Ghostland

by Duncan Ralston

  She only knew the hideous, inhuman giant stood between them and escape. And with the headless Hedgewood on their heels, Garrote awaiting them in the library and all the doors and windows barred, they had finally reached the end.

  There was nowhere left to run.

  THE BEHEMOTH

  BEN COULDN'T MOVE, staring at the monstrous Final Boss creature that had lumbered into the foyer. He'd heard rumors about this ghost from the few survivors who'd dared break into Garrote House at night after the writer's death. Chat groups on ghost hunting and the paranormal called him the Sculptor, the Behemoth or—less frequently—Picasso's Monster. It was said to be an amalgam of body parts from the Odell family, torn apart and fused together. Looking at the thing towering over them Ben could see this rumor was true.

  From the shoulders down, the Behemoth appeared to be a normal man: the famous sculptor, Clayton Odell, whose body of work had been compared to H.R. Giger's biomechanical paintings. His dark skin and muscular legs were partly hidden beneath a long, stained leather apron speckled with solder burns. In one hand he held a welding torch with a sharp blue flame. In the other, his thick, gloved fingers gripped a heavy scrap of burnished metal that looked like it might have belonged to one of his macabre sculptures displayed on either side of the fireplace. Like the torch, it could easily be used as a weapon.

  And just like chat group gossip had stated, Clayton had no visible head of his own. Instead, the head and torso of his pale, freckled wife Laura was perched on his shoulders, severed at the waist and fastened to the sculptor's shoulders by metal straps. Blood from her wounds had oozed down the man's shoulders and spattered his apron. Her long, sleek black hair hung over her face, her head lolling lifelessly, adorned with a mask made of welded brass with a cone jutting outward like a megaphone that held her jaws impossibly wide. It reminded Ben of the medieval torture device called the "scold's bridle," or "witch's bridle," although this seemed meant to amplify the woman's voice rather than throttle it. Where her breasts should be, twin toddlers had been crudely sewn to her chest from their bellies up. The gray-skinned babies drooled, their eyes sewn shut, their chubby fingers grabbing mindlessly in front of them. Reaching for what, Ben had no idea.

  The dead woman's head cocked at an angle, and her green-eyed gaze fell upon Ben and Lilian. A hand rose zombie-like to point at them, and she screeched into the horn. Her cry caused the bone-chilling bleat they'd heard earlier to echo coldly throughout the empty house.

  Clayton's bare feet shuffled at the sound, turning his wife and children toward them. The Behemoth, Picasso's Monster, raised the welding torch in its gloved hand and began lurching forward, shaking the floorboards and rattling the lamps on the bannister. As if it were solid. As if it were real.

  Ben stood there, still unable to move, as fascinated as he was frightened. The floors must have been rigged to tremble with its footsteps, like the seats in a 4D ride, to make the monster's presence even more menacing. It worked. He was so frightened he had to force himself to take a cautious step toward the stairs.

  The floorboard creaked under his foot. Again, he froze. The Behemoth's head snapped toward him. Its muscular left arm swung out with the giant scrap of metal. Its sharp edge missed him by several feet. But if they didn't get out of here quickly, it would cut them to shreds.

  A gurgling groan arose from the dining hall. Ben turned to see Hedgewood's headless corpse shamble out into the foyer with the knife. His lower jaw had come unhinged and flopped wetly against the once-white shirt and black tie.

  There was no way out. The stun gun seemed useless, a toy, like going up against a gun holding a sharpened stick.

  Lilian shouted, "Now would be a really good time to show up, Harrison!"

  The programmer didn't respond and the Behemoth plodded forward, reacting to her voice. The headless corpse stabbed the air with the knife, his fat tongue flapping in the blood pooled in the basin of his shattered skull, like a dog's lapping in its water dish.

  The ghosts were closing in on them. One or both would reach them soon.

  Lilian grabbed Ben's hand and pulled him away. The Behemoth's reach with its jagged blade could easily cut off their heads if they attempted to run for the basement door. She led them to the stairs. Ben shook from his stupor as he ran, and bounded up by her side.

  They hit the second-floor landing at full stride. Ben dashed through the first doorway he saw, stopping only when he reached a long, dim corridor. Paintings with display lamps above them lined the walls, hung between doors to their left and on either side of the balcony overlooking the foyer to their right. A pastoral setting, a gothic castle at night, a stiff Victorian portrait of the Hedgewood family. Ben thought he saw movement in the portrait from the corner of his eye but when he turned to look the subjects of the painting remained still.

  He peered out through the balcony door. The ghosts hadn't followed them. Hedgewood and the Behemoth appeared to be in the midst of a blindfolded knife fight.

  They were safe for the moment. Which was fortunate. Lilian was starting to look tired. Like him, she'd been pushed beyond exhaustion. And now they'd gone out of their way again, making their destination even further away. He thought about how far they'd come to get here, how many friends they had lost along the way, and the thought gave him a desperate sinking feeling in his stomach.

  He had to tell her, before it was too late.

  "Do you have any idea which way to go?" he asked instead, and cursed himself silently for losing his nerve.

  "I don't know," she said. "We can't go back down there, that's all I know."

  "No," he agreed. "I was thinking… a place this big might have a second stairwell. A lot of these old houses had stairs from the servants' quarters to the kitchen."

  "Makes sense. But where?"

  "I dunno. But I figure if we put our heads together, we're sure to find it."

  "Let's hope so," Lilian said, without much optimism in her voice.

  Ben smiled wanly as she started ahead. He watched her walk three swift paces before he finally managed to call her name, all but choking it out.

  She turned back, cocking her head quizzically. "What?"

  His tongue held back the words, refusing to let them go.

  Tell her, dammit!

  She wouldn't like what he had to say. He knew that. She would argue. After all they'd been through today, she might even cry. But it needed to be said. He took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and spoke. "I just wanted to say, if anything happens to me—"

  "Nothing's going to happen to you."

  "But if it does," he said, resisting the urge to backtrack, to let her convince him he was wrong to even suggest it. "You have to keep moving, Lilian. Don't stop, not even for a second. Just leave me behind."

  She gave him a look of uncertainty, bordering on anger. "I'm not going to leave you, Ben."

  "I want you to. Please. If… if he gets into me, if I start acting strange—"

  "How would he get into you, Ben? What do you even mean?"

  "Just listen to me for a second, goddammit! Jesus!"

  She huffed, her shoulders sagging in the baggy silver fabric. "Okay…"

  "You were always the best of us," he said. "That's why you need to live through this, Lilian. I won't have the same opportunities you will. You're smarter, you're personable. Do you remember that Halloween—must've been sixth grade—when we fought off all those big kids who were egging the first graders?"

  She nodded, evidently curious where he was going with this.

  "You stood right up to them. You were afraid, I could see it in your face—heck, you were shaking so bad it looked like you just climbed out of the water down at the Hole—but you didn't back down until you convinced them they were wrong and they all went home with guilty looks."

  "Yeah," she said, smiling slightly at the memory.

  "That's when I knew you were bigger than this place," he said. "I knew you'd go on to do big things. Great things. You could be anything you want to be. I
wish I had that."

  "You're smart," she said.

  He smiled patiently. "I know. But I know my limitations. I could never go very far. There's always a chance I could die tomorrow—"

  "Either of us could die tomorrow."

  "Lilian," he said patiently, approaching her. "Be serious, okay? I should be dead already. That day, when this… when this fucking house came through town, Garrote got to me. He did something to me, got inside my head—something. I don't know what, but I had to come here today. I knew I had to stop him. And I dragged you here—"

  "You didn't—"

  "I did, Lilian. You wouldn't be here if not for me. And if you hadn't, there's no way I would have survived this long. I would've been dead by lunchtime. You've carried me this far—"

  "We carried each other!"

  "Look, we can keep arguing about this until Garrote shows up to kill us both or you can just promise me right now that you'll keep moving—"

  Lilian stepped up to him and brought a hand to his face. For a moment he thought she might slap him. Instead she grabbed the back of his head and pulled him to her, surprising the hell out of him when she pressed her lips to his. He kept his eyes open in disbelief. Lilian had closed hers. It was his first for-real kiss, and her lips were warm and moist with life, unlike the cold, dead lips of the nun—

  Don't think about her, dammit! You've thought about this for years and now you're wasting it thinking about that—

  —and then it was over. She stepped back and looked down slightly into his eyes, a thin rope of saliva still linking their lips. It broke apart and she cocked her head again, studying his face.

  "I shouldn't have done that," she said suddenly. "I don't know what I was thinking."

  "No," he said. "It was—it was good."

  "You're not just saying that? I mean, it was weird though, right?"

  "Yeah, of course. I mean no. It was—I liked it very much," he said, feeling the heat of embarrassment rise in his cheeks again. He didn't know what to say that wouldn't sound stupid or accidentally hurtful. It was good and weird and crazy and all of those things. It was everything he'd thought it would be and more. If he could only form the words to express how much it had meant to him. But the skill was beyond him. He looked down at his shoes.

  "I liked it too," she said. She touched his face, making him look up at her. "You're not going to die on me. Okay? We're gonna make it through this. Both of us."

  She held his gaze until he agreed. It didn't feel like a lie or a compromise. Never in his life had he wanted to live as badly as he did now. Because Lilian had liked it too.

  "Now come on," she said, taking his hand. "Let's go check out some ghosts one last time."

  Ben followed down the hall alongside her, his heart full and brimming with confidence for the first time since it stopped beating four years earlier.

  OLD BONES

  LILIAN HAD SEEN the look of hopelessness in Ben's eyes. That lost spark. She'd only wanted to give him something to live for, something to keep fighting for. But now the kiss was between them and she couldn't take it back. She wasn't even sure she wanted to. There had never been anything physical between them. When they were young, they'd been more like a brother and sister to each other than friends, and she would have laughed at the idea of them ever being boyfriend and girlfriend. He was nothing like the boys she was normally attracted to… and yet, despite the sharp smell of his fear sweat in her nostrils and the fumbling quality of the kiss itself, she couldn't deny the intense rush of feelings she'd felt, almost as if—

  "Where should we start?" came a man's disembodied voice, startling her from her thoughts.

  "In the master bedroom," a woman replied. Her voice sounded familiar. "Where he started."

  "What now?" Ben groaned.

  Lilian shook her head, looking around warily. She couldn't deny not feeling at least a little grateful for the interruption. High heels clacked down the hardwood floors, moving away from them. The sound stopped abruptly and the second door from the end of the hallway opened with a distinct creak.

  "Come on," Lilian said, heading toward it. Ben followed her. They approached the room cautiously and peered in through the doorway.

  Sara Jane Amblin stood just inside the master bedroom, dressed in a jacket and pencil skirt combo similar to what she'd worn in the control room. A slightly taller man stood beside her, dressed business casual with a blazer and Polo shirt, pressed suit pants and sneakers. The two of them wore large headsets—more like clunky, old VR tech than the sleek AR glasses Lilian and Ben wore—and were looking down at the large four-poster bed. Through a gauzy white curtain, Lilian was able to see a man was black with short-cropped hair and a woman almost ghostly pale with long dark hair, both of them sleeping peacefully. There were photographs of the couple on the dresser. On the wall beside the bed hung a painting of sheep grazing in a pasture. A small brass sculpture stood in the corner of the room, near the door to an en suite bathroom.

  "The master suite," Sara Jane said. "Rex Garrote slept here. And Laura and Clayton Odell, the sculptor and his wife, before him. And long before any of them lived in this house it belonged to a wealthy San Francisco shipping tycoon named Oliver Hedgewood[xxviii]." She turned to the man. "Your great-grandfather."

  The man nodded thoughtfully and approached the bed. His hair was wavy blond, graying at the sides. He had high, sculpted cheekbones and full red lips. His forehead creased in a frown as he fingered the gauzy curtains, pulling them back to watch the couple sleep. In the bed, Clayton Odell murmured and rolled to his side, away from his wife, facing the door.

  The man standing over the bed adjusted his headset with an annoyed grunt.

  "The headsets are prototypes," the inventor assured him. "The final product will be much smaller. We've partnered with a major sunglasses manufacturer to ensure they're more comfortable to wear, as well."

  "That's good to hear. And this is where Odell…?" He seemed not to be able to finish the thought and so Sara Jane nodded.

  "We've looped the final half hour of the Odell family's lives. In a moment, he'll wake," she said. "According to the biography penned by his niece, he'd begun sleepwalking shortly after the family moved in. She'd spent a summer with her aunt and uncle when the twins were born. She was the only survivor when—"

  "—Clayton Odell sleepwalked to his studio, picked up the reciprocating saw and cut his wife in half at the waist while the poor woman screamed for him to stop, clawing at his face."

  "You know your history," Sara Jane said, seemingly impressed. "The master of the house, your great-grandfather Oliver, he got off easy compared to the Odell family. You've seen the Behemoth? What some call Picasso's Monster?"

  "The Sculptor," the man said with a grave nod. "I'd seen it once or twice, when I was young, after my father bought the house back." He shuddered and let the curtains fall back against the bedframe. "Out of the corner of my eye, of course. Awful thing. Gave me nightmares."

  "As one of our star attractions he's sure to give our customers nightmares, as well. Mr. Garrote was insistent the Behemoth be front and center once the park is up and run—"

  Clayton Odell shot awake with a gasp.

  "Step right up, ladies and gentlemen," Sara Jane said, adjusting her headset as her lips perked up in a smile. "The show is about to begin…"

  Clayton swung his feet out from under the covers and onto the floor with a vacant gaze, and all of the holograms evaporated, leaving Ben and Lilian alone in the bedroom.

  "Hedgewood," Ben said. "He's the silent partner. The family who built this house, they're the ones who helped fund Sara Jane's research and build Ghostland."

  "You think they knew what Garrote planned to do?" Lilian asked. "You think they were in on it?"

  "I don't know. But they knew how evil this house was." He corrected himself: "Is. They knew that and they still charged people forty bucks a ticket to walk through here. If they were in on his plan or not—"

  The room next door ope
ned, as if on cue. Ben and Lilian crept over and looked into the nursery. There were two large antique cribs which looked like old-fashioned sleighs, painted white, with floral designs and frilly white skirts. A woman with skin the color of soap and a long black dress sat in a red velvet chair between the two cribs, cradling the remains of a baby swaddled in a blanket with a bonnet tied around its shriveled, gray-green face. The governess rocked the dead child on her knee, making gentle shushing sounds as flies circled around their heads. After a moment, she looked up at Ben and Lilian standing side by side in the doorway.

  "Shh," she whispered, placing a finger against her lips. "The little one is sleeping."

  Ben shuddered and drew the door closed.

  They turned to face the final door at the end of the hall, perpendicular to the others. Its keyhole bore multiple scratches, the brass door handle battered and blackened from age. For a moment Lilian worried they might need a key, but before she reached the handle the latch clicked and the door creaked open. She'd hoped to find a staircase leading down. Instead, it led to another hallway.

  They stepped through into the corridor. The last of the evening sun shone through dusty lace curtains draped over cracked windows yellow with grime, the glass warped from age. The opposing wall had been decorated with the bare minimum of wall sconce lighting, no paintings or photographs, and only two doors: one in the middle of the long hall and one at the far end, facing them.

  Lilian waited for Ben to catch up before moving onward, hugging the wall opposite the windows. She half expected something to come crashing through the glass and attack them and it seemed Ben felt the same. He held the stun gun out in front of him, finger on the trigger, shooting jerky looks at the windows every so often, as distant cries came from outside.

  "Survivors?" he asked, sounding hopeful.

  "It's just seagulls," she said.

  "Oh." He looked just as disappointed as she felt.

  Thinking about the two of them alone, against all odds, she said, "I'm sorry I ghosted you for so long. That wasn't fair." She was feeling fatalistic again. The urge to tell him, to admit her mistake in case neither of them made it out of here alive loomed over her like a presence, a ghost of their past. Ben had already made his confession. It was her turn.