Gridlocked Guesthouse (Locked House Hauntings Book 1) (14 page)

The bat-shaped piece of the chair he was holding raised in the air slightly, and then he lowered it gently, catching it with his other hand. He could fucking kill her. If that was what Rachel wanted him to do, maybe he should try to do it?

What was happening to him? He opened his mouth to say something, to stop the spiraling of sounds and thoughts in his head. But Jenny spoke first. "Do you hear them?"

He listened intently, but all he could hear was the gentle crunch of their feet on the road. He turned and looked behind him, and Mike and Tiffany were close. "No." Dammit. That wasn't exactly a conversation. He tried again, desperate for his mind to be occupied by anything other than bashing Jenny's head in. "Do you think we should keep going?"

"Yes. I guess so." She turned to him, and her eyes were wide, and she was clearly frightened.

He desperately tried not to envision his club piercing Jenny's face. What would she look like then? Would she be more frightened? Would she become intimately afraid and fight back? He stared at her and suddenly asked, "Do you feel angry?"

Her face twisted, and she said, "Yes. Of course. It's been a long day."

"A long weekend, even," he said. But he started to wonder if the house made people violent. Maybe it wasn't so much that there was a ghost, but that there was... something... happening.

Still could be a ghost. What if they were all drugged with something? Hallucinating, or... I dunno, something. I'm not sure what to believe any more. Ghost, serial killer, drugs; it's hard to believe any of it. But what the hell tied Jenny up and why couldn't she remember it? How did they even get her in that blocked-in little car of hers? Why did John go crazy and attack Tiffany and then kill Beezer? Was that drugs? Did he just break from the stress? Was he possessed? Would Rachel have gone to those kind of lengths for this party? Secretly drugging her guests to enhance the fright? Where the hell was she?

A few moments later, Ricky was feeling calmer. It seemed strange that he ever had the urge to hit Jenny anyways. He was ashamed at his sudden violent thoughts and turned to look at the girl again. He wanted her to live. They had seen unspeakable carnage so far this weekend, and everyone was starting to wear thin. He wanted to defend this girl, not fight her.

He glanced back in the dark night to Mike and Tiffany trudging behind them.

Where the hell had Beth, Zane and Mikaela gone?

They had been walking for an hour or so when Ricky's stomach turned. He could see it up ahead, the thing he dreaded. "Zane?" he shouted into the darkness.

There was no reply.

His face twisted with stressed grief. His voice was a cracked whisper as he held back tears. He pointed with his makeshift mace and tried to say, "Do you see it?"

Jenny stopped in her tracks. "No, it... No." She was panting suddenly, all the fear sucked the air from her lungs and she couldn't breathe. Her gasps were accentuated by her tiny sobs starting to form.

Mike stepped forward and he let out an angry sigh. "Is that?"

And Tiffany said, "That's the light from the guesthouse, isn't it?"

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

It was.

Instead of carrying forward, they stopped and regrouped. "Here is where we lost them, remember, Ricky? This is where you started running."

"Maybe..." Tiffany started, trying to comfort herself. "Maybe, like... Beth twisted her ankle real bad and they just... are really slow walking back."

Mike said, "Maybe they are in the middle of a threesome in the woods."

Jenny brought the lighthearted comment down with a hammer. "They've been gone for fucking hours and hours now." The hatred in her voice was rough and tight.

"Jenny," Mike said slowly, trying to calm the fury building in the girl. But he never got to finish his sentence because she whirled her pointed knife on him.

"I should just slit your throat." Her growl was sudden and outrageous.

Mike's eyes grew wide as he stared at the blade inches from his throat. He raised his hands slowly. "Are you okay?"

Ricky suddenly smacked the knife/spear creation with his mace. "Jenny, give it a minute; it'll pass. Anyone else feeling the sudden urge to kill?"

She looked shocked at his assessment and leaned her spear back into the air, like a soldier. "What?"

Ricky frowned at her. "Dude, I've been thinking about killing you since we started walking. It just finally passed a few minutes ago. Do you think it's a ghost following us or something?"

Jenny stared at him, disbelief crossing her face. "You've been what?"

Ricky shouted, "I've been thinking about taking this mace and smashing it through your thick skull!"

"If it's wearing off, is it a drug? Did Rachel drug us? I know she was really overthinking this whole party thing." Tiffany's voice was loud and shrill. The air seemed a bit cooler, and the three of them grew silent.

Did you notice how I did that? The three of them?

Jenny turned to Tiffany and said, "Do you really think she'd do that?" Then after a moment, "Ricky? Do you know anything?"

Ricky suddenly looked very tired. He rubbed his eyes slowly with one hand and wouldn't look over at either of the girls. "I didn't think she was serious, jeez, it's just, that... she really wanted to scare the shit out of everyone, so I don't even know. I'm not even sure where she is." There was a long pause as everyone considered the idea that Ricky thought Rachel would have drugged everyone. Were they hallucinating right now?

"Do you wanna search the woods or go back to the guesthouse?" Jenny said slowly. She stared off the road into the bitter darkness.

"Did Amelia really have the word 'grid' written on her leg? Or did Rachel make that up?" Tiffany suddenly asked Ricky.

Ricky said, "I think she really did have it on her leg." He turned and looked at the faint light in the distance. "What do you girls want to do?"

Jenny turned back and finally said the thing you've been waiting for. "Where's Mike?"

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

"Mike?!" Jenny shouted, refusing to leave the road, but terrified to stay put all the same. Where had he gone? Did he go back to the guesthouse?

Tiffany and Ricky were also shouting out Mike's name, the soft "My" roaring into a screeching "kkkk."

Silence was the only reply, if you could even call silence a reply. Not a bird, not a bee replied. Not an owl, or Zane, Beth, Mikaela or even Rachel.

The group was down to three.

Ricky, Jenny, and Tiffany. And they weren't sticking together very well--in their frightened shouting, Ricky stepped away from the girls.

When he turned around, they too were gone.

"What the ever-living fuck?" he said, and he suddenly wondered if he was gone, or if they were gone.

It had to be them.

He uncertainly stopped calling for Mike; he didn't even bother to call for Tiffany and Jenny. Instead, he stood really still and listened.

He couldn't hear anything out of place.

I think they were hallucinating. Each of them pumped full of the cocktail of drugs Rachel dumped into the food.
She made all the food herself!
They could be standing two feet from each other and completely unable to recognize anyone. Just whisper a suggestion that someone was dead, or someone was missing, and boom! They believed it. They believed in the ghosts. They believed the person was missing and that was all it took.

I think Rachel, after carefully drugging everyone but herself, told them she was missing. She kept whispering it to their drugged faces every time they started to notice her again. And I think all of them were lying in the street right in front of the guesthouse--except for Rafael, Beezer, John, and Ben, who were inside on couches, snoring. Rachel kept pointing at them and whispering that maybe a ghost got them. Maybe it was Richard, freezing in the master bedroom. Besides, could John in fact freeze in a bedroom? Maybe Rachel just set some ice on his drugged-out face.

And suggestible Jenny probably was just sitting on the blocked-in car, with Rachel either tying her up with the leash, or just telling those boys, "She's locked in! Go save her!" while they stumbled around like drugged-up maniacs. Eventually, Rachel announced that they freed Jenny, and they all trooped back inside for more food, more drinks, more drugs. She drugged everyone. Any minute now, things would start to wear off and everyone would start to wake up and realize that Rachel was an asshole with too much time on her hands.

Didn't you even notice I didn't bother introducing her?

That's what I think.

Carson's body
(Was he killed? Was Cletus sleeping in the sink, and Carson sleeping at the foot of the stairs? Wouldn't that make more sense? Were these people suggestable because of the drugs?)
still lay at the bottom of the steps. The basement door had another locked unlocked. Only two left.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Ricky finally stopped listening for the girls and he let out a soft "Guys?" But then, he slowly walked forward to the light at the end of the road. Where else could they go at this point? He had to stop doing it. Stop saying "they." Where else could he go?

He was the last one.

Ricky walked to the guesthouse and tried the door. It opened smoothly, and inside, he saw his dead friends, John, Beezer, and Ben, lying next to Lucy. He stared at them slowly, wondering if Rafael was still upstairs in the freezer bedroom.

A thought suddenly occurred to him. If these guys were dead, and they seemed dead, then the others must be alive. Dead people don't get lost. So maybe he just had to find them.

If they were lost outside...

Maybe they couldn't find the house. But, they could find it, if he made it brighter in the night. And there was one way to make a building light up the night sky.

He grinned as soon as he thought it.

He started to open windows quickly and wondered what he would need. The liquor. Surely there was enough left. The only thing left to decide was...

Should he bring the dead out of the house before he set it on fire?

If I had known what he was up to, I would have stopped him. First off, I like the guesthouse. Secondly, what if Rachel was still inside?

Third, I would never allow someone to burn down my house. Ricky had to stop. Fuck him and his stupid plan. I don't usually get so mad at gorgeous men I want to feel intimate with, but burn my house!?! The thing was, I didn't know because I was busy. I had completely lost track of the dead or the living at this point, and I mistakenly thought I knew where everyone was. I thought they were all in the basement.

I told you, I don't know what each of them was thinking at any given moment, but I do, I do in fact know for certain that if I had seen Ricky trying to burn down my home, I would have stopped him. That bastard.

I've had guests try worse. One time, I was unlocking the basement door and a guest saw me and charged down the wooden steps. And usually, I just get the door open and they go flying into the basement rooms. But he was far faster than I, and somehow drove a long knife into my foot, pinning me into the ground. If you look at the floor at the bottom of those steps, you can see where my foot was pinned, the deep groove from a blade. So I'm just saying, I've had worse happen than a fire.

It might seem ridiculous that I own a house full of ghosts, but I've tried to make them rest. I've done the usual- séances, proper burials and I had priests shake water, and witches burn sage. That was why I started renting it out for parties.
I mean, if you can't beat 'em!

And yeah, this one has been a bit of a clusterfuck so far. I think the ghosts were particularly restless this weekend. Or these dumb college kids were stupider than the average ones. At this point, the house hadn't even had to kill them. They did it all themselves.

And I did warn them to stay out of the basement. It is not safe down there.

But it doesn't matter; you'll end up in the basement if the house wants you there.

So as Ricky was dragging corpses out of the building and about to set aflame his few remaining friends, I was watching the basement.

I was starting to really root for Tiffany; do you have a favorite yet? Despite both her last sexual partners being killed, she was trying to persevere. Lucy didn't even try; she just gave up. Even Rachel, the over-planned little lady, had a bit of spitfire in her soul. And pretty Cletus, who was staring at Jenny. The lovely farm girl who had grit.