314 Book 2 (29 page)

“Holy
shit,” said Paul.

Oliver turned to the intruder that was strapped to the gurney. His hands were shaking as he held the pistol up. He pointed the gun at Paul. “Now let’s talk abou
t what you know. Tell me about The Skeleton Man.”

It took me awhile to realize what a dangerous person Oliver was. He’d been kind to me, and actually doted on me while we worked together in Widowsfield. Yet his fascination with what was clearly a town beset by evil unnerved me. As he stood staring over my shoulder at my little blue notebook, critiquing my drawings and always seeking more detail, his interest seemed to border on lust. He wasn’t interested in Widowsfield in a scientific manner; this had become a passion for him.

I decided to sneak away one night, all alone, while the rest of the people in the facility were asleep. I wanted to get a chance to see the house on Sycamore by myself. I don’t know what I hoped to accomplish, and to tell the truth I was terrified of the place, but Oliver’s fascination with that house drew me to it.

The first time I went there all alone, in the middle of the night, I couldn’t build the courage to go in. I stood on the sidewalk and just stared at the tomb of a home. In all the history of mankind, it seems as if we’ve always known that there were monsters hiding in the walls. Humans have always assigned supernatural importance to buildings, and we never thought to question why.

Think about it. The religious among
us don’t just worship within churches, they worship the buildings themselves. They assign a spiritual reverence to an inanimate object, even if the God they worship pleaded that they never do exactly that. I grew up in a Christian home, so I can only draw upon that experience, but I was always confounded by how Jesus seemed intent on shunning buildings of worship. He went to the mountains, and the valleys, and to bodies of water for his sermons, and he spoke against worshipping inside buildings. It was almost as if he understood the purity of nature, and the danger of permanence. Those walls hold onto too much.

As I stood on the sidewalk, staring at that awful cabin, I understood, for the first time, the true meaning of a haunted house. Indeed, I realized all our homes are haunted. All the walls we build up around us are just the borders of our coffins, and we rot within them.

I’ll never touch a wall the same way again.

Lost in Widowsfield

Alma Harper watched Aubrey as she stood in the street. The young bartender was alone, in the bright sunshine, standing on the broken yellow line that divided the lanes. She had her head down, and was coughing, but her arms hung straight at her sides.

Widowsfield was behind, and the fog was hiding in the woods, shielding all but the foremost trees, as if making a failed attempt to hide from them. Jacker’s van was parked on the side of the road, and the others couldn’t remember any of the horrors they’d all witnessed so many times before. But everyone knew to be frightened of who was looking through Aubrey’s eyes, almost as if it were an innate fear.

Alma didn’t know what was real anymore.

“We can’t trust her,” said Rachel.

“She’s one of the dead ones,” said Stephen.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Jacker.

Alma rubbed her thumbs on the teddy bear keychain in her pocket.

Aubrey’s cough produced a fountain of blood that splashed at her feet. Then her right arm jerked upward at the shoulder, eliciting a horrendous crack of bone, but no other part of her body reacted to the violent action. She began to twist her head to the side, and then shook it a few times before staring straight up. Her throat bulged as blood spewed from her lips, like a grotesque human volcano, with white foam streaming from her nose. Then a hand shot up from her open mouth, extending up to the elbow, and started to slap down at the girl, clawing as it tried to break free.

“Alma, run!” Rachel screamed from far off. Alma turned to see that her friends had fled, but were headed directly into the fog that had swelled from the nearby woods and now covered the road. One by one, her companions disappeared into the mist.

“It’s safe in here,” said a child’s voice.

The fog crackled with green energy.

“Ben?” asked Alma.

A figure appeared in the fog, short and slight, and stood with his arms behind his back. He was clearly a child, but his features were shrouded by the mist. Dogs howled somewhere nearby, and the fog seemed to react to their sound by flailing at the sky, like the tentacles of a squid as it floundered, dying on the shore.

“I love you, Alma,” said Ben. “You have to trust me.”

He held out his hand, and it pierced the fog.

“Is that really you?”
asked Alma.

Aubrey twisted behind her. The bartender’s body was forfeit, a mass of splintered bone and writhing flesh. Blood p
ooled under the mass as the red-haired woman broke free of her corpse prison, rising from the crimson and laughing as she pulled herself out. “Look what you’ve done!”

“Alma, hurry!” Ben pleaded, but didn’t step out of the mist. “You have to trust me. I’m the only one
that loves you.”

Alma was still rubbing her thumb on the teddy bear keychain in her pocket.

“Alma,” said Ben from within the fog. “We don’t have time. You have to come with me before The Watcher in the Walls finds me.”

“Who?”

“Just trust me,” said Ben. “He’s building The Skeleton Man, and then I’ll be gone again. You have to trust me. Who else loves you like I do?”

“Look what you’ve done
!” The red-haired woman screamed as she crawled forth from Aubrey’s corpse.

Alma closed her eyes and walked into the fog.

*   *   *

Alma Harper stood at the stove in T
erry’s cabin. The pots of water had not yet begun to boil.

“You’re doing good,” said Ben.

She turned to see him, but he was sitting on the couch watching a television that displayed flickers of black and white light. She could only see the back of Ben’s head as he faced away from her.

“Has the water started to boil yet?” asked Ben, though he sat motionless on the couch.

“Not yet,” said Alma. She was confused about how she got in the kitchen, and looked around to get her bearing. She had a sense of obligation, as if there was something that she was supposed to accomplish but couldn’t remember what it was.

Terry’s dog’s cage was on the floor, and beneath
it was a symbol written in black ink. She stepped away from the oven and knelt beside the cage, leery of the vicious dog within. Luckily, Killer wasn’t in his cage. She pushed the crate aside and saw the symbol for pi written on the tile. There appeared to be wax stuck in the grout between.

“I think it’s boiling now,” said Ben.

Alma glanced at the television, which was still just displaying snow. Ben was faced away, in the same spot on the couch. She could only see the top of his head over the back of the furniture.

“Take the water upstairs.”

Alma stood up with the intention of going to the stove to retrieve the water. This was what she was supposed to do. She had been asked to boil the water, and then bring it upstairs for her father. He was waiting by the tub.

She
put on the oven mitts.

“That’s right,” said Ben. “He’s waiting for you.”

“He wants me upstairs?” asked Alma. It felt as if she were participating in a play, but had forgotten her lines.

“Of course he does,” said Ben. “He needs the water. He’s needs your help.”

Alma reached for the pot just as the bubbles began to rise within it. As she leaned forward, the new, tight jeans that Rachel had bought for her pressed her keys into her thigh. She grimaced, and took off one of the oven mitts so that she could reach into her pocket and take out the keys. Alma intended to throw them on the counter, but ended up staring at the teddy bear keychain as it hung from its ring.

Then she heard little girls humming outside.

“Do you hear that?” asked Alma.

“Nevermind them,” said Ben. “The kids from school are heading home. Take the water upstairs before Daddy gets mad.”

Alma took off the other mitt and walked to the large window in the living room. She thought there was supposed to be a couch under the window, but it was missing now. Her shoe crunched on broken glass and she saw that the lower pane of the window had been busted out with a brick that was now lying on the floor.

A line of children were passing on the sidewalk outside. They were all little girls of various heights and ages. Some of them wore dresses while others were in jeans and t-shirts. They carried backpacks, and all of them stared at the cabin as they passed. They were humming the song that Alma’s mother had taught her so many years ago.

“Who are they?” asked Alma as she watched the procession.

“Don’t look at them,” said Ben. “They’re the ones that go to the lake. They’re not important.
You need to focus on what you’re doing here.”

“Alma!” Michael Harper’s voice shook the walls as he screamed from upstairs.
“Bring the water up.” His scream warbled, and it seemed like the entire cabin changed. The walls seemed dirtier, and then clean again, all within just a few brief seconds.

Alma heard the dog barking and looked back at the cage, expecting it to be empty like it was before. Instead, she saw Killer inside, snarling and snapping at her.

“Where does the time go?” asked a girl that Alma didn’t recognize.

“Who said that?” asked Alma.

“Ignore the witch!” Ben yelled. “She doesn’t belong here. You need to focus on our time at the cabin together. Stop thinking about the other times.”

Alma looked at Ben, but saw a mannequin sitting on the couch where he had been moments earlier. The mannequin was dressed in
Ben’s clothes, but had a blank, plastic face. She felt her stomach lurch, as if she were in a car as it went over the hill that led into Widowsfield – or perhaps as the car fell a greater distance.

She put her hand
over her face. Her mind raced to accommodate too many emotions, all of which threatened to turn her stomach. She was twisting and turning as she stood still, every sense available was screaming that the world was different than it should be.

“I feel like I’m going insane! I can’t keep anything straight, Ben,” Alma wiped away tears and then covered her eyes again. Her feet crunched on broken glass, and her hands stung for reasons she couldn’t explain.
“I don’t know what’s real anymore. I don’t understand what’s happening. Everything’s all mixed up.”

“What would you have of madness?” asked a new voice, deep and omniscient, seeming to emit from the house itself.

“Who said that?” asked Alma as she took her hands away from her eyes. Now the room was empty. The couch and the mannequin were gone, but the symbol for pi was still on the kitchen floor, surrounded by glass candles. She looked out of the window to see if the girls were still there, but saw only one: A young girl with black hair that smiled and waved at her. The girl’s hair had an ethereal quality and was waving in the air as if floating in space.

Alma gasped and stepped back when she saw tha
t the girl outside was a corpse. The child’s eyes were gone, and the flesh on her face was rotting away. Her skin was barely attached to her, and looked like lace that was drifting in the same watery grave as the girl’s black hair.

Alma staggered back and bumped into someone. She
turned and saw her father, except he was much younger than the last time she’d seen him. He was nude, wet, and held a butcher knife in his bloody hand.

“Welcome home,” said Michael Harper, although his voice was that of the person that spoke of madness moments earlier.

Alma pushed her father away and screamed out in terror. He fell to his butt while laughing. Alma stared at her own, bloody hands, and saw gashes on them. Had her father stabbed her? How had she been hurt?

Glass crunched under her feet and she remembered that the window was broken. She tried to crawl
out, even though the front door was only a few feet away. For some reason she felt compelled to exit through the broken window, and knew that the doorway would provide no escape.

“No!” Michael got up and charged at her.

She was halfway out when he caught her legs. He was screaming her name as he pulled, but she kicked back and refused to give in. Then she felt his knife stabbing into her legs, and she cried out in pain. He was relentless, stabbing and slicing, but the rush of blood that resulted from the wounds caused his grip to become slick. Alma was able to escape, and fell to the flowerbed under the window.

She lost her breath when she hit the ground, and
wheezed as she tried to crawl away. Her lungs seized, and her body ached. She reached out and gripped a handful of tall weeds. Alma saw her own hand, and was startled by how small it was.

Her breath returned, and she glan
ced up at the window that she’d crawled out of only to see that it was no longer broken. A snake slithered through the grass beside her and she scrambled to move away from it.