by John Everson
JOHN EVERSON
The House by the Cemetery
FLAME TREE PRESS
London & New York
Prologue
One Night in October
The floorboards creaked as Candace crossed the room.
Ominous.
She caught and held her breath, then kept walking slowly, one careful foot at a time. Tentatively. Just like the rest of the house, this room was mostly dark. She worried with every step that something would run across her bare toes. Why had she worn sandals? A muffled red light warmed the far wall near the baseboard. Maybe warmed was the wrong word. The light from the hidden lamp didn’t warm, it bled up the wall from the floor. Nearby, just barely illuminated by the lamp, a woman lay prone, unmoving on a crimson velvet duvet. She wore a frilly white nightgown, which was spotted in dark splats. The reason was obvious.
Someone had slit the woman’s throat. The murder weapon lay nearby on the floor, the knife’s silver blade coated in dark red. A spray of blood bled down the wall beside her in visual opposition to the light that bled up the wall. It was a study in opposites…the only constant was the color.
Red.
She could see it everywhere. Pools on the floor. Spots on the walls. The room was dripping in red.
Candace shivered. What had happened here?
The house was disturbing as hell. They’d gotten that part right.
Something tapped her shoulder. Candace jumped.
“Boo!”
Sara and Briana stood behind her grinning.
“What the hell!” Candace said. “Don’t do that.”
“Isn’t this place awesome?” Sara asked.
“There’s so much blood,” Candace whispered.
“That’s what makes it awesome,” Briana said. “And they got the color right too; it doesn’t just look like red paint.”
Candace shivered. “It’s horrible,” she said.
Sara laughed. “Scaredy cat. Don’t you want to reach out and touch someone? Like the witch?” She pointed at the bloody body lying by the door.
“No,” Candace said. “It looks too real.”
“Maybe it is real,” Briana said. Her hands gestured dramatically. “You’ve heard the stories. Maybe this really is a slaughterhouse, and the whole haunted house thing is just a cover. Can you guess what’s really going on down those creepy stairs in the basement?”
“You guys are mean,” Candace said.
“You think so?” Briana said. A wicked smile stole across her face. “How about if we let you finish the house on your own? That way you’ll get the full effect!”
“No,” Candace said. Her voice took on a note of panic. “You wouldn’t do that to me.”
Sara grabbed Briana’s hand and pulled her past the dead body and through the door into whatever horrors the next room held. “Sure, we would,” her voice echoed.
Candace raced after, but they were already gone from the next room when she passed through the threshold…and she didn’t know which way they’d gone. This room offered two choices of exit. A sign rested crookedly on the wall with an arrow pointing at the stairs leading down and out of sight. ‘Don’t Go In The Basement,’ it read. The words looked as if they’d been painted freehand, in blood, with a very wet brush. A figure dressed in a black cape and holding a long scythe detached itself from the wall near the basement stairs and began moving toward her.
A second staircase was on the other side of the room, but this set of steps led up. It too was flanked by a sign with drippy red letters, this one reading simply ‘Exit’.
Candace debated between the two. But only for a moment, as the reaper was between her and the stairs leading down. She began climbing the stairs leading up. ‘Exit’ was exactly what she wanted at this point.
The room at the top was strangely bare. The first thing she saw was the raw plank ceiling, with the beam crossing the room to form the center of the peak’s A frame. The next thing she saw was the rope tied to that beam. It ended in a hangman’s noose just a few feet from the floor. The loop at the end was swaying slightly.
Candace shivered. At least there wasn’t a body hanging from it. But why was it moving?
Something creaked to her left. The hair stood up on the back of her neck. Candace turned to look, but saw nothing. There was an old bureau there, with an oval mirror attached above it. The mirror was cracked. And it blocked her view of whatever was in the narrow end of the room beyond. Probably someone in costume waiting to jump out at her. In a rare moment of bravery, Candace decided to beat the haunted house people at their own game. She stepped around the dresser, prepared to confront someone in a gory ghoul mask.
There was nobody there.
The hair on the back of her neck began to tingle. The small space behind the dresser was a dead zone. A shuttered window marked the wall, but otherwise…the space was empty.
Candace walked to the window, and lifted the wooden shutter slats by an inch. The window looked out on the cemetery. Even in the dark, she could see the tombstones of Bachelor’s Grove in silent rows below.
Something creaked again.
She dropped the shutter and started to turn.
But someone grabbed her shoulders and gripped them tight. She struggled, but couldn’t turn.
“Wha—?” she began to cry.
And then a hand covered her mouth and yanked her whole body backward.
Candace slapped and punched at her captor, but her hands couldn’t make contact. The arms only tightened around her and dragged her off her feet.
Her upper body suddenly lowered. Her feet thumped down a few inches, and then her head was below the level of her toes.
She stopped struggling then and finally understood what was going on. There was a hole in the floor.
Or rather…a trapdoor.
That had been the creaking sound she’d heard. Someone coming up and through the door.
She had figured out one piece of this puzzle, but it was too late to matter.
Candace tried to scream as her head dropped down another stair below the level of the floor. A moment later, her feet dragged afterward, cracking painfully down the steps to follow her.
Her heels bounced off wood at least eight or ten times, and then the thumping stopped, and she was dragged across a floor.
She should not have walked around the bureau. Because now she had literally disappeared behind it. Maybe forever. This couldn’t be part of the haunted house attraction gimmick.
Something cold touched her wrist, and then clicked. The hands abandoned her for a moment, and Candace twisted her body until she could see the chain that now locked her to an old steel bedframe. A few feet away, she heard the creaking sound again.
The trapdoor had lowered once again.
Nobody above would have any idea where she’d gone. If Briana and Sara came back to look for her, they wouldn’t find a clue.
Candace opened her mouth to scream, but almost as soon as she made a sound, a hand closed solidly over her lips. The hand was cool and firm.
Her captor whispered softly.
“Shhhhhhhh.”
Part One
The House
Chapter One
June 23rd
“But the place is already haunted,” Mike Kostner said. He shook his head and gave Perry the eye. “You want to haunt a haunted house?”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Perry said. “Half the work has already been done. We just need you to go in and put down some planks. Shore up some walls. Make sure nobody’s going to fall through the floor.”
Mike lifted a pint and downed a couple gulps. Stalling. Then he looked at Perry. “You don’t really believe that, do you? That place hasn’t had anyone living in it for fifty years. Probably more. You’d be better off knocking it down and building a new place from scratch. Actually, you’d be better off renting the space of the old Dominick’s grocery store on Cicero and just setting up your haunted house there.”
Perry shook his head. “We don’t want to be like the Jaycees! A dead Dominick’s ain’t no Bachelor’s Grove. You know that. C’mon. We’ve got access to an old cemetery in the woods, with an old spooky house behind it. And stories…lots of stories. Everyone in Cook County knows the place is supposedly haunted. Hell, everyone in Illinois who has ever heard of the place knows it. That’s the beauty of this – most of the marketing is already done. People have heard ghost stories about Bachelor’s Grove since they were kids. When word gets out that we’re letting people into that old locked-up shack hidden back in those woods? That the police have kept under guard with chains? People will flock to this on Halloween! The place has been under lock-and-key for decades.”
Mike nodded. “There’s a reason for that.”
“Rumors,” Perry said.
Mike shook his head. “People died there. People are buried there. It’s next to a cemetery!”
Perry shrugged. “People are buried everywhere. They don’t come back. I don’t care what the ghost stories say. They’ve had chains on that place because of a bunch of drug-smoking Satan worshippers who vandalized the place. That’s all.”
“It just seems wrong, man,” Mike said. He picked up his beer, and moved the level down another inch. When he set it down, he looked at Perry. The other man had been his friend for more than ten years, since they’d met at Mike’s ex-wife’s sister’s wedding. But Perry wore a suit, while, at his best, Mike wore jeans and a t-shirt. Even now, sitting at a sticky black round table at The Edge, a shithole shot-and-a-beer bar frequented by Zeppelin and Journey cover bands on the weekends, Perry was wearing a white shirt and tie. And Perry talked to Mia, Mike’s ex, a lot more than Mike did.
“It’s not wrong,” Perry said. “It’s business.” The other man ran a hand across his balding dome, reminding Mike that when they’d first met, Perry had had a full head of blond hair. Now…he had a dome and a paunch. Things change. Kind of like Mike’s marriage. Mike had kept building houses, and while he did, Mia had kept checking out other houses. In particular, the beds in those houses. That had been the sticking point for Mike.
“Look,” Mike said, “I don’t know what you did to bankroll this, but it just seems like a bad idea. I mean…Bachelor’s Grove…they’ve talked about that place since I was a kid. People see ghosts out on the boulevard. I just don’t think—”
Perry held up his hand. “Mike, seriously. When was the last time you had a gig? Three weeks? Four?”
Mike shook his head. “I had a roofing job last week.”
“For a day?”
Mike shrugged. “Two.”
Perry leveled two iron-gray eyebrows. “And what do you have lined up for this week?”
“It’s Thursday.”
“Okay, next week?”
Mike deflated. He said nothing. What could he say? He was a carpenter in prime season, and he’d only worked a handful of days in the past three weeks. His bank account was currently looking a lot smaller than the rent on his apartment.
Perry nodded. “That’s what I’m talking about.” He put his hand over the opening at the top of Mike’s pint just as Mike was about to lift it.
“Look,” Perry said. “You’ve had some bad luck. I get it. But not everybody does. You do this, and things could turn around. This is a good gig. We sold the county on a sweet deal here. They spend thousands every year trying to keep people out of that cemetery in October. Now instead of bleeding money, they can make a profit on the place. We’ll fix it up, open it as a haunted house, and they get a percentage of the ticket price. If you’re a part of this…there are a lot of jobs that the county could reference you on. This could put you back on the five days a week circuit instead of five days a month. I’m telling you.”
Mike pulled his glass out from under Perry’s hand. “I don’t know,” he said.
“All we need you to do is reinforce the floors and the staircases,” Perry explained. “Some of it needs to be torn out, but we’ve already had it inspected and I think we can save a lot of the surface stuff that looks old and creepy. You’ll be building a lot of new support underneath. Redo the entry, and probably build a couple room dividers once the decorators have a traffic plan.”
“It’s going to be a black hole,” Mike said. “That place is probably ready to sink into the earth just like the coffins around it.”
“What else do you have lined up this month?” Perry countered.
A tall lanky guy got up on stage at that moment and plugged in his guitar. A moment later his fingers were walking across the strings and the half-empty bar filled with steel arpeggios. The guy wasn’t bad. But he was clearly a wannabe Eddie Van Halen.
Mike could sympathize. He felt like a wannabe carpenter lately.
Perry was looking at him expectantly. Mike shrugged. Noncommittal.
“This is your ticket back,” Perry said. He grabbed Mike’s shoulder and squeezed. “You do this, and the county makes money this fall…and you will be working again. All the time. I promise you.”
Mike rolled his eyes.
“Again, what else do you have lined up this month?”
“When would I start?” Mike asked.
“Monday,” Perry said. “We need the structural work done by the end of August so there’s time for the artists to come in and decorate the place.”
“Decorate how?”
The guitar player behind them held one note – and the guitar – high in the air. Mike put one hand over his left ear.
“Like a haunted house?” Perry said. He reached across the table and cuffed Mike. “What do you think?”
“Why don’t they just leave it exactly the way it is?” Mike said. “Like you say, it’s creepy and haunted now. You don’t need me to do anything.”
“One word: lawsuits.” Perry shook his head. “You go in there and make sure people don’t fall through the rotten floors. I’ll make sure this thing becomes the best haunted house attraction in the state this fall. It will all be good.”
“Two words back atcha,” Mike said. “Haunted house. As in…already!”
Perry shrugged. “Two more words: Ticket sales.” He paused, and looked hard at Mike. “And you pay your rent.”
Mike bowed his head and stared at the half-empty glass.
“What time on Monday?”
Chapter Two
Monday morning came fast. And when it did…Mike wasn’t ready. He wanted to be. He’d tried to be. He’d loaded the truck over the weekend, putting anything onboard he could think that he might need. But the reality was, until he got into the place and really scoped it out…who could say?
Plus, Sunday had run wrong…lonely. And consequently, he’d had one too many beers again. The truth was, his head hurt, his lower back ached, and he really didn’t want to be here.
The sun was still low in the sky and there was a fuzzy haze along the top of the grass when he followed the gravel path that led from Midlothian Turnpike down and into the cemetery grounds. His shoulders shivered slightly with the chill in the morning fog as he walked past the stand of silent gravestones. There honestly weren’t many at this point…the place had only been a small community cemetery from the last century, after all, and some of the stones had fallen over, while others had been vandalized or removed. There was a reason the police had put chains up across the forest preserve fencing to protect what remained of this place.
It was somewhat hidden. And largely abandoned. A sad place.
And thus…ripe for abuse. Mike had heard that Satan worshippers had been run out of here on more than one occasion. There were all sorts of stories about black masses and witchcraft.
Whatever had happened before, on this particular July morning, it was just an empty and kind of forlorn clearing that he saw on an otherwise quiet morning. Behind him the echo of cars whizzed by on the asphalt. But step by step as he approached the old house…that sound receded. Ahead, there were wisps of fog rolling off the ground. And as he rounded a bend in the path, the roof of the old, abandoned cemetery farmhouse edged into view.
His summer project.
Mike walked until the full face of the old place was visible. And then he sighed. The arch of the roof lifted halfway into the tree line, and the black of the shingles was almost completely obscured in green moss. The place was sided in what was probably cedar, but whatever rustic allure it had once had, today it just looked gray, rotted and warped. There were obvious dark holes in the wood, and one of the window frames hung down in a twisted L in front of the dirty glass.
He didn’t want to look inside.
But not only was he going to look inside…over the next few weeks he was going to gut the place.
His head hurt at the thought.
The porch sank, its wood spongy, as he walked up its two steps, and he mentally made a note of it. Replace porch. Probably the easiest repair he’d be doing here over the next couple months. He turned the key in the padlock that held the warped door closed, and took a deep breath as it creaked open ahead of him.
The sun didn’t want to enter there.
He didn’t want to either.
“I never wanted it to come to this,” Mike said, as he stood in the door of the old house.
Thankfully, nobody answered. For a heartbeat, he’d worried someone might. But then he took a breath and stepped inside.
The front foyer was half-covered in yellowed linoleum. But there was a hole in the middle of it, where some animal had gnawed its way through the floor. Whether it had been digging into the basement below or digging its way out, he couldn’t tell.