happens In Vegas
Vivica tapped her six inch stilettos on the floor and waited for her cue to enter stage left. Her chest heaved in her sequin push-up top, and she fanned herself with both hands. Calm down, she thought, before your eyeliner runs and you turn into the world's sexiest raccoon.
Stage fright was something Vivica had never experienced. She always said her nerves were stronger than steel; they were titanium. But you shouldn't have done it. It's a dirty trick, and it's going to blow up in your face.
She watched Harvey on stage as a Burmese python slithered up the sleeve of his tux. It reappeared, center stage, in a cloud of confetti and smoke, and the crowd cheered. Vivica frowned as Harvey's words from last night replayed in her mind. She remembered the way he had scowled at her, had moved so close to her face that she could feel his drunken body heat. “If I catch you flirting with another man again,” he had hissed through fetid whiskey breath, “I'll feed that goddamn rabbit of yours to the snake.”
He smiled on stage. He turned to the crowd with a dramatic sweep of his arms. “For the next bit of madness, I'll need some assistance,” he bellowed. “She's hypnotic. She's erotic. She's not afraid of the blade! Please welcome... Ms. Vivica.”
Vivica entered the spotlight with a seductive swagger. She stepped over to a large wooden structure. It was circular, painted red and white like a huge target. She pressed her back against the wood. Harvey tightened her restraints.
He stepped back, took aim, and within seconds knives whizzed through the air, stabbing an outline of her body in the wood. Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk. A blade struck the board mere inches from her face. She gritted her teeth. I'm getting too old for this.
The show dragged on and on, until finally the moment arrived. The hat trick. Harvey loved his tired old hat trick. “An homage to the ancestors of magic”, he called it.
There was a secret compartment in the table below his hat. That's where Abra Cadabra was supposed to be waiting. Sweet, fluffy little Abra Cadabra, the bunny Harvey had threatened to kill just one night before. Vivica smirked.
He plunged his hand into the hat and felt around for the rabbit. He froze. A look somewhere between pain and horror crossed his features. His eyes grew wide, and he let out a scream so loud it made Vivica cringe. He writhed and tried to pull away, but something yanked his arm deeper.
Vivica knew the rabbit would bite. That was the whole point of the prank—to startle Harvey, to deliver a blow to his pride in front of a huge audience. But this? Something wasn't right. Harvey was in too much pain.
He freed his hand from the hole, and the fat, hideous rabbit dangled there, its yellow teeth buried deep between his knuckles. Blood and foamy saliva moistened its face. The hat was stuck between Harvey's elbow and the frothing little beast. It made it difficult for him to get a good view of his predator.
But Vivica could see it. She gulped. What exactly was she seeing?
Triple the size of Abra, this rabbit's beady red eyes were slanted, its hackles raised. Its sharp claws sliced the air. Harvey gripped its plump body with his free hand and attempted to squeeze the life out of the cri
tter as it mangled his knuckles, whipping its mangy head back and forth.
The Tooth Collector (and Other Tales of Terror) Page 10