Accidental Evil (30 page)

“I will. I’m going back to the house first. Don’t go investigating without me.”

“Like I would,” she said.

[ Paranoia ]

Jenny shook her head as she looked back at her father. He was trying to run to the house, but had only made it halfway up the street before he slowed to a fast walk. He was pathetic at running. They had a treadmill, an elliptical, and a stationary bike, but her father just sat on his butt all winter and expected to get in shape by playing golf.

She thought most of this while she was trying to fill up the blue bucket in her game. Her phone popped up a warning, telling her that she only had twenty percent power left. Jenny frowned, shut off the display, and shoved the phone in her pocket. She looked around like there might be a charger on the street somewhere if she just looked hard enough.

Maybe that could be a job. Maybe she could get some kind of generator and offer to charge the phones of Summer People who ran out of battery while walking around downtown. With half of the Summer People, they barely got any signal in town. Their phones drained quickly as the devices tried to communicate with distant towers. They were always running out of batteries. Jenny shook her head, discarding the idea. If it was really a good idea, someone would already be doing it. And where would she get a generator? Maybe she could buy power from Mr. Dawn and run an extension cord out into the street. She decided to bounce the idea off her father when he returned. Even if he thought it was stupid, he would be proud of her for trying to come up with something. That might earn her a little more allowance.

Off in the distance, she heard him slam the trunk of his car. A second later, she heard the engine crank again. He was still trying to start the thing.
 

Jenny wondered where the scream had come from. It was probably from one of the neighbors that they didn’t know. They lived amongst lots of People from Away. It was the curse of having a decent house. Most of her classmates lived in terrible houses off in the woods.

People could say what they wanted to about her father, but at least Jenny lived in a decent neighborhood. The house she was walking by was ten times better than most of the places in town, and it was a house that was only occupied four months out of the year. The people who lived there probably had a place in Georgia or Florida, and only came up for the hottest time of the year. They would disappear long before the snow started coming down, and they would only arrive again after all the spring mud had dried up.

Jenny heard the scream again. She was close enough to see the place where the sound came from. She turned around and saw that her father was back on the road, trotting towards her. Jenny stopped at the driveway of the place and waited for her father. She studied the house. It looked short from the roadside. The house was just a brown peak of stained wood and triangular windows. On the other side, where the hill fell away, the house looked enormous. Jenny had seen it from the lake.

“The scream came from the A-frame,” she said. She pointed. That’s what her father always called this house. He was still trying to catch his breath.

Her father pulled out a gun and slid something back until it clicked.

“You’re not going to shoot them, are you?” Jenny asked. She was only half-kidding. She didn’t know what her father intended to do with the gun.

“Just for protection,” he said. “Wait here. I’ll go find out what’s going on.”

“Why is it safe here?” Jenny asked. “I should come with you.”

“Just stay back, please.”

He approached the house like he was in charge. That was something that Jenny really admired about her father. He always walked into things like he was in charge. She was going to do that when she was an executive of a major company. She would always walk into rooms with her head high and let everyone know who was in control.

She stayed on the path while her father pounded on the door.

Jenny thought about pulling out her phone for the camera. Maybe she would make a video of the whole thing. Maybe the police would want it as evidence if something was wrong. She decided against it—probably nothing would happen and she would just waste her battery.

“You’re sure it was this house?” her father asked her.

Jenny nodded.
 

“It doesn’t seem like anyone is home,” he said.

“Maybe they’re unconscious or whatever,” Jenny said.

Her eyes grew wide as her father reached for the doorknob.
 

When they heard the scream again, her father turned the knob and rushed in. Jenny stood there, unsure of what to do. She took a couple of tentative steps forward and saw her father rush down a flight of steps. She advanced to the door frame.

[ Rescue ]

When Kirk heard the scream he reached for the doorknob. Never for a second did he believe that the door would be open. He expected that once he found it locked, his obligation would have been fulfilled. Instead, the knob turned and the door opened. Without any other ideas, he rushed in.

The first floor of the house was basically just a landing. Doors on either side probably led to closets. Based on the slope of the roof there wasn’t really room for anything else on that level. In front of him, a staircase led down towards the windows that overlooked the lake. He’d seen this place a million times from the water, and often wondered what the inside must look like. It was beautiful. Everything was rich, dark wood, polished to a shine. The back of the landing was a balcony, overlooking the room below.

The railing of the open stairs was brushed nickel. He grabbed the railing and descended as rapidly as he could. He filled one hand with a gun and left the other gun tucked into the back of his waistband. It felt stupid, uncomfortable, and somehow reassuring back there.

The stairs dumped him into the middle of a big living room. Huge windows showed him trees that dotted the hillside down to the lake. At the far end, a kitchen was separated from the sitting area by an island with stools.

It was classy and perfect, except for the place between the couches.

A wood and glass coffee table had been shoved over near the windows to make room for the terrible graffiti on the wood floor. Kirk approached slowly, leading with his gun.

“Hello?” he called. “Where are you?”

Kirk took another step. He’d seen plenty of horror movies that portrayed pentagrams. He knew the five-sided star inside the circle—everyone did. He’d never seen a ten-foot version spray painted on the floor of a million dollar house though. The red circle was perfectly formed. At least the vandals had been decent craftsmen. In each point of the star, there was a candle. Four of them were still burning. The one closest to the windows had already burned out.

When Kirk heard the scream again, he looked up and actually smiled. It was amplified. He spotted the speaker towers in the corners of the room. It wasn’t a person. The scream was being played through the stereo system. This was an elaborate joke. He tried to scuff the paint of the pentagram with his foot. The paint was dried. It was an expensive, elaborate joke. They might need to sand the floors to get that silly pentagram off. Kirk glanced around, looking for any sign that the place was currently inhabited. Maybe the owners had decided to not come up this year and their house had been vandalized by local kids or something. It didn’t explain the screams over the entertainment system, but there had to be some reason.

Kirk walked over towards the wall. The audio components were mounted behind a glass door. He opened it and spotted the numbers on the CD player slowly ticking up. When he hit the eject button, the machine spit out a white CD with a hand-written label. It read, “Ritual Loop.”

“Huh,” he said. The handwriting could have been his wife’s.

“Dad?” Jenny called from above.

“Stay there, Jenny. Someone broke in and vandalized. We’ll have to find a cop in town and report it.”

“What about the woman?”

“There’s no woman.”

He turned and walked back towards the stairs. She was hanging over the railing, looking down.

“Is that blood?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “It’s paint.”

He turned back. He would blow out the candles so the place didn’t burn down. Maybe it served them right having their place messed up. It seemed like they left it unlocked and didn’t even bother to arm the security system.

Kirk braced himself on the arm of the couch and lowered himself to one knee. The day was certainly providing him lots of opportunity to get some exercise. He leaned down towards the candle. Maybe this day would be his fresh start on moving around. If he could get a walk in every day, he could continue his cardio in the gym once the cold weather hit.

Kirk blew out the candle.
 

He narrowed his eyes. Now that he was closer, he realized that there was something in the center of the pentagram that he hadn’t noticed earlier. The vandals had dripped some paint directly in the middle. He shuffled forward a little. With a lean, he touched the barrel of his gun on one of the other candles, snuffing it. The image brought another smile. It was cinematic, snuffing a candle with a gun like that.

“Dad? What are you doing?” Jenny asked.

“Didn’t I tell you to wait outside?” he asked. He looked up at her. She wasn’t even looking at him.

Kirk shook his head and turned back towards the floor. He would snuff the other two candles and then they would…

What he saw stopped the thought in its tracks. The spot in the center was bigger. And it wasn’t the same color as the other paint. It looked fresh, too. Kirk shook his head to dispel the strange thoughts forming there. Was it blood? Was it seeping up through the floor boards. He looked up. Whatever was collecting on the floor must be dripping from overhead. He saw nothing but clean white ceiling above.

[ Coming ]

Above him, Jenny released a sad moan. It almost sounded like she knew what was going to happen, and didn’t want to witness it again. Kirk’s eyes were locked on the red liquid. He watched it grow. It wasn’t spreading out in an even circle, it was reaching out in fingers of red liquid and then branching and back-filling. The liquid looked intelligent. It looked hungry to cover the floor. He could smell it—coppery and metallic—like when he was bleeding out a deer.

“Jenny, get out,” he yelled. Kirk pushed himself backwards as the liquid spread even faster. It was close to the lines of the pentagon that made up the center of the star. He could still hear Jenny moaning above, so that meant that she wasn’t obeying him.
 

“Go!” he yelled as he stood up on wobbly legs.

He waved an angry hand at her.

The gun clicked in his hand. For the second time that day, Kirk’s heart felt like it stopped dead in his chest. He stared at the gun, realizing what had almost happened. He had waved it in Jenny’s direction and his finger had accidentally squeezed the trigger. If there had been a bullet in the chamber, he could have shot her.

“Dad!” she yelled.

Kirk looked down at the floor and took another step back. The blood—it had to be blood—had reached the confines of the inner pentagon and stopped. It had formed a perfect, improbable geometric shape, based only on the outline of paint on the floor. As he watched, the pentagon began to fill vertically, as if the sides were made of glass. He saw an inch of the fluid, and then two.

“Dad!” Jenny screamed again. The desperation was clear in her voice.

Kirk took another step towards the stairs and was about to turn when he saw something new. There was a shape coming up from the center of the blood. It was something solid forming. Maybe it was coagulating. The idea turned his stomach.
 

The sight of that was enough. He turned and ran as fast as his legs would carry him. Kirk pulled at the railing as he ascended. He kept his eyes locked on Jenny. Her mouth fell open as she witnessed what was happening below.

“Go, Jenny,” he said, trying to spur her into action. Whatever was down there was more captivating than her cellphone, if that was even possible. Kirk was halfway up when he turned to look. The shape was the head, torso, and arms of a man, cast in blood. The liquid swirled inside the shape. The arms were folded across its chest. It was emerging, inch by inch, from the pool of blood. Again, the word “coagulating” flashed through Kirk’s mind and he found the ability to climb even faster.
 

When he reached the landing, Jenny was still standing there. He reached with his free hand and turned her away from the sight. His shove snapped her from her stasis. She glanced at him and the turned to run for the door. Kirk was much slower.
 

He saw his daughter pass through the doorway, escaping out to the bright sun.

The door slammed behind her.

Kirk grabbed the handle and pulled. It was stuck. He tucked the gun in his belt next to the other one and pulled with both hands. The door was immovable. Kirk glanced to his sides. He ran to the left—that door wouldn’t open either. He doubled back and nearly ripped the next door from its hinges. It flew open to reveal a coat closet.
 

There was a wet noise coming from below.

He heard Jenny pounding on the front door from the outside.

“Back up!” he screamed. She pounded once more and then the noise stopped.

He could still hear a rhythmic, wet, slapping sound coming from the lower floor.

“Are you safe?” he yelled.

He thought he heard agreement from the other side. It was hard to tell.

Kirk pulled out both guns, backed up, and pointed them at the frosted window that ran from floor to ceiling to the right of the door. He aimed them downward, took a breath, and then fired.

The gun went off with a deafening report. As his hearing began to return, it was filled with a ringing sound that almost eclipsed the wet slaps still approaching.

The window was unharmed.

He looked closer and saw a tiny chip in the glass. He was lucky the bullet hadn’t bounced off and clipped him. He took a step to the side and opened fire. He shot twice with each gun. Each bullet left its own mark and a network of cracks connecting the impact sites. Kirk ran up and kicked at the spiderweb of cracks, hoping to capitalize on the damage already done. His toe bounced off the window. He backed up and raised the guns to try again.