Don't Look Behind You-A Collection of Horror (Chamber of Horror Series Book 3)

by Billy Wells

In the dim light from the street lamp, she saw the haggard face of Danielson pressed against the glass, and covering her mouth, she was barely able to stifle a scream. His face rekindled the nightmare that had plagued her as a little girl after seeing Grendel Ogre strangle a poor woman in that horrible old movie. There was no way in Hell she would open the door for him.

  Why had Danielson changed from his uniform into street clothes? Why had he not called her first if he had a question or had forgotten something? Was the Boogeyman at her front door?

  Suddenly, she heard the voice that made her blood run cold only a few inches from her throat just behind the door, “Hello, Mrs. Schwartz. This is Officer Danielson. I tried to call you, but your phone’s not working. Are you all right? My partner thought he may have forgotten to lock the slider, and he asked me to check it out.”

  Agnes was shaking so badly, she feared she would bite her tongue off if she tried to speak. She remained silent and firmly plastered against the wall in a cold sweat. After ringing the doorbell two more times, she heard Danielson step away from the front porch. Peeking through the glass, she saw him disappear from view to the right.

  Why did he come back? Was he here as a concerned police officer or was he the Boogeyman, here to strangle the life out of her before midnight.

  In a few moments, she heard Danielson’s voice calling to her from the back porch, “Mrs. Schwartz, if you're here, please answer me. I need to know you’re all right.”

  After several more knocks on the slider and repeated pleas for her to answer, it was all she could do keep her sanity when she heard the slider open in the breakfast nook. Danielson’s weird voice called to her from inside the house, “Mrs. Schwartz. I don't want to frighten you, but my partner asked me to be sure he locked the slider. It’s a good thing I did, because he was right. He did leave it unlocked. I tried to call ahead, but your phone is out-of-order. I can’t turn on the light because the electricity is off. Please, tell me you’re all right so I can go home.”

  Was the electricity really off in her house? She could see the streetlight burning brightly through the side panel of the front door and lights were on in the Jenkins house across the street. Then, Agnes saw the flat nose and the cauliflower ears coming ever closer as one big eye hung in the light of the street lamp and seemed to leer at her with lethal intent. Was she still dreaming or was Danielson dragging one foot as he shambled closer to where she was hiding? She saw his mouthful of crooked teeth spread into a monstrous grin. His protruding eyeballs bulged with recognition when he spotted her shaking in terror on the floor.

  “Mrs. Schwartz, why didn’t you answer me when…?” Danielson saw the 38 Special emerge from the shadows and raised his hands in submission as he recoiled slowly backwards. The crooked smile vanished from his shocked, misshapen face.

  “Please leave now or I'll shoot,” Agnes warned him.

  “Take it easy, I’m just trying to help you,” the officer stammered, “I live close by and….”

  “Can’t you see how terrified I am,” Agnes shrieked. “With an hour left before midnight, I don't trust anyone at this point. Leave now before my nerves make me do something both of us will regret. It's not your fault, but you remind me of a monster I had in a nightmare when I was a little girl, and I’m deathly afraid of you. Even if you have good intentions, I can’t control the fear I’m feeling right now.”

  “Sorry. I was in a fire when I was little. I was just worried…”

  “Please, leave now!” Agnes shrieked. “I won't tell you again.”

  Danielson paused a beat, then turned and walked briskly to the back and left through the slider without another word.

  Agnes didn’t move until she saw the headlights and heard his car pull away from the driveway. She closed the slider, locked it, and pulled the drapes across the creepy darkness in the backyard. Her heart was still beating fast, and her entire body was still shaking. She shuddered at the thought she had almost shot a police officer because he reminded her of Grendel Ogre, an actor who played in an old movie a long time ago.

  She picked up the phone and verified the line was dead. She tried the light switch to confirm the electricity was off. “I guess he was telling the truth after all,” she thought. “What a night of weird circumstances,” she said to the darkness.

  She removed the phone from her pocket and saw the time was 11:30. From the top drawer of the chest in the foyer, she found a flashlight. Turning it on, she was elated the batteries still worked. Totally exhausted, she climbed the stairs, still gripping the 38 for insurance and pointing the beam of the light into the darkness above. She knew she would never be able to sleep, but she had to try. She could barely put one foot in front of the other when she reached the landing.

  After brushing her teeth and putting on her nightgown, she fell into bed and placed the gun on the end table and the flashlight beside her on the bedspread. She wondered if the Boogeyman had found his ninth victim yet. The beam of the light was diminishing from weak batteries, but the dim glow was a small comfort as she fixed her eyes on a small speck of dried blood on the ceiling from a fly she swatted the year she moved in.

  As Agnes lay there praying for sleep to come, a sudden realization of horror gripped her like a vice and had her gasping for breath again. Scared half out of her wits and wanting the giant policeman to leave immediately, she forgot all about the back slider being unlocked. If Danielson wasn't the Boogeyman, the real one had plenty of time to sneak in the back door when she sat in the cruiser.

  At once, everything around her seemed ominous and threatening. To make matters worse, the flashlight went out entirely. Her eyes flitted back and forth in the darkness like a scared rabbit, dwelling on every shadow in the room, straining to detect the slightest foreign sound or movement.

  What if it was the Bogeyman in the bridge, and he really did follow her home? Or maybe he was the young man who blew his horn as he passed in the car. He might have turned around and followed her. Maybe the Boogeyman left the door open when he came to strangle her, and then, waited in the backyard when he found her gone. With a sudden burst of adrenalin, Agnes grabbed the revolver from the end table, sprang to her feet, and tried the light switch on the wall.

  The electricity was still off as she expected it would be. She crept to the door and peered out, ever listening to the silence for movement. Her fear accelerated when she still saw the street light and several porch lights on across the street through the bedroom window. Why was her house the only one without electricity? This couldn't be a coincidence; the Boogeyman had obviously chosen her as his next victim. He must be somewhere in the house. Everything pointed to this gut-wrenching conclusion.

  Peering into the eerie blackness of the lower level from the top of the stairs, Agnes knew it was futile and probably suicide, even with her revolver, to leave her bedroom without a light. She knew her pounding heart would explode from fright if she really saw the Boogeyman step from the shadows.

  She slammed the bedroom door, locked it, and propped a chair under the doorknob. The battery powered clock on the end table read 11:45 when she climbed into bed, shaking with unbridled fear. Placing the revolver next to the clock, she rested her head on a mound of pillows and strained to make out the speck of fly on the ceiling she could no longer see. Maybe tomorrow, she would get the ladder and take care of it.

  Turning on her side, she watched the digits turning slowly over as each minute passing seemed like an eternity. The room felt as cold as a tomb.

  At 11:55, she felt something move beneath her. It was the last place in the house she would have checked.

  Then came the loud “achoo” from under the bed like a giant fart breaking the silence of a somber wake.

  Agnes lunged for the revolver that had disappeared from the table as a hand as big as a catcher’s mitt clutched her throat and started squeezing. The Boogeyman had a deadline to meet, and he had to work fast.

  INTO THE LIGHT

  The rescue squad pulled Tomas from the ta
ngled wreckage. He'd taken his eye off the road too long when he tried to answer his phone. When he looked up, he saw the deer caught in his headlights in the middle of the road.

  His excellent reflexes had allowed him to miss the animal by veering off the road into the bushes. Unfortunately, he did not see the deep ravine concealed by the foliage. The car and Tomas went airborne after smashing through the guardrails, which inflated the airbags.

  He was still in one piece with his seatbelt fastened when he creamed a huge boulder halfway down the hill. The hood of his Mustang folded up like an accordion.

  Despite the massive head injuries, Tomas was still breathing when the EMTs loaded him into the ambulance. About twenty cars pulled off the road next to the ravine. The occupants craned their necks as they peered down at the tangled wreckage. Several shook their heads when they saw the Mustang was barely recognizable.

  When Tomas reached the emergency room at St. Barnabas Hospital, the EMTs wielded him inside with several IV lines dangling around him. The bandage wrapped around his head was wet with blood.

  As he lay motionless on a stretcher in the hallway, the long faces of the doctors and nurses attending him forecasted the hopelessness of his condition. Tomas' s eyes opened wide between the slits of his bandages, and then, closed again. His forehead creased with pain, he went entirely limp, and he stopped breathing.

  A doctor in green scrubs shouted, “Clear” as he placed two paddles on Tomas’s chest, which caused his body to jump off the table like a rag doll.

  Tomas couldn’t move, but unbeknown to the doctors trying to save his life, he heard the constant drone on the blood pressure device to his right and felt several hard blows of a fist on his chest. He detected a hint of spearmint gum on someone’s breath as they exhausted every measure to save his life.

  Suddenly, the beeping of machines and doctors barking orders dissipated, and then disappeared entirely. It was like he had gone completely deaf in a split second. He had never heard silence so complete before. Even with his eyes closed, Tomas saw a bright light fill the spectrum of his consciousness, intense and all consuming.

  Then, like magic, the light engulfing him faded like a wisp of smoke in a strong wind, and he found himself standing by the side of a country road. Tomas felt certain his critical condition from the accident would not have allowed him to leave his hospital bed if he were alive, so he assumed he must be dead. What he was experiencing now must be what people say they saw after they died and were brought back to life.

  “Wow,” he thought, “he never imagined in his wildest dreams there would really be life after death, but here he was somewhere on what the mediums on TV call “the other side”. What lay before him now was nothing like the afterlife he'd seen on TV and in the movies. This road looked about the same as many country roads he had traveled in real life.

  Looking in all directions, he didn't see anyone else. Inspecting his clothes, he discovered to his chagrin that a flimsy, hospital gown was all he had on. Like most hospital garb, it was open in the rear. He could feel a cool breeze on his naked ass.

  The weather was balmy on the other side, and a slight breeze was blowing. It felt like about 75°. There were no cars traveling on this road. He saw a cornfield on the left as far as he could see. A cemetery occupied the entire hillside on the right.

  “A cemetery,” he thought, “he hoped this was not his final destination in the dream he must be having. This new world seemed familiar, and yet, incredibly strange. A minute ago, he felt warm, and now, he felt a sudden chill. His lips started to quiver. He had no sense of time in this new world. The sun seemed to move across the sky like a sped-up, time-lapse video.

  He saw an old house up ahead that looked long-deserted and thought he might spend the night there. Possibly, he might find something inside he could use to cover his ass.

  As he approached, the white, frame house seemed familiar. Even though he didn't believe he'd ever been there before, he had an uncanny sense of déjà vu that he'd seen this place in a photo or a painting somewhere. He didn't know why, but the house seemed eerily foreboding.

  Climbing the two steps to the front porch, he was about to knock when he noticed the door stood ajar. The stark silence of the countryside made him very uneasy. Something about this place seemed very wrong. The house appeared to be deserted, but he knocked anyway. When no one answered the door, he called out, “Hello, is anyone there?”

  Tomas waited, but again, no one answered. He pushed open the door and entered the dark, shadowy space. When he saw the partially eaten body on the floor, he realized immediately where he was and why it seemed familiar. He was in the house George Romero used to film the movie Night of the Living Dead. The cemetery he'd seen across the road must be the one where the brother and sister had placed the bouquet of flowers on their father’s grave just before the first zombie attack.

  “Zombies,” he thought, “certainly if he was in heaven, there would not be any zombies. He looked out the window and saw about ten zombies shambling toward the house just like in the movie. Where was Barbara, the woman from the movie who’d lost her mind from fear? Was she hiding in the house?

  He pinched himself and feeling a twinge of pain, he decided maybe he wasn’t dreaming. In any case, the zombies seemed shockingly real in the nightmare he’d stumbled into, and he didn’t want to find out what would happen if they sunk their teeth into him.

  In the movie, the hero had hidden in the basement to escape the zombies. Sure enough, on the right side of the kitchen, Tomas recognized the door he knew from the movie led to the lower level. He ran to it and discovered it was locked from the inside. Tomas started pounding on the door and shouting for whoever was down there to help him. Through the window, he saw the zombies getting closer, and he began to pound on the door and shout just the way he would if his life was at stake.

  After a time, he heard a voice he recognized as the black hero played by Duane Jones in the original movie shout, “Who’s up there?”

  “My name is Tomas, and a shit load of zombies are about to climb up on the front porch. Please open the door, and let me in before it's too late.”

  “Are you alone?” the voice asked without any urgency.

  “Yes, I’m alone. Hurry!”

  The door opened a crack and a shadowy, black face peered out at him and laughed like he just heard a funny joke. He undid the chain, and opening the door, said, “What is that you’re wearing?”

  Tomas ignored him and slipped inside. The black man locked the door behind him.

  “Have you already killed the father and the mother when they came back to life after you barricaded yourself in the basement?” Tomas asked, looking into the darkness at the bottom of the stairs.

  The black man looked at him in amazement and asked, “How did you know about that?”

  “Just consider me a psychic. What’s your name?”

  “I'm Ben.”

  “That’s right, I remember it now from the movie.”

  Tomas followed Ben down the stairs and took a seat on the basement floor next to a candle burning on a makeshift table. He saw that the lone survivor had dragged the double dead corpses of the husband and wife whose daughter had turned into a zombie into a corner on the other side of the room. “So this is the end of the movie, and all the others are dead. You're the only one left. ”

  “How did you know all this?” Ben said, staring at him in awe with his mouth agape.

  “You wouldn't believe me if I told you,” Tomas said solemnly.

  Suddenly, they heard scuffling upstairs and pounding on the door. A worried look came over Ben's face as he looked up the stairs with apprehension.

  “Cool it, Ben. We’re totally safe down here in the basement. We just need to chill out until the morning when the authorities will arrive and kill all the zombies.”

  Ben looked at Tomas as if he had lost his mind and wondered what kind of weird nutcase he had let into the basement.

  “Look, Ben, we’re in a movie
I've seen at least ten times. Someone even did a remake in color with Tony Todd playing you, which had a different ending. All you need to know is in the morning when we go upstairs to meet the police, don't look out the window. If you do, one of the cops will think you are a zombie and blow your brains out. While the final credits roll in the movie, it shows the good guys dragging your ass to the bonfire and tossing it into the flames.”

  A heavy thud struck the door above, and the zombies continued to batter on it for what seemed like an eternity without breaking in. Then, everything went silent, and the two of them sat looking at the candle burning on the table for another hour.

  Even though Tomas knew the zombies couldn’t get into the basement if this nightmare remained true to the original movie, he said, “Look, Ben, I’ll take the first watch. Why don’t you try to get some sleep?”

  After thinking this over, Ben decided to comply. In no time, he began to snore loudly, and Tomas spent the rest of the night looking at the candle burning down on the table and the matchbook with five matches beside it.

  In the wee hours, Tomas, not really concerned about the threat of a zombie attack, dozed off and did a horrible job at standing guard. When he awoke, he found Ben gone. Looking up the stairs, he saw the door standing open.

  He hoped for his sake that Ben had believed him when he told him not to look out the window. No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than he heard gunshots above.

  Racing up the stairs two at a time and bursting into the kitchen, he found Ben spread-eagled on the floor with a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead with blood pooling around him on the linoleum floor.

  Tomas was sad that just like the movie, the nightmare did not have a happy ending for Ben, the hero. He moved cautiously to the window and peeked outside.

  He couldn’t believe it when he saw the zombies overrunning the sheriff and his deputies in the front yard. He immediately thought of Custer’s Last Stand when it became apparent that the bloodbath taking place before his eyes would surely end badly for the good guys. He grimaced when he saw the familiar face of one of the zombies in the movie chewing on the sheriff’s neck, which was not supposed to happen.