by Gabe Sluis
Chapter 11- Through The Dark Places
Up and up they walked, following the narrow road up the side of the hill. A rock slope faded upward to their right, and the view below to the waterfall and farmhouse on their left. Pillars of rock sporadically positioned along the path threw shadows in the bright night. Chris and Jake both walked without talking, both fighting down internal rage, anger and frustration at loosing their friend so soon into this strange journey. Chris felt upset with himself but knew there was nothing they could have done; Donny was taken so fast. Jake was right to drop the point of argument with Renault, Donny had his own path.
Theirs, on the other hand, had finally begun to level out. The lower ground from where they had come had suddenly disappeared, replaced with a face of rock matching the opposite side. The sound of rushing water had also disappeared. Only the sound of their echoing footsteps were left as they made their way through the narrow pass that appeared to lead over the summit.
“It’s getting narrower as we go,” Chris pointed out. “I think I see something tall and dark ahead.”
“Yeah, I see it too. A gate, maybe?”
Upon getting closer, a tall house stood in the middle of the road, leaving no room on either side, completely occluding the path. The house was dark, not a light shone from within. The windows matched the outside color, a mahogany blackness in the shadowy night. Tall, skinny features and an odd twist on Victorian architecture dominated the roadblock. Black turrets sat at the corners of the various islands of mansard roof. The central portion of the house rose far into the night sky, looming over the boys as if a gust of wind would make it crash down before they had a chance to flee more than two steps. But instead of fleeing, the two walked into the shadow of the house and stood at the portico’s edge.
Jake ran his hand down the black ridges of the clapboard siding and brought his hand quickly away. “This place feels weird.”
“It got a couple degrees cooler once we got closer, too,” Chris said. “You figure this whole place is going to be abandoned like that farm?”
“I don’t know. And I don’t think we could climb this rock to get around,” Jake said, taking a look at where the house seemed to melt into the coal colored rock. “It figures, though, that this house is going to be our only way to get to the other side.”
Just then, a loud but muffled boom came from the depths of the black house. Jake and Chris both took a step back and stared at the front door as the decorative roof fencing rattled from the after shock. A second after the boom, a warbling tonal screech jumped to near deafening levels, and slowly faded down to a whisper over the span of several heartbeats.
“Great, it’s creepy too. If a water dragon got Donny, who’s to tell what is waiting in here for one of us.”
“We do not need to get picked off one by one! Is this our only option?” Chris asked. His body posture telegraphed he was not thrilled about going into the sinister building before them.
“Aren’t you the one who likes horror movies?” Jake said, trying to lighten the mood.
Chris shook his head and grinned as the two mounted the steps to the porch. The wood beneath their feet creaked and groaned, loudly announcing their intentions. Chris reached for the knocker, an ornate sculpture of a long nosed man, reminding him of a story told to children around Halloween, when Jake flung the front door open, out from under his hand. Chris looked startled at Jake who took his first steps inside. Chris joined him.
A long dark hall, paintings and sculptures standing along both walls, met the boys as they entered the house. The only illumination to guide their way came from odd colored lights set in dissimilar fixtures that lit the art from above. The floor was lined with a close cut red patterned carpet, like you would see in an old hotel. Chris and Jake continued to drift in, looking at the peculiar scenes and likenesses. On the left, Jake checked out a painting with a carved golden frame depicting a group of children standing in an above ground pool, all watching another child jump from the deck in ag strange pose. Dismissing the Rockwell style scene, he moved on.
Chris was walking past a bronze sculpture of three razor sharp beasts holding halberds, advancing upward upon two more similar beasts, obviously defending a small square machine at the top of the sculpture. Chris reached out to touch the machine when something large brushed past his leg. He spun in surprise and let out a weak sound from being startled.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know! Something just knocked into my leg!”
“Well, I didn’t see anything. Let’s just get moving, this hall goes on for a long way,” Jake said.
They walked, not bothering to inspect any more of the adornments, and Chris kept his eyes on the floor. After passing another ten lights, there was a break in their regularity, on the left where Chris walked. Without needing to communicate, they both turned to the opening. A staircase led to an intermediate landing with an oriel window letting in bright moonlight. What they saw next was much more surprising. Seemingly from out of nowhere, Jake and Chris were pelted with tiny slimy fish. Throwing up their hands to block their faces, the two slowly reacted to the unexpected barrage. Finally, Jake and Chris rolled to opposite sides of the doorway and out of the hail of wriggling fish. Without a target, the onslaught ceased, leaving two pairs of wide eyes and flopping fish all over the ground. Chris opened his mouth to speak when another building-shaking boom sounded from beneath the house. Instead of the warbling sound following the boom, as they had heard the first time, a bone-chilling laugh came out suddenly, and faded quickly.
“Great, this place is haunted, as well,” Jake said, head back against the wall. The light from the art dimly lit his face.
Chris looked deeper down the hall and made up his mind, “I guess we just have to go down further.”
Making a run for it, they escaped the torrent of fish and dashed deeper into the house. Another opening on the right appeared similar to the first, but also yielded similar results. The two ran on, passed two more identical openings that were impossible to enter. The smell of fish oil was strong in their noses when they stood on the far side of the fourth passage.
“Have you noticed the statues and paintings? They are the same,” Jake said to Chris as they caught their breath. “How many more should we try before we give up?”
“There has got to be something we are missing,” Chris said. “Think of this like a dungeon in a video game. I’m not ready to call it quits yet.”
“Lead the way then.”
This time they walked, past the same statues and paintings, lit with odd colors emitting from strange angles. The next opening came into view, just where the previous interval suggested it would be. But this time, the opposite wall was a dark shaggy mass. As they crept closer, the stuff on the opposite wall became clearly identifiable as some sort of climbing ivy. Before investigating the strange growth that seemed to come out of the floor, Jake and Chris popped their hands and then heads past the edge of the opening, confirming that there was no flying fish to meet them this time. Chris was first to step fully into the moonshine of the opening. The perpendicular hall and stare case looked exactly the same as the others. Jake went to the ivy.
“Solid wall behind it. I don’t see any passages or switches or anything.”
“Well, this must be the one we go through, no fish stopping us. Yet.”
“After you, then,” Jake motioned.
The large oriel window at the top of the stairs let in long rectangles of moonlight, leaving a grid work of shadows from the cage-like windowpanes. The two stole across the room, coming to an abrupt halt as they realized what materialized in front of them. Floating circular membranes of white came into focus in their path, drifting across the room and absorbing into the walls. The steady stream did not slow, but Jake took the lead dodging between the smooth floating specters and reaching the other side.
Chris felt himself swallow in a dry mouth, his Adam’s apple feeling huge and sticking as it bobbed up and down. Ja
ke stood on the other side, looking a football field away, waiting. Chris told himself that he wasn’t afraid of some strange orbs of light. They had an eerie quality to them, the way they drifted by like waves. What could they do to him? He considered reaching out and touching one, but then laughed at his own stupid idea. Chris finally brought himself to move and matched Jake’s maneuver exactly. He felt the temperature drop significantly as he passed through the stream, and the returning warmth on the other side.
“That was weird,” Chris found himself whispering to Jake.
“Yeah, let’s move,” Jake whispered back and turned.
Jake had just taken one step when Chris noticed that the phantoms had stopped their transient motion across the room. Like basketballs slowly spinning, formless dark spots in the transparent membranes of lights turned toward Jake. On each, three previously unseen dark spots rotated in Chris’s direction, two small spots above one large spot. Before Chris could get a word out, the spots took up a solid shape and the entire room grew cold.
“Ghosts!”
Jake turned to see the tear drop eyes and grinning mouths of round ghosts coming toward him at a slow but menacing pace. As he turned to face them, they slowed to an unnatural stop. Chris came skittering up the stairs backwards, half leaning on the handrail when he let out another shriek.
Chris had advanced up one stair above where Jake had stopped, and his left foot had sunken down much lower than it should have. Both boys attention were taken away from their first threat as Chris yanked his foot free from the false stair. Jake soon realized why he had trouble bringing he foot away as the rest of the stair giggled and reacted to the loss of volume. Chris’s foot was covered in viscous goo from the ankle down and slopped onto the solid step below. Jake looked in horror at Chris and Chris looked in horror at the advancing ghosts that had taken the opportunity to move forward while no eyes were on them.
His mind flooding with panic, Chris bolted up the stairs with Jake in pursuit, skipping the fluidic stair and looking out for another, but going too fast to do anything about it if there was. Chris squashed up the last twenty feet and threw a quick look backward over his shoulder. The ghosts were still there and coming fast. One leg heavier than the other, he tromped his way onto the landing and was about to take the next flight teeing off to his left when the world dropped out from beneath him like a bolt of lightning. Everything was dark for a second then he violently hit a hill of sand. His velocity was gently taken away but still at a speed that knocked the wind from his lungs.
The trap door that took Chris was part of the landing in front of the staircase that led right. Jake standing on the left, looked down and saw that he was safe. Chris just made the wrong choice, but I am still in danger! The ghouls had not increased their speed but now refused to stop even as he remained looking upon them. A quick glance down the hole showed only darkness. Confirming with his gut that he would not loose everyone, Jake made up his mind to escape the oncoming phantoms by throwing himself down the trap door. Coming to terms with the fact that whatever injuries might befall Chris, he would rather endure a similar fate than abandon his best friend. Jake jumped.
In the black weightlessness, one thought ran through Jakes mind, the impact. In that single moment, he remembered back to a conversation he had had with his younger brother, on the subject of jumping out of airplanes. Ryan had gone to jump school right away for his job as a pathfinder, and he had told Jake all about it. Jake had always been interested in the specialized training, but doubted he would ever get the chance, merely being a weekend warrior. The one piece of advice Ryan had given, the interesting part that stuck with him, was the trick to landing.
“Anyone can jump, that’s easy. You just toss yourself from the aircraft. Landing is where you could get hurt. But there is one trick, and if you forget it, your legs go all directions and you will snap a femur, easy.” Ryan paused for effect, “The main thing you got to remember is, keep your feet and knees together.”
“Keep your feet and knees together,” Jake whispered to himself, and hit sand.