The House by the Cemetery

by John Everson

  From somewhere in the distance, she heard voices.

  She rose, and forced her feet to step past the Iron Maiden and rack to the edge of the exhibit.

  Jeanie looked to the left and right, and saw only spotlights and dry-ice fog.

  Now or never.

  She stepped into the corridor and walked toward the exit, her feet moving faster and faster the closer she got to the stairs that led up and out of the back of the house.

  Something was dripping all over her face now; she didn’t want to know what. Jeanie wiped it off her cheeks with the back of her hand. The red arrow on the floor directed her out of the basement and through the red-painted door. The cement stairs beyond looked like a life raft.

  Jeanie vaulted up them and emerged outside behind the haunted house, beneath the dark of the midnight sky. She hurried around the side of the house and saw the pathway to the turnpike. It was completely clear. There was nobody standing in line to get into the house.

  Because they were all dead, she thought.

  There was nobody at the ticket-taker booth. It was weirdly empty and quiet. She could hear the light breeze riffle the leaves that still clung to the oaks that barricaded the house.

  The moon shone icy bright through the tips of the trees on the edge of the clearing nearby, and Jeanie wiped at her face once again, looking down to see water glistening on the back of her bloodstained hand.

  The drips on her face were tears.

  When she realized that she was crying, the tears only intensified. She started sobbing and couldn’t contain the noises that came from her chest and throat.

  Jeanie shook her head and began to run down the gravel path toward the deserted turnpike.

  She was all alone.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Katie stood near the coffin that held her bones, though they were no longer simply bones. When Mike looked inside it, he saw Katie. Or her doppelganger. Katie’s double lay silent and naked in the coffin; her body now appeared fully formed, from the small creamy nubs of her toes to the dark thatch of hair at her crotch to the soft, round breasts that he longed to suckle again. Only her face remained slightly incomplete; her lips still didn’t quite connect right…there was too much scarlet at the edges; he could see the white of her teeth with the front of her lips closed. Emery held a knife in her hand; she raised it in the air as she began to walk toward Mike. He backed away.

  “Don’t worry,” Katie said. “Emery won’t hurt you, I promise you that.”

  “Yeah, okay maybe,” he said. “But who will she hurt? This place is a slaughterhouse. What the hell happened while I was asleep?”

  “Just what had to be,” Katie said. “You want me to be alive again, right? In the flesh, so you can actually touch and feel me?”

  “Yes, of course,” Mike said.

  “Well, that’s what we’ve been working on,” she said. “We’ve been doing what we need to do to make that happen. Because, I want to be with you finally, too.”

  “But why so much blood?” he said. His voice rose with incredulity and anger. He waved a hand toward the coffin. “When this all started, you said we wouldn’t have to kill anyone. You just needed a little blood each night. I was okay with that,” he said. “But not this. This place was supposed to be a fun haunted house, not a death trap.”

  “There was only one way for me to return,” Katie said. “I’m sorry it had to be this way but…you want me to be with you again, right?”

  Mike nodded. “But why,” he said. “Why did all those people have to die?”

  “Power,” she said. “On the night of the becoming, I needed all of their energy.”

  Emery stepped toward him.

  “Emery, give Mike the knife,” Katie said.

  Katie’s quiet but very bloody accomplice lifted the blade, and offered it easily into Mike’s hands. He took the weapon, but frowned.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” he asked.

  Katie stood just in front of her coffin and bowed her head as she answered.

  “I need you to kill her,” she said. “Her blood will complete my return to life.”

  Katie reached out a hand to touch Emery’s shoulder. Without protest, the girl knelt, and offered her chest for Mike to address. He made a face and looked back at Katie.

  “What are you saying?” he said. “She’s been your best friend!”

  Katie nodded. “I love her, I do. But…a witch can have only one familiar. And Emery has been mine for more than fifty years. She began the process of my return…and now she must give the final energy to complete it.”

  “But what about her?” Mike asked, pointing at the chunky girl who knelt and stared at his feet without looking up. “Doesn’t she deserve something for her service to you? Something more than death?”

  Katie shook her head. “Yes,” she said. “She deserves to finally be set free. It is time for a new person to join me. Emery has helped me for many years but…she’s been with me since I died in 1963. It’s because of her that I’m here today. But now... I need someone who understands the world today. Someone who can help me not only survive, but thrive. Someone who can be my lover, as well as my familiar.”

  Katie looked at Mike with eyes that sucked out his soul. “I need you.”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Jillie wiped the tears from her eyes and rose from the floor. She couldn’t bear to look at Ted’s body anymore. She couldn’t imagine life without him near, but what made it worse was the guilt of his blood that was on her hands. His death was her fault. She should never have dragged him into this. Her throat was thick with grief but everywhere she turned her head, it got worse.

  There were mutilated people everywhere. Men held the red ropes of their guts between their fingers with the mask of surprise and sudden, unexpected death painted on their faces. Women hung from rusty meat hooks from the low ceiling. Bodies lay in gory piles on the floor and bled out from where they were pinned to the walls by nails and stakes. Nearby in a tableau that looked like an old barn with bales of hay and a rustic horse stall, a teenage boy wearing a Camp Crystal Lake shirt was staked to the wall with the tines of an old pitchfork. The decapitated head of a girl lay on the floor just beyond his feet. The girl’s body rested nearby on a bale of hay, her open throat still dripping a slow trickle of blood on the floor below.

  “This has to stop,” Jillie whispered.

  She walked over the bloody floor to an exhibit meant to look like an old crypt. Maybe it was supposed to reference The Mummy, she wasn’t sure. The false walls were painted to look like roughhewn stone ‘bricks’. In the center of the room, two stone sarcophagi sat with lids half removed. A hand gripped the edges of one, as if a figure were about to rise from the tomb.

  On the floor between the stone coffins, a man lay with a long, silver blade jutting out of his middle. Jillie forced herself to walk over, grip the haft of the blade and…pull. She needed a weapon if she was going to track down the witch.

  The blade slid out of the dead man easily, and she quickly turned away from the corpse.

  The woman who had killed Ted had walked away from them toward the end of the basement, and that’s the direction that Jillie headed. The haunted house theme music was still playing through speakers hidden in the ceiling, with groans and sighs and occasional screams adding tension to the already spooky rhythms. But above the soundtrack, she could hear voices.

  Someone else was still alive down here.

  Jillie moved toward the voices, passing body after broken body along the path. She stepped carefully, quietly. She couldn’t tell where the voices were coming from; the Aisle of Atrocities hit a wall just a few yards away and nobody was alive in any of the macabre ‘sets’ on the right or left side of the walkway. But as she reached the end of the aisle, she saw an opening between the sets to a dark access corridor behind the fake walls of the horror
‘exhibits’. And there was a crack of yellow light in the shape of a doorway just a few feet away.

  So.

  Jillie stepped over a dead girl and wound her way around a wooden post to emerge in the narrow corridor behind the sets.

  “I never wanted anything like this,” a man’s voice was saying inside. He sounded upset.

  “It’s too late for that,” another voice answered. A woman. The killer? Jillie wondered.

  She took a deep breath and put her hand into the wooden inset that served as a handle for the door. The door opened inward as soon as she touched it. No turning back now.

  Jillie stepped into a small room lit by a single bare bulb screwed into a fixture on the ceiling. On the right side of the room, an old coffin sat on the floor near the wall, its lid removed.

  A beautiful young woman stood in front of it. She was slim with long dark hair that draped across her shoulders in easy curls. Her eyes were dark pools, her lips heavy and filled with a secret humor. Her hands were on her denim-hugged hips.

  She was looking at another woman, a stocky girl with mouse-brown hair who knelt at the feet of a man. Jillie could only see the woman’s back, but she could tell that her head was bowed down, as if awaiting execution.

  Jillie wanted to rush forward instantly once she looked at the man. He was dressed in work boots, jeans, a t-shirt and a denim overshirt. All of his clothes, from bootlaces to collar, were spattered and dark with blood. There was a bloody handprint on his back.

  The man held a knife. From his clothes, it was clear that he’d used the weapon, repeatedly. And from the stocky girl’s position on her knees in front of him, he was about to use it again.

  “You must,” the pretty girl said. She was speaking to the man and didn’t seem to have noticed Jillie’s entry. “It’s the only way. And the time is now.”

  “No!” Jillie ran forward, raising her own knife. She had to stop him. She aimed at the center of the man’s back and brought her arm down as hard as she could. But the man moved at the last second, twisting away as she brought the knife down. Instead of his back, she caught the side of his arm. He yelled as the knife bit through his shirt sleeve and carved a channel in his flesh. A fresh bloom of red joined the sodden cloth all around it.

  The man grabbed at his wound and staggered to the left. The kneeling girl came to life then and grabbed at Jillie’s legs. But Jillie turned and twisted, throwing herself away from the girl and toward the coffin.

  “Get rid of her,” the pretty girl commanded, and the other woman rose from the floor. When she turned, Jillie realized in a flash that this was, in fact, the woman who had killed Ted.

  Jillie retreated until her back hit the edge of the coffin. The touch of the wood startled her. Jillie glanced behind her and saw the body lying between the short wooden walls of the old coffin. The first thing she noticed about the body was that it looked fresh. Not rotten like the wood it lay within. That and its nakedness. And then she recognized the face. It had the same high cheekbones, narrow nose and black hair as the woman standing just a few feet away. A dead twin.

  Jillie looked away from the body and held the knife out in front of her, threatening the thickset woman who was coming at her with both hands outstretched. The other woman didn’t move, but seemed to be in charge. She directed the man.

  “Help Emery get rid of her. Hurry, it’s time.”

  “Can we use her blood on the body to finish it?” the man asked. He walked toward Emery holding his wounded arm.

  The pretty girl shook her head. “Emery’s blood began to raise me. Only Emery’s blood can complete the spell and bring me back in my new skin. The hour is now. The power is thick in the house at this moment but it’ll quickly drain away. Hurry. I want to be reborn for you.”

  The woman stepped closer to the coffin and put her hands on the feet of the body within, gently touching the ankles and calves of her twin as if marveling at their soft beauty.

  It all hit Jillie in a flash. This woman was the witch of Bachelor’s Grove. The girl who hundreds had reported walking half-dressed and chilled along the turnpike. The girl who consistently disappeared as soon as a driver picked her up and tried to take her home. The witch who had been trying to find a way back into the world for decades.

  On a hunch, she took one hand off the knife. While she kept the blade trained on Emery to hold the woman at bay, with her other hand she grasped at the witch’s arm.

  Her fingers passed right through the woman’s skin. As she’d expected.

  “Your name is Katarina,” Jillie said.

  The girl looked up in surprise. And smiled. “Very good,” she said. “Have we met?”

  Jillie shook her head. “No,” she said. “But I’ve felt your energy in this cemetery for years. And I’ve stood at your grave.”

  Katie nodded. “I see,” she said. “Well, perhaps you can lie down in it. After tonight I won’t be needing it anymore. Mike?”

  The witch pointed at Jillie, and Mike began to walk forward with the knife in hand. Jillie did not understand exactly how Katie’s body in the coffin had been reborn, but she understood that this night was all about reuniting the spirit of the witch with this flesh. The incarnation had not happened yet. But it was about to. And she knew how to stop that from happening.

  Ghosts were fleeting, but flesh could be killed.

  Jillie turned her back to Emery and raised the knife. She didn’t know much, but she knew that whatever happened, she could not let the witch of a half century of legend return to the living. She brought the knife down.

  Emery dove forward at the same moment.

  Jillie’s blade bit into something soft before lodging with a wrenching finality in bone. Blood sprayed, drops raining warm against her face. And then her arm yanked to the side, as the knife and the flesh it skewered moved.

  The body she had stabbed was not the vacant vessel of the witch. The blade had stabbed deep into the chest of Emery. She had flung herself over Katie’s unraised body at the last second.

  The girl’s eyes bugged out as she gasped and coughed while still trying to shield Katie’s body from further attack.

  The sudden cold bite of metal in her back took Jillie by surprise. It stabbed down from beneath her shoulder and in seconds she felt her chest fill with fire.

  She cried out and struggled to turn as the man pulled a dripping knife out of her back. His face was twisted in anger and fear and horror and he screamed out a single word.

  “Stop!”

  Then he brought the blade down again. Jillie reached out with both hands, but the knife only sliced past them with an icy kiss that blossomed instantly into hideous fire. And then something hit her neck. Even as she felt her skin open, she heard the knife clatter to the floor and the man turned away to reach for Emery. He had abandoned his attack on her to lean over the coffin.

  “How bad is it?” he asked.

  “Bad enough,” the witch answered.

  Jillie felt the world ending. She opened her mouth to speak but only blood came out. Her legs suddenly gave out and she collapsed backward to slam her head on the floor.

  The last thing she saw was the witch’s ghost climbing into the coffin.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  “Hold her over my body,” Katie instructed. With one hand, the witch gently stroked Emery’s forehead as Mike cradled the dying girl’s upper body in his arms, supporting her spasming form a couple feet above the vessel below. The back of Emery’s thighs rested against the coffin.

  “You have always been mine,” Katie whispered, her lips just inches from Emery’s choking mouth. Blood oozed steadily from the place where the knife had been buried near Emery’s collarbone.

  “There are no words that I can say,” Katie said, bending low to kiss the girl’s crimson lips. Emery’s eyes stared wide and fearful, looking back and forth between Katie and Mike as the
end crept closer.

  “It’s been a long road to tonight and you always walked it bravely,” Katie said. “Go now into the night and finally be free. Free of earth. Free of me and my demands. I’ll always treasure you.”

  Tears streamed from the corners of Mike’s eyes as he held the body aloft. He let the blood drip across Katie’s body’s face and neck and chest. He painted the waiting flesh with Emery’s blood as Katie’s ghost looked on and said nothing.

  When Emery’s eyes glazed over and her lips stopped gasping, Mike lifted her body up and away from Katie’s flesh. He laid her down gently on the floor next to the coffin. Then he knelt next to her and with his finger, closed her vacant eyes.

  Katie stripped off her ephemeral clothes, letting each article drop to the floor. As they hit the earth, they disappeared. Figments of truth, no longer needed. When she stood completely nude, Katie pulled herself up and over the walls of the coffin. With a faint smile, she turned to sit on the coffin’s edge, and then laid her back down on the chest of the blood-smeared body within.

  “What should I do?” Mike asked. Katie didn’t respond. Instead, she closed her eyes and then seemed to…sink …into the flesh beneath her.

  For one strange second, there were two Katies visible. She looked like a double exposure, her two noses and chins at first an inch and then a centimeter apart.

  And then there was only one.

  A naked, bloody body that now displayed perfect butterfly lips.

  As Mike watched, the tip of a moist pink tongue slid through those lips and licked the blood away.

  Katie’s eyes opened.

  A smile crept across her lips and she turned her head to meet Mike’s eyes.

  “At last,” she whispered.

  She raised one arm and flexed her fingers above her face. Then she did the same with the other, her grin growing as she twisted her arms and fingers one by one. Then she put her arms back down and used them to push herself upright.

  “Take off the locket,” Katie said. Mike did, and set it into her outstretched hand. Katie dropped it into the coffin and then held that same hand out to Mike.