by Hixon, Wayne
He was a human just like they were and Autumn did not think humans were, by and large, evil. Not individually.
“Are these the people you live with?” Charlotte asked.
“Yes. They are.”
“Do you live in the Sad House? Have you been living in the Sad House?”
He paused for a moment, leading the way. “Yes,” he said finally. “I live in the Sad House.”
“I knew there was something strange about you. You’re one of them, aren’t you?”
Autumn still couldn’t believe any of this. It was like she was mixed up with all of the legends surrounding Lynchville and here was Charlotte speaking casually about it as though it was possible for all of this stuff to exist. But maybe the boy had previously challenged Charlotte’s realities in a way her own had never been tested. The most unreal thing she had ever seen was a man spontaneously combusting in Charlotte’s backyard, oh, about a half an hour ago.
“I’m afraid it’s not that black and white.”
“No?” Charlotte asked.
“No. No, it’s not. See, I only aspired to be one of them. Tonight is the night I become one of them. Fully. And you could become one too. With me.”
They stopped walking abruptly. The boy turned to Charlotte and held a hand up in front of her face. Moonlight glinted off the blood that wrapped around the fingers. Autumn wondered how he had cut it. She stood relatively close to them but had drawn back a little.
“Would you like that?” Zack asked.
Charlotte bent toward his hand, almost greedily, and began sucking at the blood.
Once again, Autumn broke through the spell. She couldn’t believe how she had just stood here and watched this. She couldn’t believe how she had let Charlotte get involved in all this. She ran up to Zack and tried to pull his arm away from Charlotte.
“Stop it!” she said, knowing how powerless that sounded.
She avoided looking at Zack as she tried to pry his arm from Charlotte.
“Get the fuck away from her!” she screamed.
Autumn looked at Charlotte, trying to find some reason inside of the other girl. Trying to trigger something that would make her pull away and put an end to this madness.
But she couldn’t see anything. Charlotte was already lost to Zack. Her eyes looked glazed as she continued to suckle at Zack’s hand.
“It needs sacrifices,” Zack whispered to Charlotte. “It needs people to feed its flames.”
It didn’t take Autumn long to figure out what they meant. She let go of Zack’s arm, resigning them both to whatever sick fantasy it was they wanted to play. She tried to dart off but Charlotte’s arm was out, clutching her, raking her nails down her arm and laying the skin open.
“Oh God no!” she cried. “Charlotte, this is Autumn! This is your best fucking friend!”
But the two of them overpowered Autumn, driving her down to the ground before lifting her up, each of them grabbing a different arm.
“The Sad House waits,” Zack said.
“Show me,” Charlotte said. “Please... show me.”
Autumn wanted to tighten her muscles and allow herself to go no farther. But she couldn’t. She felt like she had no control over her body whatsoever.
She felt betrayed.
Betrayed and doomed. How could Charlotte turn on her so quickly? Then she told herself it wasn’t entirely Charlotte’s decision. She remembered how she had felt, if only for a second, upon looking into Zack’s eyes and couldn’t exactly fault Charlotte for doing the things she was doing. After all, she had done much more with this boy than simply look into his eyes.
She couldn’t even manage a scream. She kept her head down as the two others led her along, her feet dragging the ground.
“I don’t even know if the Sad House will be there anymore,” Zack said.
“Why?” Charlotte asked.
“Because when I left it was burning to the ground.”
“Why?”
“Enemies,” Zack said matter-of-factly.
Autumn wondered how much farther she was going to be dragged. She wondered what fate would hold for her when they finally reached the house. She couldn’t think of anything positive that could come of this. She had fallen into one of the horror stories she was so fond of only, in this one, there wasn’t a definite ending. She didn’t know how long it was going to go on. She didn’t know which characters would be alive at the end of the book.
Then they stopped. She raised her head.
They were on a wooded hillside, overlooking a small hollow. At the bottom of the valley lay a vast pile of smoking rubble. Part of her wanted to cheer. This was Zack’s house and someone had burned it down. It made her feel like she had someone on her side.
“It’s gone,” Zack said sorrowfully.
“What do we do now?” Charlotte asked.
“I don’t know.”
Autumn continued to look at the rubble and then she saw something she knew she didn’t really want to see.
The house came back.
It was odd, unlike anything she had ever seen and she would have found it wonderfully magic if it were any other house. It simply built itself up, as though carving itself out of the night air. It thickened and grew more substantial. It didn’t take long and Autumn wondered if she was dreaming all of this. She had had a fucked up nightmare last night. Was it possible she had gone home after the Wake Up Screaming and fallen asleep on her bed with all of those thoughts of Charlotte and the Devils still fresh in her brain?
As much as she wanted to believe that, she knew all of this was really happening right there in front of her and by the time she could process that thought, the house had come back.
“It calls to us,” Zack said. “We have to go in now.”
They continued to drag Autumn. She finally found the strength to fight back and, since it came so suddenly, it caught them off guard. Their holds loosened and Autumn turned immediately back toward the woods and ran as hard as she could. But Charlotte was behind her. Autumn heard her harsh breath rasp against the air and the other girl launched herself toward Autumn, dragging her down.
“Please, Charlotte,” she tried again. “I’m your friend. You can’t let him hurt me.”
“Oh, nobody’s going to hurt you,” Charlotte whispered into her ear. “I’ve heard what Zack has said. I’ve heard what he has been told. Death is not painful at all. Death is the most beautiful thing you can ever experience and you will be able to roam this earth as a completely different person. One without laws or rules.”
“It’s all a lie,” Autumn said out of self-preservation.
Charlotte pulled her hair back, lifting her head off the ground, before slamming it back down.
“Zack does not lie. They do not lie.”
“You’ll see,” Autumn spat out through her bloody mouth.
And then Zack and Charlotte had hold of each of her arms again and they dragged her down to the Sad House.
Thirty-eight
Being shoved through the door was like being shoved into an atrocity. The room on the other side of the door looked kind of like a church but it was a church bent on destruction and carnage. The pews were from some kind of stone that seemed to rise from the very earth itself. There was a raised stage area but instead of a pulpit there was a large stone slab that looked like a sarcophagus. Lining the walls were the corpses of some of the Devils’ victims. They hung like lanterns or lamps on the wall, their bodies in various states of decay, twisted, black mouths opened, radiating a death stink.
Jacob recognized a couple of the faces. They were people from town. They were his neighbors. They were the normal people he had always wanted to be.
“Do you like the artwork?” Ernst asked him.
“Fuck you,” Jacob said.
“So unimaginative,” Ernst mocked.
“You know you’re not going to get away with this, don’t you?”
“Stop threatening me. You have nothing. There is not any way we cannot get a
way with this. This is what we have lived our lives after death for. Who do you think is going to stop us, really? Your girlyfriend? Well, let me give you an update as to her condition. As of this moment she has just drifted off in the car and, soon, she is going to receive a visit from a very charming young man.”
“Bones,” Jacob hissed.
“Whoever,” Ernst said. “He’s on quite a rampage. He’s already put away the other girl you came with. He’s coming in a lot handier than I thought he would. For a halfwit.”
“You’re lying.”
“You know I’m not.”
And, the worst part was that Jacob knew this man was right. He had no reason to lie.
“So there is no one who can help you. There is no one who is going to stop Ilya and I from tasting the Dark Fire. You’ve heard that name, haven’t you?”
“No. Guess you guys aren’t as popular as you thought.”
“Beyond the Dark Fire is like Heaven and God all in one. It appears as fire but a whole world burns within it.”
Jacob guffawed. He couldn’t help it. At that moment, Ernst reminded him of a Baptist minister.
“Very well. Let me tell you what it is we intend to do. I want to make sure you are not going to run away first.”
The couple led him up to the stone slab. The man pushed Jacob down on it but Jacob wouldn’t simply lie down. He waited for the man to loosen his grip and then he was back on his feet, taking a wild swing at him. His fist glanced off Ernst’s cheek, leaving absolutely no damage whatsoever.
Jacob dashed for the door.
With his hand on the cool handle, he felt a shimmer of excitement run through his body but, no matter how hard he pulled, the door would not open and his excitement completely dissipated.
Ernst laughed from the other side of the church, walking slowly toward Jacob.
Jacob knew he was going to have to stand and fight. He had no choice. But he didn’t know what he was supposed to fight with. The tire iron was long gone.
He charged at Ernst. Ernst stepped out of the way, grabbed Jacob’s arm, and threw him into one of the stone pews. Jacob hit the pew with his shoulder and heard a sickening pop.
“Fuck!” he screamed in pain.
Jacob scrabbled to his feet, convinced he was going to go after the woman, thinking this might be the man’s weak spot. He charged at her and launched himself, wanting to take her down completely, but Ernst was there, snatching him from the air as though he weighed absolutely nothing.
This time, Ernst wasted no time in placing him on the slab, holding him down by pressing a huge hand on his chest.
From beneath his back, Jacob could feel the stone quivering. It felt alive, malleable. Sections of the stone snaked up from either side of his waist until they met in the middle of his stomach. There they fused together.
“There,” Ernst said. “That should keep you from moving around a whole lot.”
“Tell me why you’re doing this,” Jacob said. He realized he was practically begging. If he was going to die, he didn’t want to die without knowing the answer to the mystery. He didn’t want to die thinking people like the Devils existed solely to destroy the human race like reckless gods playing a game.
“I deserve that much,” Jacob said.
“Well,” he began. “If you’re referring to your present situation, that would be because Mr. Latch seems to have disposed of himself and we need someone to fill in in that capacity. Are you aware of what happened to Mr. Latch?”
Jacob thought about what he saw in the deformed man’s eyes. The horrors he saw there, more extreme than anything he could imagine.
“That’s not what I’m talking about. You know that.”
“I see. You’re talking about a more all-encompassing kind of thing. Well, I guess if you think we owe that to you, then we are somewhat obliged to answer. After all, this is an evening of conclusions. I don’t see why the end to your sanity is any less conclusive than the end Ilya and I have planned for ourselves.
“But I think we need to get to work as time is running a little bit thin so I guess we will just have to converse as we go along. Try not to scream too loud. You’ll disrupt my thought processes.”
Jacob looked at Ilya, who seemed to be reaching under the stone altar. She came up holding a large horseshoe-shaped metal device. It reminded Jacob of a pair of bent scissors, the tips flattened down.
“It’s really pretty simple,” Ernst said. He held Jacob’s left arm down. Jacob struggled to move it but the man’s strength was just too great. Ilya placed the tip of the scissor-things on his elbow and began depressing them. Jacob drew in a wince with the first sign of pain.
“There are all kinds of what you would call Devils. Some of them have been around far longer than others. The oldest of those are no longer human. They are more like pure energy.”
The scissor-things tightened on his elbow. Jacob heard a pop and then a crunch. He cried out at the pain, shooting all through his arm. Ernst held his forearm and twisted it in a clockwise fashion, the shattered bones grating together as he did this. Sweat drenched Jacob’s head, the pain only increasing.
“These old ones are kind of like our gods, here to usher us through the Dark Fire. But they need human forms to hide within. More than that, they need souls to hide within so that, wherever there is a god, there is a body of flesh with two souls in it.”
Methodically, Ernst popped each of Jacob’s fingers in that hand, breaking them at the middle knuckle. That pain was nothing compared to his arm, it felt lost in the throbbing redness.
“The gods are very careful about who they choose to hide themselves in. Many many years ago, they came to Ilya and I. It was more than two-hundred years ago, in fact, and it happened right here in Lynchville.”
Together, Ilya and Ernst crossed over to his other arm.
“Please stop this. Don’t turn me into that. I don’t know what you want. I don’t know what I can give you but please don’t turn me into that man upstairs.”
“I think we should remove his tongue,” Ernst said. “That way he can listen to our story, because it has to be told, and he won’t be able to tell it to anyone. Oh, sure, he could try and write it down but I don’t know what good his fingers will be.” Ernst chuckled.
“Jesus, stop this. Just let me go and I’ll do whatever it is to stay away from you.”
“Aww, where’s the brave Jacob we used to know? You came here to stop us and now the only thing you want to do is to escape without hideous deformity.”
He grabbed Jacob’s jaw with his huge, strong hand, prying the teeth apart. Ilya inserted the device into his mouth, clamping it around his tongue. Jacob tried to scream a few things but the pathetic sound of his trapped voice made him too sad to continue. She pulled the tongue out, touching it to his chin.
Ernst held a hand before him, his fingernails long and razor sharp. He drew the nail over the back of Jacob’s tongue. Jacob tasted blood, felt it fill his throat. He wanted to spit it out but could not. At least it hurt less than his arm.
Jacob didn’t know how long the torture continued. It was spliced with Ernst’s tale from the past. Jacob was not blessed with unconsciousness, was not allowed to feel its painless black depths, so he listened to Ernst murmur on.
It happened one summer when they were fifteen. Ernst was the son of the only Lynchville minister, also the founder of the town, Sparrow Lynch. He didn’t name a specific religion he was minister of. Ilya was the daughter of the church’s treasurer. That was how they met each other. Of course, given the miniscule size of Lynchville, they were bound to meet each other eventually. But, upon meeting, they fell instantly in love. Consequently, falling in love with each other, they had somehow fallen out of love with the church. Ernst had always had his doubts about the powers of the church but he thought this might have stemmed from his hatred of his father more than anything. And Ilya, Ilya would follow Ernst wherever he went.
That was when they found this house. And the man who lived in
the house, before it was abandoned. Ernst did not give the name of this man. Ernst described some of the things the man was able to do. Predict deaths in the town. Summon fire from the sky. Disappear. Change his shape. Speak inside of the mind without moving his lips. See one’s past, see one’s future. Ilya and Ernst were enchanted.
The main reason they continued to go to this house, however, was because the man was often away, and he didn’t care how they used it. So Ilya and Ernst copulated constantly. That was what teenagers did, especially when there wasn’t anything else to do.
Ilya ended up pregnant and that was when Ernst first became aware that people in the town were talking. They knew about the man in the abandoned house. General consensus believed he was the Devil, a tortured soul who was hellbent on torturing everyone else’s soul. But the talk grew stranger than that. Ilya had kept her pregnancy a secret until she began to show. The rumors said the baby was most likely the Devil’s. They were too naive to believe Ilya and Ernst, two children of upstanding church leaders, were capable of performing these ungodly acts.
The man in the house sensed Ilya and Ernst’s unease. He began to regale them with legends of a place beyond the Dark Fire. Then one day, he offered to show it to them, if only for a second. He told them it was beneath this very house. They followed him down there, figuring it couldn’t do any harm. From the way the Devil talked about it, they were not sure if this world beyond the Dark Fire was a place or a person or both. He showed it to them. It was only a few seconds they stared into the roaring flame, but they saw enough to last them several lifetimes. They saw enough to devote those lifetimes to gaining admittance to the Dark Fire’s paradise.
On the surface, things were getting worse. The townsfolk had banded together. Headed by a Dr. Millicent, they were determined to end Ilya’s pregnancy. Although they did manage to forcibly remove the fetus, it did not end there. Ilya and Ernst were not prepared to let it end there. They fought back with extreme ferocity, having had their unborn child pried away from them and murdered before their very eyes. Now they were intent on doing some murdering of their own.