by TJ Park
It took Rob longer to be convinced. Doug studied him warily. Rob had not lost any of the loathing in his expression. He appeared ready to stamp on them, like vermin he came across on the station.
Janet gathered up her son. Hammered emotionally by the horrors he’d just witnessed, Scott was easily steered to sit beside his mother and sister.
Doug knew the woman on the bed was burned into Janet’s memory, but the spectacle of the dying boy would be foremost on her mind. Her Scott was too easily imagined as the same child. And the man in her house had shot that boy right in front of her. Despite knowing it was a deceit, an apparition, Doug may as well have pulled the trigger. One way or another, he was responsible.
Though the air was heavy with suspicion, it seemed everyone was reconciled to an uneasy truce … for the time being. Few unnecessary words were spoken. No backs were turned. Some started arranging their beds again, but Doug knew there would be no going back to sleep this night.
It was probably the familiar’s intention the tenuous alliance between their two factions be shattered. And though it hadn’t worked out right away, Doug knew it was only a matter of time before they were worn down from the constant effort of being on alert for each other, until exhaustion, nerves and mistrust tipped them over.
Yep, Doug believed that was the monster’s plan. But, like its predecessor, it was just too bloody impatient.
***
Boom … The house shook. The noise snapped them out of private reveries; dread suffused the room with a strong electric current. Everyone waited. No-one asked the obvious – “What the hell was that?” – for fear of the answer.
Boom …
It reverberated in the bones before being heard. Any remaining glass in the broken windows tinkled roughly like stopped chimes. Since everyone was listening for it the second time, they were able to establish its point of origin – the kitchen.
Doug got there first.
No, not in the kitchen, but behind it. Outside. Bracing himself, he struggled to see into the dark beyond the gaping window.
His straining eyes latched onto a shrinking black pit in the yard. A darkness resolved into some creeping backward gait. He couldn’t figure the meaning at first. But he should’ve known. He’d seen something much the same at the paddock fence.
The pit leapt forward. Its head down, never hesitating in its charge, accelerating to disappear under the windowsill. Doug grabbed hold of the kitchen counter.
Boom … Like being hit with cannon fire.
Drawers jumped in place. Cupboard doors popped open. Glass and cutlery rattled in hidden alcoves. Doug tried to trap the ugly vibration in his hands and feet, but was helpless to stop it travelling through him and rattling his teeth. He felt violated.
Barely a moment after the house settled, the black pit reappeared under the window, tirelessly backing up again.
“What’s it doing?” Rob asked. He had joined Doug at the window.
“It’s trying to knock the foundations out from under us.”
The monster broke forward again. Doug could barely track its acceleration in the dark. He and Rob flinched as it neared the end of its charge, not trusting it wouldn’t try to leap up and let fly at the window.
Boom …
The kitchen rattled, along with everything in it. Doug’s teeth clicked together.
The monster backed into view again, retreating for another go.
Mick joined them briefly for a quick look at the situation, watched the start of another run. He turned away before it could come to fruition, returning to the living room without a word.
Boom … the separate thumps and rattles were riven together in one ugly noise.
Scott had finally managed to escape the protective clutches of his mother. He crowded his father at the kitchen window, wanting to see the action.
“Scott! Give me room!”
Rob fired, made a direct hit.
The familiar staggered slightly in its systematic withdrawal, then continued backing away as if it had merely stumbled.
“Don’t bother,” Doug said, though he’d waited briefly, to see how the shot panned out. “Save your bullets.”
“Why?” Rob asked angrily. “What’s the point of saving ammo if it does no good against it, anyway?”
Doug’s first inclination was to reply. “You might want to keep a few rounds handy for your wife and kids.” But he didn’t. It sounded like melodramatic bullshit. Though, as alternatives went, it was marginally better than being torn to pieces.
Yet why tell someone to do something he would never do himself? Doug would fight tooth and nail if cornered. Suggesting an option like suicide would have father and son looking at him as if he was simple. They’d go down fighting, too.
His eyesight now better adapted to the dark, Doug watched the hunched entrance to the abyss backing away. Watching that made it easy to experience a change of heart. Fight it to the end? Easy words behind the walls of a charmed house. He’d be lucky not to shit his pants and whimper like a baby if he was to come face to face with it again. It would swallow him whole. No need to chew. It would just envelop him whole and have him tumble away into its slick depths forever.
Doug did the same as Mick, turned his back on the monster’s charge. A show of contempt, but not as easy to do as he’d like. And walking away, he braced himself.
Boom …
He joined the others in the living room, sitting down and ignoring Warlock’s questions. Let him get up the nerve to look for himself. The next set of tremors did not vibrate through him, now his weight was off his feet.
“What’s happening out there?” Janet asked.
It was a little something in Doug’s favour that she still preferred to ask him rather than any of his crew. Or perhaps she had questioned the old man and he hadn’t answered. Doug thought about lying, but squashed the idea. Besides, he was feeling tired and a little mean.
“It can’t get in, so it’s trying to bring the house down on top of us.”
“What? What?” Warlock asked.
Doug wasn’t about to repeat himself. Mick told Warlock in no uncertain terms to shut it, and after that there was a short, appreciated silence. It ended too soon with two rifle shots on top of each other and another resounding boom …
Doug figured that Rob was trying to interrupt the thing’s charge, or at least reduce its effect. A tactic that didn’t seem to be working. Bang-bang again and the following impact was just as persuasive as the last. Boom …
It was also a signal for Janet to speak again. “Will it?”
“Will it what?” Doug wasn’t really in the mood to talk.
“Bring everything down?”
“I don’t know. Depends. Depends on how well-built the house is. Depends on how persistent it is. Maybe it’ll give up if it doesn’t get results right away. It doesn’t seem the patient type, does it?”
From the sound of things in the kitchen, Rob and his son were up to some new scheme. Nothing for Doug to be worried about. Their designs seemed to be focused purely on the monster.
Boom! Rattle. Something tipped over with a crash in a distant part of the house. That didn’t augur well.
“Try asking me again in half an hour,” Doug said.
He didn’t have to ask Janet about the condition of the house. From his own inspections, he could see it was built to last. That was both good news and bad. The floor, walls, even the ceilings, were joined hardwood planks. The house might not be brought down too soon because it was built solid. But if it was brought down … it was built solid. A light flared in the kitchen, the walls flickering orange. There followed a wild war cry from Scott. A muffled knock came from outside; a vexed oath from inside.
Boom …
Scott appeared in the kitchen entrance to share his disappointment. “It didn’t break.”
Doug guessed. The fuel for the disused kerosene heater in the lounge room was being put to use in one of the glass bottles not storing water. Molotov cocktails.
Scott vanished again, eager to be involved in the next firebomb. Doug was inclined to dismiss it as busywork, but supposed it was better to do something, and perhaps come across a solution by accident, than do nothing and wait for the inevitable.
What was he doing? Pretending to save his strength while his reserves were steadily worn down. Any attempt at lengthy conversation was hopeless. Even having an uninterrupted chain of thought was next to impossible, cut off by the next bout of house shaking. If it kept up for much longer it would be far more effective than the earlier horror show at driving them out of the house.
Doug sat up abruptly. “Make sure you throw those bottles away from the house! Don’t bloody help that thing by setting fire to the place!”
“Shut up and mind your own business,” Lauren said. Her misery made her reckless. “Don’t tell us what to do in our own house.”
“Yes,” her mother agreed.
Doug could have laughed. They spoke back readily, felt free to do it.
The situation was worse than he thought.
Doug didn’t say anything when one of the constant crashes out back sounded wrong. It did not reverberate. It ended sharply and abruptly. When they returned, the collisions didn’t sound to Doug as if they came from the same place any more.
Let Rob or his boy come in and tell them what happened. Doug didn’t want to be the purveyor of doom. He didn’t want his suspicions proved right.
The girl’s period pain worsened. Janet comforted her daughter as best she could, pressing a hot water bottle to her abdomen. From Lauren’s uncommon distress and Rob’s inquiry earlier, Doug guessed this was not a normal event.
“Is it early?”
No response.
“Janet, is it early?”
Janet didn’t favour him with an answer. Lauren’s wretched expression told him enough. The timing was out of whack, something to do with the familiar’s proximity. Another symptom to go along with the affected livestock and other queer happenings around the place. He stared at Janet, speculating. She knew he was looking at her, but purposely ignored him.
“Stop looking at her,” Lauren shouted, then she crumpled up as fresh pain twisted through her. Janet hugged her daughter closer, choosing to return Doug’s gaze with open hostility. This time though, he could face it down.
“You’re doing okay, aren’t you, Janet? No cramps?”
“You’re disgusting,” Lauren forced out, her eyes clenched shut.
“I wonder why it hasn’t burned us out,” Mick said from his seat. He may as well have been set in stone. He was paying no heed to their line of talk.
Doug pictured the familiar’s fat paw, like a boxer’s mitt with spikes.
“Maybe it can’t light matches.”
A distant tinkling of glass. A brief noise like flapping canvas. Scott’s cheer.
“Bull’s-eye!”
Doug’s pulse quickened a little. So, he wasn’t wallowing in quite as much hopelessness as he imagined.
“The idiots think they’re going to stop it,” Mick said.
“They think they’re going to slow it down,” Doug replied. “Don’t knock them, Mick. Maybe they will.”
“Watch out!” they heard Scott yell.
From his vantage point Doug could see a section of the window frame turn a rosy orange.
Boom …
“Idiots,” grumbled Mick. “It won’t have to start a fire with them helping.”
“The timber is treated,” Janet replied. “The paint’s fire-retardant. And don’t call my family ‘idiots’ when you’re the ones who brought that thing here.”
Doug accepted the insult. Mick didn’t. He matched Janet in murderous glaring.
Boom …
A crucifix jumped from the wall.
Mick grimaced at the sight. “Even God’s deserting us.”
The latest impacts were becoming worse to Doug’s way of thinking. He saw them in every surface of the room, able to discern the vibration by sight as well as by feel. Not good. The shaking began to irritate Mick’s injuries though the old man tried not to show it. He had become rigid on the last one, riding out the tremors before he settled back into his former sullen pose.
Father and son returned, crestfallen and openly disturbed.
“That thing’s not natural,” Rob said. A firm believer at last.
“Mum, you should have seen it,” Scott said, in frank awe. “It looked like the fire fell into it.”
They barely sat down when another boom shook the house, its import subsumed in a huge, rending crack. They heard cooking utensils drop from a height and clatter.
Rob was up and racing, his arm out to stay his son. Doug raced the boy to be at Rob’s heels. The grazier was running for the back window, but halted in the centre of the kitchen. Doug went no further than the entrance, unsure the floor would take the weight of them both. At Rob’s feet the floor tipped to become a slope, falling away to an uneven flattening at the far wall. It looked as if the fixed line of cabinets there was the only thing stopping the floor from dropping any lower. Not much appeared to be propping it up from beneath.
From a different place outside, but close.
Boom …
It was attacking the next stump in line.
There was nothing they could do about it. Doug went back to his seat in the living room. “I think it means to drive us out the front,” he said.
Mick was ropable. “What a bloody obvious way to go about it. No finesse.”
Doug offered up a clipped, knowing smile.
“Yeah, just like something Cutter would do.”
Mick had nothing further to say to that.
The time that passed before the third stump gave way was shorter than the second, the demise signalled by a harshly drawn-out trumpeting buried under a shrill crash of breaking dishes. Wood-joins wailed under duress in further parts of the house. Everyone in the living room looked round in fright at the creaking groans emanating from the far corners, fearing sudden attack.
“I don’t trust the time on mine. How long you got, Mick?”
Mick glowered at his wrist. The faceplate on his watch was missing. “When’s sunup? Four-thirty? Five? Two hours until then.”
“Damn.”
If the familiar kept it up, the house wouldn’t.
The fourth stump went even faster than the third.
A lot of crockery breaking all at once heralded the slow disintegration of that side of the house. The far end of the kitchen became a steeper slope, the empty windows pointed to a taller horizon. Bottles and jars in the pantry rolled away sight unseen, to smash at the end of wild rides. Doors that popped open tried to swing shut again, but were stuck halfway, unable to fit into the new configurations the cupboards had taken. Seams gaped. Splinters sprouted from the floor in tidy rows like the stiff hairs of a boar’s back. The rich fragrance of spilled food and cleaning fluids blossomed out of the entrance in an outrageous stink.
Though everyone kept a safe distance from the kitchen anyway, they still retreated another step. Soon they would be standing up against the front walls.
“We’re not going to make it to morning,” Doug said.
Janet tottered upright. “You’re not going to make it! You! Don’t include us!”
“Geez, Doug, you can be a blunt bastard sometimes,” Mick muttered.
“We’re going to make it!’ Janet shouted at them both. “Are you listening to me, you murdering pieces of shit!”
“Yeah, well, you’ve got your kids convinced,” Doug replied.
The two Clarkson children were staring aghast at their mother.
Rob approached Janet, put an arm around her shoulders, struggling not to appear as bewildered and lost as he felt.
“He’s right, love. This house won’t be standing by sun-up.”
Janet looked as if she was about to lash out at him, then she slumped in his embrace. “No, that isn’t true, Rob.”
Watching them comfort each other, Doug was struck by th
e most profound despair he’d ever known, worse than the first day of his second stretch in prison.
Rob moved apart from his wife, broke open his Winchester, began reloading it. “I’m going to get the ute.”
“No, dad!” Lauren cried.
But the house’s insistence was more compelling than her own.
Boom! Far doors rattled in their frames. A racking groan travelled inside the ceiling above their heads. It visibly shifted, dust puffing out where it met the corners.
Everyone instinctively flinched, but the ceiling moved no further. Rob ignored it. His attention was on his unwanted guests. “I’ll bring it over for you – the ‘getaway car’. That’s what you pricks call it, right? I’ll go get it, so you can leave.”
“I must have got in a few good hits,” Mick said. “Your brains are scrambled if you’re thinking of going out there.” He gestured half-heartedly for the other man’s rifle. “Give that here, Rob. I’ll put a bullet in you now and save you the trouble.”
Rob eyed him with something too pure to be called contempt. “You might have dragged us into this mess,” he replied, “but I’m guessing that thing’s business has nothing to with me or my family … it’s only with you three.” The physical recoiling of Mick encouraged him to go on. “We don’t mean anything to it. The only reason it’s trying so damn hard to get in here is because it wants to get to you.”
“Rob, we don’t know that for sure,” Janet said.
“Yes!” Warlock said, although he wasn’t agreeing with her. “He should go! It’s not interested in him.”
Mick gave a nod to the door. “Go ahead, then. I’m not stopping you.” That was as close as the old man would get to saying in his own fashion, “Don’t.”
Doug fought down the sneaking relief it wasn’t him going out there.
“Your wife’s right. We don’t know what it’ll do. We still have time to figure out something else.”
“This is my home it’s demolishing,” Rob said witheringly.