He rolled over, away from his wife in hopes that his cries of sickness would not wake her. He couldn’t bear the idea of waking her, leaving them both awake and struggling. Small bits of light poured in through the window, giving the bedroom a dim glow. He couldn’t see beyond the window, his vision blurring from the sickness at such a distance. Sometimes he couldn’t even see what was right in front of him, the roof a blur when he laid on his back, his wife’s outline only an obscure shape even from barely a foot away.
The light coming in through the glass reminded him for a fleeting moment of the blinding light that came down from the alien spaceships in all those old B-movies until it faded away and the bedroom came into focus for a minute. He could see the outline of the window and furniture throughout the still mostly empty space that was their bedroom. Even now, they still hadn’t replaced most of the furniture they had left behind, leaving a majority of the house feeling like a bare skeleton, the heart, his family, there but lacking the flesh that made a house a home.
A jolt came. He crunched together, retracting into a fetal position. He clenched his belly as if he were going to tear it out himself, anything to rid him of the pain. But that would solve nothing because the pain had long spread to every corner of his body and he could not tear apart everything, not without dying halfway there.
When the pain finally receded, the room returned to the blurry state from before. He wanted to be held, not by his wife, but by his mother, or even his father who he had never been very close to. But both were long dead, having passed when he was a teenager. He remembered his mother holding him this one time in particular after a baseball had hit him in an unlikely line-drive directly at his leg. It wasn’t broken, but you couldn’t have convinced the eleven-year-old Richard of that no matter how hard you tried. But his mother held him, rubbing his back even though it was his leg that hurt, until the pain faded like most of his childhood memories had.
The bed shuffled behind him, Lisa rolling over or shifting in some way. He waited a minute, wondering if she would wake up. She didn’t. Silence ensued. He laid there for what seemed like hours, the pain coming only in moderate waves rather than unbearable surges, which he was immensely grateful for. All he had to do was make it until the morning. That was when they were making a trip to the doctor, all of them, his entire sick family.
He wondered then how Toby and Paisley were doing. They had come in earlier, but he hadn’t seen them since. He had felt guilty almost immediately at how they treated the two of them and their irrational story. But they were only kids. It was probably only natural that they try to come up with an explanation as to why their parents, sibling, and uncle were all sick. And the fact that they were in a new house, in a new town, only made the unlikely situation seem even stranger and insane theories feel even more likely.
Even he thought the whole situation was rather weird. Richard tried to remember if it were tomorrow, or, rather, today, if it were already past midnight at that point, that the locksmith was supposed to arrive. He was certain that whatever was beyond that door in the basement was somehow responsible for everything that was happening. But would a dead animal really cause all this? There had to be more, maybe black mold. He knew that stuff could get nasty. Perhaps it was a mold infestation in there, covering the room from the floor to the ceiling. If he could find the cause and get rid of it, maybe they wouldn’t have to move after all. But if he couldn’t, well, then they would be forced to. He wasn’t sure how they would manage it, but this house wasn’t worth the health of his family.
Richard’s eyes opened. What he had been thinking about, he could no longer remember. He had fallen asleep, or lost consciousness, he wasn’t sure, but it didn’t really matter because it was still dark outside. Still night. He tried to recall his thoughts but fell asleep again, this time for what felt like longer. Despite how it felt, it was still dark when he woke again.
“Acute” was the word floating around in his head as he rolled over to get closer to Lisa. The way the sickness had come on, the way it had wrapped its painful tendrils around him and Lisa. The only word he could think of to describe it was “‘acute.” It was the word they used for medical conditions when they came on suddenly, and with severe affect. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Acute myeloid leukemia. Acute pancreatitis. All terms that came to him acutely, just then, memories, he assumed, from his brief stint in nursing school shortly after graduating high school. He had told himself that nursing just wasn’t for him, that he didn’t like being around people nearly enough to take on such a career, but the truth was, he just couldn’t hack it. That realization, too, had come on acutely.
There was a sound. It shook him from his thoughts, his memories, maybe even sleep if that was what was happening. He wanted to sit up and see what had caused the noise, but as soon as he attempted it, pain let loose, and he quickly laid back down, afraid he would cry out and wake Lisa if he didn’t. The floorboards groaned, a light squeak filling the room’s emptiness.
There was somebody there, that he was sure of. But how? He didn’t hear the door open. Was he really that out of it?
Silence.
He drifted, the very weight of his being awake leaving his eyes feeling like his lids were made of lead.
The squeak came again.
He arched his neck, trying to see over the mound of blankets that covered his bed. The sound had come from near the bedroom door. Now he remembered the last sound like a memory lost in a dense fog.
There was a figure there, tall and firm. By how it stood, he somehow knew it was a male. It was Robbie. But he was facing the other direction. His brother had been sick last he knew. Apparently not anymore if he was able to sneak into Richard’s bedroom.
“Robbie,” he whispered.
Richard found himself a little annoyed at his brother’s shenanigans. It was the middle of the night. Just because he had begun to feel better didn’t mean the rest of them had. He’d had his time to rest and now it was his turn, and Lisa’s. Not to mention it was a little creepy, him standing there like some weirdo.
“Robbie!” he said louder. “What the hell are you doing?’”
There was no response, and holding his head up to look at him was quickly exhausting his neck. He caved, letting his head drop back to the pillow. His body was giving in to prolonged, overwhelming exhaustion. He quickly stopped caring about his brother standing by the door and then forgot about it all together as he drifted off to much-needed sleep.
But it wasn’t Robbie standing there by the door, in the darkness, holding onto the handle like it would flee otherwise, because Robbie was in his own bedroom, lying in bed, not quite asleep but not quite awake either, stuck somewhere in between where nothing seemed real but instead like a living dream. He was staring at the people in the darkness wondering distantly why they were staying in the dark, as if they were hiding or afraid to be seen, only peeking out at him long enough for him to catch a quick glance before drifting back into the darkness. There were so many of them, young and old alike, some sad looking, others happy, while some looked like nothing at all, as if the ability to even feel had been stolen from them.
Robbie was feeling different, like he had been in pain for so long, so intensely, that his body no longer held on to the ability to comprehend the sensation any longer. Instead, he just felt empty, eroded by the sickness. Some of the faces, some of the mouths, seemed to be moving, like they were trying to speak to him. But the lips were moving too quickly, and no sound was coming out.
He felt a sudden throb of aggravation from his lower abdomen. But it wasn’t pain. It was…pee. He had to pee. This sudden urge brought him to the surface, reminding him that he was awake and he was alive. As he pushed himself to a sitting position, all the faces vanished as if they really were all just a dream. Now his bedroom was nothing but darkness, disturbed only by a bit of light entering in through the window.
The throb came again, a pulse of sensation. His mind was like a fish trying to tread further out
to sea, and the throb—the reel, pulling him back in. He swung his legs around, off the edge of the bed, staring now, straight into the darkness. It seemed like a physical mass, there at the edge of the room, the light from outside somehow unable to penetrate its fog.
His heart beat along with the pulsing urge. He climbed to his feet, using the bed to prop himself up. Turning away from the darkness, he made for the bedroom door. His knees went weak, caving beneath him. He fell to the floor, reaching and grabbing the handle as he went down. It was his dream, he knew then, the state his mind he had been in before the need to pee arose, that shielded him from the pain that never really went away. But now it was back and in full force, like it knew he had been hiding from it, tucked away in his own mind, and it wanted to make up for all the lost time.
“Uuaaahhhhh!” he cried out. “Leave me alone. Please, just leave me alone!”
He clenched the handle with both hands, the blood fleeing, leaving his skin white and pale as he tried to pull himself up. His biceps flexed with all their might, but he still rose slowly. He wondered desperately when he had become so weak, staring at his withered arms as he struggled. He looked starved; his entire body, as he realized now, had diminished extremely compared to how he knew for certain it had looked not even a week earlier.
How long had he been in that bed? One month? Two? He could swear it hadn’t even been a week. He pushed back tears as he reached his feet, using the door handle as a crutch. Both hands still on the handle, he twisted it open.
With every step, he nearly lost his footing, his body struggling beneath him. He lunged out into the hall, crashing into the hallway wall harder than he would have liked. But he was still standing and only feet from the bathroom. He pulled in heavy breaths, demanding more of himself, demanding he make it to the bathroom, and that he not cry, even though the pain was surging tears toward the surface.
Then he heard crying, but not his own. It was coming from up the hall, in the direction beyond the bathroom, toward the attic. He turned, letting himself lean on the wall, and looked, seeing what his eyes couldn’t be seeing, what his mind didn’t believe to be real. There was a woman there. She was screaming so loudly, her face filled with nothing but utter horror as she looked Robbie’s way. But nobody was rushing from their bedrooms to see what the commotion was because what he was seeing couldn’t have been real.
She took a labored step toward him, like her body weighed a million pounds and gravity wanted to crush her beneath its strength. She was reaching, like her savior was just beyond her grasp. But he knew somehow that it was not him, that he was not who she was reaching toward. He wasn’t even there, not to her, just as she wasn’t really there for him. Her eyes pleaded, but with her next step, she would come to an end.
A darkness arose from the nothingness encircling her, wrapping its tentacles around her. Everything he had seen in her eyes faded instantly. Her skin went pale. Whatever she was running toward, it was too late. She didn’t make it. Black lines sprung up all across her skin, under her skin, squirming and spreading like veins pumping the darkness that was outside her body, inside, throughout her entire body.
Then he watched the unimaginable. The darkness spread away from the veins, taking hold of everything. And, as her body began to crumble before his eyes, the dark shadow that had grasped her pulled her down, directly into the floor, where they vanished.
34
From somewhere, there was a loud, annoying ring. Toby’s eyes wiggled under their lids, still reacting to the dream he was having. In it, he had followed Addy back into the woods, to where they had made love. She was so far ahead of him the whole time, but she knew he was behind her and he somehow knew that she wasn’t going to wait up. When she disappeared into the woods, he hesitated, remembering the darkness that waited, locked beneath the canopy of trees.
He pushed ahead anyway, knowing that he couldn’t lose track of her, that he needed to keep up with her or something bad would happen. So into the dark he went, his memory of his last visit guiding him through the trees where his eyes could hardly see.
When he came out at the water, the area was empty. Not even the creeks churning could be heard, or the patter of the animals that should have been roaming the brush, or the insects infesting the air. It was as if he had just walked into a silent film starring himself and literally nothing else.
He looked around, his eyes snapping from side to side. If nobody was there, then why did he have this overwhelming feeling of being watched, as if he were on stage performing in front of an audience of starving wolves?
There was a ringing. It was loud, and repetitive, and annoying. Like an alarm clock. He looked all over, trying to trace the sound to its origins, or at least close enough to give him somewhere to start. But it was as if the ringing was coming from everything. The trees. The grass. The creek didn’t make the rustling sound of water bouncing off rocks but instead a mind-numbing ring that only grew louder and louder and louder.
He sat up with a jolt. Everything was spinning at first but quickly slowed to a standstill. He was awake, looking at Paisley, who was asleep on the couch. He remembered now that they had opted to sleep in the living room, both afraid to go anywhere else in the house, alone, after learning what they had about the house. But the ringing was still going, continuing even outside his dream, loud, and terribly annoying.
His cell phone was on the table, the screen lit and flashing. It was a call coming in. The ringing was his cell phone. He got up, but before he could reach the phone, the incoming call ended.
Missed call from: Eli read across the screen. Paisley woke, rolling over to see him standing over the table. She looked confused for a moment but regained her sense.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Eli called.”
She sat up and snatched her phone from the table where it had been sitting a foot or so away from Toby’s. Twelve missed calls from Eli. She hit the callback button but hung up when she noticed Toby with his own phone already up to his ear.
“Toby!” Eli said, answering the phone.
“What’s up?”
“I called this university that’s not that far away, a few cities over, and there was a professor of Latin Studies there!”
“Holy shit!” Toby nearly jumped out of his skin. “What did you say? What did he say?”
“Well,” Eli said, “I didn’t give him much context. I told him it was for a sort of game. But I spelled out the text on the basement door.”
“And?” Toby said. Paisley was staring at him, eager to know what Eli was saying, so he put the phone on speaker.
“Well, we had it wrong. Apparently, internet translators are ‘hogwash,’ as the professor said. According to him, ‘ULTRA HAEC QUAEDAM TENEBRAE MANENT—IPSAS UT LIBERES—VERBA CLAVE CANTA’ translates to…” Eli paused. Toby could hear Eli’s shallow, hurried breathing, as if he had just sprinted into his house and dialed Toby’s number without remembering to take a breath. “It translates to, ‘Beyond this, a darkness awaits. In order for you to free it. Recite these words with the key.”
There was a pause. Toby and Paisley looked into each other’s eyes. The words repeated in his head. Beyond this, a darkness awaits. In order for you to free it. Recite these words with the key.
“Reciting the words isn’t the key,” Eli said. “Not the only key at least. There’s a real key, too. An actual, physical key. You need the key and the words.”
“But we don’t have the key,” Toby said, his words strung with foreboding. “The real estate guy said he couldn’t find it, either. We’ve been trying to locate it since we got here.”
Eli took in a deep breath, staring out his bedroom window. The last time he did so little as look into the town’s past, people literally showed up at his door for him. He remembered the fear in his mother’s voice as she demanded that he leave it alone, a fear he shared. If he did what he was about to do, his life would be in danger, and so would his mom’s. But the alternative was just as horribl
e, if not worse. If he stood by and did nothing, Paisley’s entire family would die just like so many before them. And he couldn’t live with that.
“I think I might know where it is,” he said, his hand shaking and sweaty.
Eli slid on his shoes, trying to maintain what little composure he had left. Then he slid his pocketknife into his pocket, the only weapon he had. The truth was he could feel the fear straight down to his marrow. Everything he had told Toby replayed through his mind. There was a church near the center of town. He knew very little about it other than it was practically ancient, perhaps the oldest building in the entire city, the oldest still standing at least. He had only been there once or twice, back when he was new to town. There was some sort of ceremony they attended at the church. A lot of strange characters showed up, religious folk and the like. Looking back, he wasn’t really sure what they were even doing there in the first place given that neither he nor his mother were particularly religious. All he knew was some lady invited his mom and, as sad as it sounded, his mom was desperate to make friends, so they went.
It didn’t matter then, back when they visited the church, but something about it came rushing back this morning as he pondered their situation. In most ways, that church was exactly the same as any other. But there was one strange thing that occurred while he was there. As he wandered around the grounds, exploring the outside, taking in the statues and graveyard, he had gone mostly unnoticed. The church grounds, from what little people told him while he observed, used to be the center of town. Old, faded graves circled the back and side of the antique structure. These had once been the primary burying grounds until the city expanded and they had to begin another cemetery elsewhere, on the outskirts.
A Place So Wicked Page 21