Jon Fore

BLACK WATER

To Lisa: for being a rich man’s playground in a poor man’s house

PROLOGUE

Three days they had gone by foot, walking, sometimes running, always further north along the path. There was no road or trail, nothing but the sky to indicate where they should go—that, and the promise of the North, the liberation of their family, and a freedom they had never known. Keep the sun to the right early, to the left later, and stop when they could not tell the difference: those were their only instructions given them at the last house with a bit of food and a jug of water. It was more than most would have given a family of escaped slaves, even those so close to the end.

It was getting on to dark, but the father would not give rest to the worn or tired, the young or the old. The mountain that stood in defiance of their crossing now lay mostly under them, and he knew that the house they sought was close, always just beyond the next clutch of trees or over the large boulders scattered amongst them. Even in the failing light, his will was forged iron. To his death, he would bring this family to salvation, his children to the freedom of the North, even if it meant without him.

He could hear the feet of his children dragging solemnly through the fallen leaves, the whimpers of unspoken complaints from the youngest of them. His father urged them onward and upward, gently but insistently. He knew that his long-dead mother was watching over them, giving strength through their memory of her. This had been a long dream of hers, a lost hope of his father, and a promise he had made to his children. They would not stop now, not before they were safe in the Heart House atop the mountain.

Trappers still worked the mountain this late in the season, and deer were about their rutting. Hunters plagued them like flies, flies with no remorse at killing the African man or woman, or even child for that matter. His family would be just a sport to them, one more diabolically enjoyable than the white tails haunting this wood. There would be no rest for them until they were safe inside, in the cellar of the Heart House, huddled close in their exhaustion. He longed to see the lantern, the hitching post alight with hope, the indication that here lives a family of white persons willing to help, to aid their escape, and see them off safely.

From somewhere, hounds took to their baying, distant but threatening, drawing the wicked men to them. The fear of his family became a smothering mist around him, his heart pounding against the harder parts of his chest. Even with the sweat dripping from his sun-baked brow, he felt a chill race through him, loosening his gut and weakening his legs. He knew they were hours away, these yelping hounds, but they rarely let up and would eventually bring those they sought.

“Hurry on now. William, you lay hands on them younguns and keep ’um close.”

“I got ’um, Pa,” the boy said, such a good, brave boy. He was near being a man, but not near enough, not for this night.

“Keep ’um movin’, and don’t let up. Get ’um to the top, quick now.”

The boy trudged past him, dragging two younger but mostly silent children. His wife came after, trying to nurse the baby without slowing. She was a tough woman, one he was glad to have, even if he had not had the choice of it. Then his father, old before his time but not without his own gumption, pulled himself up the mountainside using the saplings spread about.

The patriarch, the one responsible for their flight and their safety followed, certain the hounds would not reach them for many hours, hopeful they would abandon their attempts in the dark of night, and wary to his very core.

After the sun had set and many hours of listening to the hounds, each howling cry he would have sworn blood was closer than the last, the ground finally leveled off. It pitched itself forward in a lazy fashion but still completely given over to the forest around them. For the first time in days, he felt hope. Atop this hill sat the Heart estate, friend of the slaves escaping the South, and solitary in its mountaintop post.

It worried him the dogs had come to the foot of the mountain. The last safe house had warned them not to take the path most traveled. The Hearts would be glad to take them in, or so they said, but not the normal stop north for those of his predicament. They must have been wrong or perhaps betrayed by someone in the small village. It did not matter now, for he could just make out light ahead.

It was the soft yellow light of a burning flame, the promised lantern he was certain, and his feet found a lighter pace, his family moving likewise. They were close to their rest, their safety, and the warm meal and kind hospitality of the Heart family.

The forest finally yawned into a field; spat them out and into the open where before them stood the sprawling estate and the small carving of a black man holding a lantern near the foot of the front walk. It was to be their home for the next few days, and then off to Philadelphia where they would continue their journey into Canada.

The house was mostly dark, something he had not expected. It was a large house, larger than the plantation he and his family had worked, but it was frightful in its cold darkness. The front door glowed warmly, the porch lit with two lanterns, but it did not much matter to the man; he would have gone to it had it been dark.

He led his family around the side of the house, skirting the tree line until they could make for the front door while covering as little open ground as possible. There he stopped them all in the trees and brush. He could not understand why the house was so unsettling, so ominous to him, when within was the escape he so desperately sought for his family.

The hound’s voices came over the side of the mountain to rush through the trees and spark a new bolt of terror in his heart. He started them toward the door; perhaps rushing them, keeping his eyes more behind than in front. Those wicked dogs had gotten too close now, and they had to make good their escape. The family reached the porch quickly, and the man knocked as politely as his building fear would allow.

A large man, on a bit on in years but dressed richly, answered the door. “Ah, company! How splendid! Come, all and a one, come and have sup with me!” He hustled them in with all their stink and dirt of days on the run. “I bet you are perfectly starved. Rachel!”

“Thank you kindly, sir. The hounds are but a bit behind us.”

“Worry not on them now. You are safe, and besides, they are my hounds!” the large man said warmly.

“Your hounds, sir?”

“Why, yes, of course. I knew you were coming, you see, but you were late. I sent my sons out looking for you.”

A rotund woman came from the kitchen wrapped mostly in an apron, flour lightening her hair on one side. “What do we have here, husband? Oh, how many?”

“Looks to be six and they are worn through. Some meat if we still have any.”

“Yes, we have some. Does the babe need swaddling as well?”

“That would be right kind of you, ma’am.” The man’s wife smiled at her, her teeth a stark white against the dirt covering her face.

“Take them down to the safe rooms, won’t you? I’ll be right along with the swaddling, some bath water, and shortly after with the meals.”

The man’s daughter began to sob lightly, sob for the tiredness etched into her frail body, for the kindness of white strangers, for the safety she found herself enjoying. William lifted her up and held her close, still looking fearful as though he may have to bolt.

“This way. I have some nice beds for you, and a bath soon enough,” Mr. Heart said as he hoisted a lantern and started for a door behind the grand stairway gracing the entry. He vanished through, and the family followed quietly. “This house was built atop an old prison—used to hold British soldiers and traitors and the like, but now it gives us many hiding places. It is a bit dark and usually damp, but long forgotten, I assure you.”

Mr. Heart made his way to the rear of a mostly square room cut from the living rock and lined with hand-carved bricks. There was a tunnel concealed behind a hanging curtain, one much more roughly cut and cumbersome for walking.

“Down near the end here is the room you will use. Don’t let the darkness frighten you none; there are torches and the like, and nice soft beds just ahead.”

He stopped suddenly and waved them onward. “There is the room, as I promised. Now the children can use this room, it is smaller but has more than enough cots. You three can go on in here.”

The man’s wife entered cautiously, followed by his father and then himself. There was a resonant clanking sound, and the man turned to find a barred door closing quickly before him. He threw himself at it but fell back from the thing, smarting along his body. His daughter began to cry loudly from across the passage, but this time the sobs of horror.

“All tucked in?” the wife’s voice asked from the darkness.

“Yes, Mother, nice and safe.”

Deep in the man’s heart, he felt a raving ache, a ravishing pain of failure and sudden loss, and his hope of many years turned suddenly brittle.

“Now, all of you toss out all of your belongings, all of your clothing, everything,” the woman said sweetly, sickeningly like a mother to a young child.

“They said you would help us…” the man’s wife wept.

“Do we have some new guests?” a male voice asked from down the passage.”

“Yes, Father, and there be a witch among them for sure—maybe two!” Mr. Heart’s voice sounded gleeful.

“Excellent. We will begin the cleansing tomorrow. What have we for dinner, good Mrs. Heart?”

The man, lost deep within his own failure, tormented by the sobbing of his children, loosed a mournful scream, not quite unlike the hounds that had pursued them, but with an endless pain that no dog would ever come to know.

PART 1

Chapter 1

“In one hundred yards, turn left,” the Tom-Tom navigator announced with its artificial woman’s voice.

“Almost there, I hope?” Ethan asked. He cut his dark hair short, but his eyes were always vibrant, deeply passionate and always intelligent. His slender build sheathed tightly in a Creed t-shirt, which was under a loose, threadbare flannel. This matched the over-worn, should-have-been-retired-long-ago button fly jeans.

“It says another eighteen point six miles,” Abby replied. She shared Ethan’s eye color, but had changed the color of her hair some time ago, so much so she was almost certain she had been born blond. Ethan was one of the very few people on campus that knew the truth, or so she thought, but certainly, the only person presented with any pubic evidence.

“Can we stop and get some food?” Madison asked from the back seat, her body pretty much just a hand rest for Chris, her current hump buddy and beer guzzler extraordinaire. She was small of frame but ample in the curves and bumps that make a woman feminine. She was an eye-catcher, constantly sought after by the rest of the male student population. Madison enjoyed this attention, and like now, always wore clothing that hid no ripened curve or slender, delicate feature. Even dressed for hiking as she was, she radiated sex like a fire does heat.

“I got something you can eat…” Chris retorted comically. He was dressed much like Ethan, but with expensive Oakley sunglasses on his face and an appreciable ponytail tucked beneath a worn leather bomber jacket.

“Yeah, Chris, right—but I want something I can, you know, swallow.”

Chris just beamed a larger smile at her, showing off his near-perfect white teeth.

Ethan chuckled lightly.

“Not while I am in the car, please,” Abby replied dryly, unsure if it would happen with her in the car or not.

“Turn left,” Tom-Tom said.

Abby heaved the extra-large steering wheel over, bringing the rusted Nova into a squealing turn.

Chris began to laugh. “Alignment, baby; save you on tires. Listen to this old bitch squeal!”

“When I can afford it, Mr. Manny, Moe, and Jack, or whichever one you are.”

Chris smiled at her in the rear view mirror. “Take it over to the high school. The Auto Shop Class will do it free. That’s what I do.” He was an Economics major and the most effective tightwad on campus. Many of the student body came to him for money saving tips when they were running low, which was rather frequent.

“When we get back, I guess.”

“I’ll take you,” Ethan offered.

“I’ll give you the number for the school, Ethan; don’t let me forget when we get back.”

“Thanks, Chris.”

The turn revealed more endless farm fields stretching down either side of the car and the entire length of the unpainted blacktop road for as far as any of them could see. The fields were now barren, harvested well before the late November weekend, tilled and turned, and nothing but disinteresting dirt.

“What’s the name of this guy we are supposed to meet with when we get there?” Abby asked, her eyes searching the road for some traffic sign or unique characteristic. She was sure now with the little Tom-Tom navigator suction-cupped to the dirty windshield that she knew what it was like for a pilot to “fly by instruments” during a particularly cloudy day.

Ethan drew out a small handheld computer, a college going-away present his parents had gotten him as he pursued his degree in Computer Science. After a few short taps followed by a few short beeps, Ethan said, “Mr. Thomas Brighton, Curator of the Heart House and Underground Railroad Museum.”

“A museum? No one said anything about going to a museum!” Chris complained loudly. “I thought we were going to an old house or something, do a little hiking…”

“We are. This is the guy we have to see before we can go to the house. He has the key and map and everything,” Abby offered.

Madison patted Chris on the crotch gently, as a mother would a child’s shoulder. “Now calm down, stallion. You won’t learn anything, I promise.”

Chris hiked his hips forward on the old duct tape-covered bench seat. “Are you still hungry?”

Madison smiled up at him, “Soon, horn-dog, soon.”

“How much further do you—” Chris began.

“In one thousand yards, you will have reached your destination,” Tom-Tom answered without waiting for him to finish his question.

Abby looked at Chris, his face a large question mark, and then they both scanned the road ahead. With the exception of the large mountain that had grown from the horizon as they drove, both sides of the street held nothing but turned soil and vagrant weed.

“We should be able to see it…” Chris trailed off.

“There’s a farm house or something over there,” Madison said, pointing to the right of the car.

In the distance in the midst of a field sat a squat, little white house, battered with age and disrepair. It was more weathered wood than white, but the remaining paint was the only color not the same as the soil surrounding it.

“Could that be it?” Abby asked no one in particular.

“In five hundred yards, you will have reached your destination,” Tom-Tom said.

“Could someone actually live there?” Madison asked, disgusted.

“I suppose. It is the first building we’ve seen in almost an hour. I wonder if an ambulance would even try to make it here in time…” Chris wondered aloud.

“In one hundred yards, you will have reached your destination.”

“This is so northeastern backwoods Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” Madison said through a smile. She was a horror film aficionado.

“In fifty yards, you will have reached your destination.”

Abby instinctively eased up on the old Chevy’s gas petal, but not entirely. “Well, now I’m creeped out.”

Madison giggled in reply and Chris tossed out another of his dazzling smiles.

“Well, we are going to stop, right? We didn’t come all the way out here to get creeped out and go back, did we?” Chris asked.

“No, I need these pictures for my project.”

“You have reached your destination.”

Abby brought the Nova to a stop next to a battered mailbox fixed to the top of a weathered length of wood. Next to this was a dirt path leading toward the house. It was puck-marked with scattered puddles and lined with nothing. Everyone in the car sat silently for a moment, considering the house some hundred yards down the dirty trail.

“You’re not a chicken are you?” Chris taunted.

Abby heaved the wheel over and started the Nova down the rutted trail, bumping and jogging the car savagely.

“This is not how one fixes an alignment,” Chris said around an “are-you-nuts” chuckle.

“Slow it down a bit, babe,” Ethan counseled.

Abby eased up on the gas a bit and began avoiding the deeper pits. She aimed towards a pair of ancient pick-ups rotting alongside the dilapidated house, and brought the car to a whining stop.

“Hey, check out Aunt Jemima,” Chris said softly.

Next to the back of the house stood a plump black woman in an old sundress wrapped in a full-length white apron, her hair fixed tightly to her head with a red kerchief tied in the back. She was well-aged and weathered, much like the house.

The foursome climbed from the Nova and stretched out their kinks. “Afternoon, ma’am,” Abby said towards the old woman.

“Miss,” The old woman replied softly. “You all fixin’ on visitin’ the Heart house, is ya?”

Abby and Ethan approached the old woman as Abby replied, “Yes, ma’am. I’m writing a book about the house and its history. Do you know—?”

“Keep yourself from dat place, hear me? There ain’t no good up there, ain’t no good come from up there. You just stay away!”

“I think she’s lost it,” Ethan whispered to Abby.

“You mind me, young mastah: keep yourself aways!”

“Can I help you young people?”

Ethan and Abby turned in unison to find an older man in coveralls and flannel shirt considering them thoughtfully from the sagging porch. Farmer-style stains adorned his knees and his face was one earned from many days spent in the fields.

“Ah, hi, I’m Abigail Conner; I’m looking for Mr. Brighton…Thomas Brighton,” Abby said more like a question.

“Well, Miss Conner, you’ve found him. Why don’t you and your friends there come on in for some lemonade afore heading up? Gotta get ya the key and all.”

“That would be great! Can I use your bathroom, mister?” Madison asked.

“Ah yeah, sure, young miss. It’s right over there.” He pointed to a small closet-like structure a few yards from the side of the house, a quarter moon shape cut into the rickety door.

That was when Abby realized that Aunt Jemima was gone. She did not wonder on this long, every town had a crazy who liked to talk to strangers.

“Uh, thanks,” Madison tried to sound appreciative but failed miserably.

The farmer, his hair a wild mass of grey straw, chuckled softly to himself. “I’m just joshin’ on ya; it’s inside. Follow me, if ya please.” He turned and held the door open for them.

The inside was much nicer than the out, but everything—every picture, every stick of furniture, even the rugs and the old cabinet-style television—were as old as Abby’s grandparents were. It was neat, tidy, and mostly free of dust, many antiques positioned around the room in what appeared to be no specific order.

“Bathroom’s right in there, missy.” The farmer indicated a direction with the end of his index finger. “The rest of ya, make yourselves at home. There are some printouts over there on the TV about Heart House. Please mind the old things here, though; some are fragile, ya see. Now for some lemonade,” he finished as he lumbered into the kitchen.

Abby decided quickly that she liked the old man. He was a classic country gentleman and as hospitable as no one else was back at the university, or her home for that matter. Madison headed towards the bathroom as the rest of them eased their way into the outdated room filled with antiques.

Shelves displayed the expected artifacts: old shackles clearly broken by hammer and chisel, lanterns and bits of clothing, a smattering of ancient jewelry and documents, even oddly enough, muskets and musket paraphernalia. Abby would have thought that a more modern rifle had been in use during this time, and not the black powder, round ball shooting musket.

The oddest pieces were near the back of the room, leaning against the wall near the old television. Long iron poles stood silently against the wall, on the ends of which were cup-like clasps. She wondered if they were for holding brands to light canons from a safe distance—but why would canons be part of a collection of antiques designed to highlight the Underground Railroad?

Other, more obscure implements were on display here as well: clamps and straps, things with barbs and pointy protrusions. Abby was not sure of their purpose, but she thought that somehow all of these things were used to cause pain. She got the terrible feeling that the dark coloring on them was blood. She heard faintly, deep in her mind, the unbridled screaming of men bearing unimaginable pain and suffering. The screams echoed through her soul, and she began to feel a distant fear…of what, she did not know.

“Here we are,” the old man said as he placed a tray containing a neatly arranged set of glasses and a matching pitcher filled with ice and lemonade on a square table against the wall. “Help yourselves as you like,” he said gently before retiring himself to a worn easy chair in one corner conveniently aligned with the television.

“Thank you,” Chris said as he poured himself a glass.

“What are these…things here?” Abby asked, still a bit frightened by her musings.

“Those are wicked bits, aren’t they?” the old man replied without standing.

“Yes, they are,” Abby said.

“Where?” Chris asked curiously.

“There next to the television,” Abby replied. “What were they used for?”

“Well, the Heart House is very old, built to house guards and a warden for the prison hidden beneath. It was used to hold prisoners durin’ the War of Independence. Now, which is the case in most wars, captured prisoners have information. These tools were used by the warden to get that information from ’um.”

“They tortured them?” Abby asked, already sure of the answer.

“Tortured who?” Madison inquired as she entered the room.

“Why yes, young lady. For years, prisoners were brought to the house—they called it ‘The Hill’ back then—to have information extracted. It’s a horrible thing, what they did, but some say that them deeds is what won the war for us.”

“Still…” Ethan trailed off.

“This stuff is sick,” Chris commented.

“Where?” Madison asked excitedly as she rushed over to see. “Ah, this is so cool!”

The old man raised an eyebrow as the warm smile drained from his face.

“She’s a horror film nut,” Chris explained.

“I see. Well, when you’re done with the lemonade, I think you should be going. It’s a day’s hike up the mountain, and I don’t have enough beds to keep ya here overnight.”

“We brought camping and hiking stuff with us. Is there running water at the house?”

“Yes, miss, there is water. The Graybar family had it put in back in the forties afore they left. No electricity, though.”

“Is there anyone living up there now?” Ethan asked.

“Oh, no, not since the fifties. I put a generator up there some time back, but the gas probably turned to varnish by now. Not much gas left, if I remember correctly, so don’t count on it workin’, but you’re welcome to try. The key is there on that hook.” The old man pointed to a cottage-style key hook next to the front door. “Now you young folk stay out of the cellar up there. Nothing in there but trouble, and no help can get to ya for a long spell. Just hang your car keys on that hook as you leave.”

“What is this?” Madison asked holding one of the long black poles.

“That’s a burnin’ pole; they put embers in the cup on the end and used it to burn prisoners from the other side of the bars. I think they called them ‘singe rods’ or ‘cinder sticks’ or some such.” The old man said dryly, clearly unsettled by Madison’s fascination with the macabre.

“Oh,” she said as she put it back.

“We’ll be back here in two days,” Abby informed Mr. Brighton as she traded keys with the little hook.

“You all be careful up there now—and stay out of that cellar.”

“We will,” Chris promised as they passed through the front door and into the late afternoon chill.

Chapter 2

After collecting their gear from the Nova, the group gathered to look up the side of the mountain and into the forest growing there. “I really didn’t think it would be this hard of a climb,” Abby admitted softly.

“Think it looks tough now? Wait till we actually get to the base of the mountain,” Chris said under his breath.

“I know you can make it, Abs. It will be tough, but I’ll help you,” Ethan comforted.

“Hiked a mountain before, have you?” Chris asked.

“Yeah, a few: in the Delaware Water Gap and the Poconos.”

“Well, there’s not much in the way of mountains in Florida, so why don’t you lead, then?” Chris could be rather quick with his tongue, but he always gave way to experience.

“That okay with you, Abs?” Ethan asked as she snapped some photos of the mountain with her Canon EO1, a gift she bought herself when she changed her major to Photo Journalism—with Ethan’s technical advice of course.

“Fine with me; I’ve never been hiking in my life.”

“Well, we should get a start. We don’t have much daylight left and we need to be about halfway up by the time we make camp. Everyone ready?”

No one answered—they just looked at him—so Ethan began walking across the empty field toward the forest’s edge and the beginning of their assent to Heart House. They crossed the field quickly enough, considering the soft sand-like soil, and entered the scrubby forest.

The mountain began as a gentle rise, which grew steeper with each step. The sun began to hide itself behind the summit, which made the vibrant fall leaves glow like uncut gems. Abby began snapping photos all around her as they walked, clearly fascinated with the scenery. It was obvious that she was seeing the wonders of the wild forest in person for the first time in her life. Abby’s photo snapping was slowing them all down a bit, but there was no real schedule to keep, so none of the others mentioned the lack of progress. Madison and Chris where holding hands and chatting softly with each other, making promises to one another of favors to be made after they stopped for the night. Ethan was a bit surprised to see that Chris was holding a beer. They had brought quite a bit for a hiking trip, each of them sporting two six packs, but to be ascending a mountain and drinking beer seemed stupid to him, but it was Chris, after all.

As the light began to fail, Abby stowed her camera in its bag, lens cap securely in place. “I got about a hundred shots. Can we put them on your laptop when we stop?” Abby asked Ethan.

“Sure. We need to mind the battery, though; if the generator does not work, we’ll have to use the solar charger, which takes freaking forever.”

“That’s fine. I can see the pictures on the camera, and damn if they all don’t look really good. I just want to empty the memory stick.”

The sun had hidden itself completely behind the top of the mountain, and everyone’s legs were beginning to weaken. They had made it the better part of halfway up, and each of them wanted to stop though none of them mentioned it.

“Did anyone else hear that?” Chris asked with Madison peeking out from under his arm. They were a good ten feet behind Abby and Ethan and thus, a few feet below.

“Hear what?” Abby asked.

“I didn’t hear anything,” Madison said up to him, sounding a little frightened.

“I thought I heard a dog barking. There it is again—listen!”

They all strained to hear, holding perfectly still, their breathing shallow. The breeze made a light rustling sound through the trees and a distant owl called out to the encroaching darkness, but nothing else.

“I guess I was imagining it. I could have sworn I heard dogs barking…”

“Maybe you burned a fat cell from freshmen year,” Abby shot at him playfully.

Chris smiled big, “Yeah, baby, you know me.”

“Should we go ahead and stop here? If we made it this far in four hours, I am sure we can make the rest before dark tomorrow.” Ethan calculated.

“That sounds good to me. I’m starved; we still haven’t eaten yet,” Chris reminded them.

“I’m hungry now, too,” Abby added.

Chris dropped his backpack on the ground as an answer. “Should we setup the tents? It doesn’t look like rain, and I would prefer to be close to the fire.”

“Nah, let’s just get the fire going and cook up some dinner,” Ethan replied.

They all set to work, Chris and Ethan collecting wood and starting a fire, the girls gathering the cooking equipment. When the girls finished their task, they brought out their sleeping bags and snuggled to each other underneath, their heads poking out to watch the antics of the boys. Ethan thought this was a favorite hobby of women, passed down in their genes and not something taught them by their mothers: watch the men, share with each other the reasons why they were doing it wrong, and conceal the laughter.

As the men of the group erected the small cooking grate over the fire and set water to heat to mix with the dried food packets they had brought, the girls began to join the sleeping bags together by way of the zippers.

“Anyone want some coffee?” Chris asked, favoring the girls with a smile.

“Do we have enough water for some?” Ethan asked.

In the distance, near the foot of the mountain, a lone and empty baying floated up to them. Abby immediately thought of an old movie she had seen about a prison break where the dogs tracked down the escaped convicts.

“Did anyone else hear that?” Chris asked, smug in his knowledge of everyone’s answer. He always liked proving himself right.

“Was that a wolf?” Madison asked nervously.

The howl drifted up the mountain again; this time it was more than just one, a chorus of many dogs.

“It sounds more like bloodhounds,” Ethan ascertained.

“I think they are bloodhounds,” Abby agreed.

“Are you guys sure?” Madison asked, still sounding nervous.

Chris turned to her and smiled. “It’s the Ghost Wolves of Cedar Creek,” he said jokingly, mentioning a favorite horror movie of hers.

Madison smiled back at him. “Okay, no need to make fun. I’m not used to being in the woods at night.”

“Don’t worry, Madison, neither am I, and that was pretty spooky,” Abby comforted.

The baying came again, this time more distant and less sorrowful, closer to dogs at play.

“It’s probably someone duck or pheasant hunting or whatever you would use a pack of hounds for,” Ethan reasoned.

Chris brought the small pouch of food over to Madison and climbed into the sleeping bag with her. They began to share the food with small camping forks. Ethan brought his to Abby and did the same.

“Is there anything else I should know about sleeping in the woods; anything else that’s going to be so freaky?” Madison enquired around a mouth full of wet food.

“Well, small animals will be all around us and in the dark, they sound huge,” Chris advised. “My first night in the woods alone, I was fourteen and I thought there was a pack of bears all around the tent, digging and grubbing. I just sat in my tent waiting for them to begin tearing it apart; all the while, I had to piss so bad my eyes were beginning to float.”

“What’d you do?” Abby asked with a sly grin.

“Well, I opened the tent just enough and leaked out the door. Just hung it out there in the wind,” Chris smiled.

“Did you piss all over the tent?” Ethan asked.

“Not with his dick,” Madison said almost under her breath. She quickly covered her face. “I can’t believe I said that…”

“Not like you’re lying,” Chris added seriously, and Abby began to laugh. “It’s true,” Chris said defensively, and they all began to laugh, Chris being the last to join them.

“Oh, hey, guess what I brought?” Madison dug through her pack. She quickly produced a bottle of Wild Turkey and a large tin, the kind that holds those curiously strong mints.

“I’ll take some of the Turkey,” Chris said as he reached for the bottle.

Madison lifted the tin and popped the top open. A number of hand-rolled cigarettes popped up, bristling on one end.

“Hmm, and what would that be, my dear Madison?” Abby asked slyly. Madison’s party side never failed to produce the finest vehicles for escape.

“Some of the finest and I brought plenty.” She smiled.

It was becoming difficult to see very far, but not so that Abby missed the joint proffered her. She took a burning branch from the fire and lit it, passing it back to Madison. Chris just sat there taking hard pulls from the Turkey.

Ethan chose not to partake of any of Madison’s gifts, but sat and watched the fire closely. Even though these were the mountains of Pennsylvania, there were still bears and cougars about. If they were close, at least one of them should be sober. Since he seemed to be the only one among them that had even thought about this, he decided it should be him. Plus, he did not tell any of them he was carrying a weapon, something he did not like to share, and Turkey always seemed to make him want to.

When the doctors had finally cured him of his hallucinations after many years of intense therapy, they had not taken his paranoia. A child of age four could not even know to tell them he always felt threatened; like that dirty street man was lurking just beyond his reason. The doctors had never really convinced him until much later that the bum was not real, but by then, it was too late, and Ethan was always prepared for some form of eventuality, some type of horrible threat that others would be oblivious to. This is why, at a very young age, he started carrying a gun.

He was excited though; Abby was a bit more ravenous when she was stoned, more eager and willing to put things in her mouth. All he had to do was be patient and things would be rather interesting for him as well.

The girls had managed to get each other into a giggling fit that did not seem likely to subside soon. Chris was just sitting and watching the fire closely, intently, as if it offered the answers to deep questions only he had thought to ask.

Ethan’s legs felt good, if not oddly sore, and he looked forward to stretching out to watch the stars move slowly across the sky as he fell asleep. First, there would be major helpings of Abby, but then silence, the calming sensation of solitude, and the wonder of gently passing stars. He really did like camping.

The girls had finally ceased their hilarities, and Abby was getting that warm comfortable glow to her face, the precursor to a quick bout of passion that never failed to satisfy Ethan in a major way. However, a slow moving unease came over Ethan, working its way up his back and standing hairs up as it went. It was not unlike the sensation that someone was watching him, but mixed in with it was a dread with which he was not familiar, at least not recently.

He tried to shake the feeling that something was about to happen, that something horrible had come close and should not be. He began to search the edge of the fire’s light, looking for a source, the darkness beyond becoming more loathsome and unsettling. Without much thought, his hand found its way to the revolver in the top of his pack. The grip felt good in his hand, but lent no comfort to him as the dread began to rush over him.

The darkness that was the tree line became a border of reality to him. Just beyond this line waited the most horrible of creatures, the abomination of life itself. It waited there, silently, watching for an opportunity to do whatever wicked thing it had come to do. That’s when Ethan saw movement for the first time, and he drew the revolver from his pack and rested it next to him, drawing the hammer back until it clicked softly into its pent-up ready position.

Chris and Madison began to talk softly to each other, their sleeping bags beginning to boil and roll with their play. Softly, Madison giggled, and a large black man stepped into the firelight. He was barrel-chested and shirtless; the torn remains of his dungaree cover-alls the only clothing on him. He walked through the edge of the firelight barefoot, paying no mind to the people arranged there in their sleeping bags. Ethan raised the revolver and tracked him as he walked through.

If it had not been for his past troubles with his imagination and his reality, the numerous visits with doctors who just asked questions and listened, and the short stay in a special hospital, he would have shouted at the man walking through. He clamped down on his voice and refused it flight. Then, an older man came through, mostly naked like the first man, but trailing a young girl with him. This man was old and grizzled, but still healthy of body and ample of muscle. The type of physique earned through endless hard labor. He wore shorts, not nearly enough to protect him from the cold, and a straw hat, useless in the darkness. He, like the first man, paid no attention to those gathered around the fire.

Ethan lowered the gun as a woman came through. She was dark of skin, darker than he was used to when compared to the friends he had back at the college. She wore a torn and soiled sundress, a bit too small for her frame but functional. In the crook of her arm, she carried a small bundle, most certainly an infant. Before she left the firelight, a boy came through, really more a young man, trailing behind him a visibly exhausted male child. They were as thread bare and as mostly naked as the adults were. Not one of the many feet that had passed through wore shoes of any kind.

As the boy reached the edge of the light, he vanished—not like a wisp of smoke, more like an over-active imagination catching itself in a lie and trying to quickly right itself. Ethan jammed the gun back in the pack after relieving the hammer, satisfied he had an episode like the ones he used to have as a child. He had been off medications for a couple of years now, and it was an unsettling thing in and of itself, but he felt secure in the fact that it had all been in his mind.

He tied his pack tight and decided not to wait for Abby to come to her sexual senses. He took her gently, and she willingly allowed him. It was as short but as powerfully sweet as he had hoped and he was soon staring at the slowly moving stars with Abby a steamy puddle of satisfaction next to him.

It was not until the morning when Chris found footprints that Ethan began to wonder.

Chapter 3

“Well, who the hell would have walked through here barefoot? It was pretty freaking cold out last night,” Fear was prominent in Chris’s voice.

“I don’t know, man. What’s the big deal?” Ethan asked trying to sound more irritated than scared.

“And look here, there was more than one: a child it looks like, and two or three other bigger people. What’s going on here?”

“Relax, Chris, we got here late, it was dark, maybe they were here before we got here? It’s no big deal.”

“I guess. It’s just creepy; not like me to miss something like that.”

“Can we just go now? It’s cold and I want to make the house before sunset,” Abby half whined while clutching her coat around her.

“It’s not hard to tell which way to go, huh? Just keep going uphill and you end up at the Heart House,” Madison mused more to herself than to anyone.

“It’s still creepy. Man, do I have a headache,” Chris muttered as he began to follow Ethan uphill.

The sun had not been in the sky long, so the air was still chill and a while away from being warm. The travelers could see their breath as they climbed, now beginning to encounter large boulders with a dried moss fixed to their surface.

The group did not speak much as they walked, more strained than yesterday due to sore legs and blistered feet. They were not disgruntled yet, the idea of an adventure still fresh in their minds, but just not as jubilant as the day before. The idea of someone walking through their camp was a bit nerve-racking for most of them, except for Ethan, who was just flat out frightened.

“You know, I just thought of this… Slaves walked this same trek trying to get away. They very well could have passed over this very ground,” Abby said wistfully, clearly taken by the idea of touching history. Her statement did nothing more than give Ethan greater reason to be disturbed.

“Did this house handle a lot of runaway slaves?” Madison asked.

“No, actually they didn’t. This was a side stop, sort of. When the main trail was impassable, the runaways would come in this direction. So, no, not many slaves past through here, but some did.”

Ethan toyed with the idea of saying something, telling them about the people he had seen last night, but was afraid of their reaction, and for not telling them in the first place. It had to have been an episode, that was all. The doctor had told him they might return, and if they did to contact him or another qualified psychiatrist; this he would do when they got back. The University had them on staff if he needed them—hell, a whole department of them, actually.

“Did any of them die on this mountain, trying to get to the house?”

“Got me—there is not much written history about the Heart House, which is why I chose it as my project. If it does well enough in class, I will submit it to a publisher; see if I can’t earn a little money.”

“I hope it works out. Are you going to put me in the dedication or something?” Chris asked.

“No, not you, just your headache and a bottle of Turkey.”

This brought a few chuckles, and the mood of the group began to lighten.

Chris worked his way behind the others to watch Madison and Abby walk up the mountain. He so enjoyed women, and the opportunity to watch two rather nice looking ones work their way up the steep climb was an opportunity he did not wish to miss.

“Hey, how good are you with that camera?” Madison asked Abby.

“It’s what I am studying. Why?”

“I was thinking of adding some more risqué pictures to my portfolio and wondered if you wouldn’t mind shooting them at the house up there.”

“What do you mean?” Abby asked slowly.

“Well, nothing too bad, you know—not exactly pornographic, but implied nudes and full nudes…and maybe some with the guys back there watching our butts.”

“I’m game!” Chris shouted.

“Well, yeah, I guess. I don’t want credit for any of them…and you can’t tell anyone I shot them.”

“Why?”

“I’m trying to be a photojournalist; it might hurt my chances if a serious news magazine found out—”

“Oh, well, okay, that’s fine. I just want to spice up my portfolio.”

Abby almost ran directly into Ethan. He had stopped without warning and was just staring into the trees to the left. “What’s wrong, Ethan?”

He looked pale and shaken, and did not reply to her question. She followed where he was looking, and there, standing next to a tree, was a soldier—not a modern soldier, but one wearing what looked like the remains of a eighteenth century British uniform. He was clearly wounded in many places and bleeding from most of them. He was just standing there, breathing heavily, and looking up hill.

“What the fuck?” Chris hissed.

Ethan turned. “You see him? It’s not just me?” he whispered.

“I see him…” Abby said as she pulled free her camera, much like an old western gun slinger, and began snapping shots, one after the other with different zoom settings, as fast as she could take them.

The emotion of everyone was thick enough to taste. Then the distant call of hounds started again, but this time uphill. The soldier turned and fled silently down the hill, plowing headlong but making no sound whatsoever.

“Yeah, okay. I think it’s time to head back,” Madison said shakily.

“And what, not take any of those pictures?” Chris asked absently, still staring off in the direction the soldier had fled.

“Did we just see a ghost?” Abby asked.

“The hounds have stopped,” Chris commented.

“We are almost to the top and it’s past noon; we would not be able to make it down by nightfall. Should we just continue?” Ethan suggested.

“Wouldn’t going down be easier than going up?” Madison argued.

“No, it’s a lot trickier. It’s very easy to trip and fall—”

“Let’s continue, get to the house, and take the pictures. We can come back down in the morning,” Abby decided.

“Are you two scared of ghosts or something?” Chris teased.

“You didn’t just see that?” Madison whispered.

“Well, yeah, I saw something, but it’s gone now, and it didn’t hurt us or anything. Probably just a trick set up by farmer Joe-Bob down there to make us talk to other people about it, bring in more tourists. I don’t know—start an urban legend?”

“Come on. Let’s get up there and out of these woods. I, for one, would be more comfortable if we were more in the open or even under the roof of a house,” Ethan said as he began climbing again. “That and I’m hungry.”

The others paused a moment before following. Abby guessed that even if there was such a thing as ghosts, they could not hurt anyone—they were, after all, ghosts. She really did want to get these pictures taken and finish her book. She was certain it would not be a best seller, but if it sold anything at all, she would be able to get rid of that rusty blue Nova waiting for them at the farmer’s house.

“Do you believe in ghosts, Abby?” Madison asked, still shaken by her experience.

“Well, I didn’t, but I am not so sure now. If I was the only one to have seen it or if someone was trying to convince me they had seen it, then no.”

“Do you think that was a joke or a trick or whatever?”

“Did you notice there was no noise when the guy took off running?”

“Yeah, but don’t they teach soldiers that? You know, in basic training or whatever?”

“He was running headlong down the mountain. He was not attempting to be silent at all, yet there was no noise—that’s what bothers me.”

“Yeah, I guess so. I think it was a trick, you know, to make us talk and start rumors or folklore or whatever—make more people come and see this house.”

“It’s possible, I guess.”

The mountain finally made a lazy layover, and the uphill climb became the littered floor of a forest. “We must be close now, maybe a few hundred yards,” Abby called ahead to Ethan.

“How could someone live up here with no roads and stuff?” Madison asked.

“There was a road, but it winds up the mountain and is now mostly grown over. It would have taken us a few days to walk it,” Abby explained.

“Oh…”

They continued in silence, Madison evidently having run her brain dry of questions. The forest here, although thick, seemed runt and twisted. None of the trees seemed to grow very tall but they were obviously ancient, most of them showing signs of illness or at least a rough life in this part of the woods. Some were even burned—small circular scorch marks almost completely obliterated by bulging bark growth.

The forest suddenly gave way to a barren field made mostly of sun-baked mud, and only a few scrub weeds were brave enough to try growing there. It looked very much the definition of scorched earth, and to everyone, it just seemed wrong. However, in the very center stood a pristine white mansion, large and lavish looking. It held many windows in its three floors and glared a brilliant white on one side, the other drawing shadows along the dead earth.

“Wow!” Abby whispered. “It’s beautiful.”

“Jesus, it’s huge!” Chris muttered.

“Oh, I could live here in a heartbeat; needs some landscaping, though,” Madison said brightly.

Ethan just stood there, staring at the mansion. “What’s wrong, Ethan? See another ghost?” Chris asked sarcastically.

“Hey, bonehead, who has been coming up here and taking care of this house?” Ethan shot back.

“What do you mean, and don’t call me bonehead, jackass.” Chris sounded genuinely hurt.

“That house could have been built yesterday. The paintjob is like new and the windows aren’t broken. I mean, come on, the house is like two hundred and fifty years old, and I know that farmer down there isn’t coming up here and taking care of it. Hell, his own house is about to fall over.”

They just stared, considering what Ethan had just said, and once more, fear rose among them like a thin fog.

“I would think a haunted house would look less, I don’t know, hospitable?” Abby commented.

“Maybe that’s its power: draws people in, welcomes them home…” Ethan almost whispered.

“Well, now you’re freaking me out, dude,” Chris said.

“What should we do: just stand here?” Madison asked.

“No, let’s go ahead, see what’s up there. It’s just weird—the fact it’s not all run down and all,” Ethan commented before starting out across the field and toward the white building known as the Heart House.

Chapter 4

A short iron fence skirted the house, which was more decorative than defensive. Near the front walk, it ended abruptly, allowing passage to a narrow gravel path leading to the house. There were no bushes or grass, just sporadic weeds strangled by the dry, infertile soil, battling for their right to survive in this dead place. The foundation of the house was a neatly piled line of red bricks, which included a stair leading to a wood porch, still whole and solid, still a dazzling white.

Ethan, as he had been doing for the past couple of days, led the group along the walk, past the small statue of a black man holding a lantern, and to the foot of the brick stairs. Here, some minor weathering shown in the paint, and some of the boards of the porch were slightly warped and askew. The front part of the house bore wood shingles painted a brilliant white. The front door was a deep red, ominous in its color, simply too much like cooling blood. There were no windows along the sides of the door, but large glass bays adorned either side, indicating large rooms just beyond.

“It’s bigger than I thought it would be,” Abby said to herself.

“Sort of scary, don’t you think?” Madison asked, her voice more excited than apprehensive.

“Are we going up or not?” Chris worked his way between the others to mount the steps.

Ethan waited, watching to see if the porch would actually hold him, if a brick would work itself loose and send him sprawling. He did not expect any of this, considering the condition of the house, but if Chris was so adventurous, it was not a bad idea to just wait and see.

Chris made the porch quickly—taking two steps at a time—and strode to the front door. He tried the old iron handle, more a gate latch than a doorknob, but found it securely locked. “You guys coming?” he asked as he headed toward one of the large windows to one side. “This place is huge! Wait till you see the inside.”

Ethan began his ascent of the stairs, careful to use each one before the girls behind him. They were solid and seemed not very old at all. They were affixed with a cement not quite the same as modern buildings, grainier and darker blue in color, but which held firmly. The porch, however, was made of thick planks of wood, each giving slightly under his weight, but certainly sturdy enough to be safe. The two behind him followed shortly after and almost in perfect unison.

“There is a huge stairway in there—I mean big, like Life Styles of the Rich and Famous big,” Chris called to them as Abby began to dig in her pack for the key.

“There’s some furniture in there, old-style stuff,” Madison observed from the other window.

Ethan strolled over to where she was and looked in. “It looks like stuff from the late eighteen hundreds, not as old as I would have thought.”

“There have been a few families living here. The Hearts owned the house until 1878 before the last one died. The house was then sold off in a tax auction or something in the early 1900s,” Abby reported.

“You’ve been reading up on this house, haven’t you?” Ethan asked while looking through the window.

Abby stopped what she was doing and looked up at Ethan. “That sounded pretty nerdy, huh?”

“No, not really.”

“It’s my subject; I had to study it,” she said defensively.

Chris snickered under his breath as Ethan said, “I know. We all know, Abby.”

“It really is a nice house. If not for the remote location, it would be a sweet place to live,” Madison mused.

“I wouldn’t live here if you paid me. No clubs, no bars, no movie theaters—nothing to do at all around here,” Chris replied flatly.

“Sometimes, it’s nice to be secluded, you know: people don’t bother you, knock on your door selling Jesus or whatever,” Madison defended with her face twisted in mock hurt.

“Relax, babe, it’s just not for me is all,” Chris cooed to her with a broad smile.

“Found it!” Abby exclaimed as she stood with the large black iron key in her hand.

She approached the door as everyone else gathered around behind her. The lock gave easily and the door eased open with a high-pitched complaint as dust drifted down to dance and swirl in the failing sunlight.

Before them was a magnificent marble floor and two sweeping stairways, which led up to a railed balcony with hallways to either side. A grand passage led between the sweeping stairways and directly back to a rear porch many yards away. To each side were large rooms containing the bay windows they had spied through. Furniture sat tastefully, placed about in a matching Old World style. There were tables and large puffy chairs, bookcases and cabinets, even large masterfully-depicted oil paintings in wooden frames adorning the walls—all of this under a thin coating of fine dust.

“It’s almost like someone just moved out a month ago,” Ethan said as Abby drew her camera and started shooting in every direction. “Someone has to be coming up here on a regular basis, maybe to air the house out, paint it, you know…”

“Some of this stuff is worth a fortune, I bet,” Chris said in his most aristocratic voice. “An auction house would have a field-day in here.”

They began to fan out, gently stepping through the house as if afraid to disturb the dust collected there. Abby felt like a thief, who had just forced her entry into a rich family’s mansion and was now searching for trinkets to steal. The room she had entered was obviously a greeting room. Large thin-legged sofas and tables, a coat rack, and a large fireplace filled the room. Many candle sconces stood rigid against the walls, wax captured mid-drip around the edges. She could not shake the feeling that someone still lived here and that her presence would not be welcome. It was an uneasy feeling she had trouble quelling.

Chris entered what he guessed was the library: a room lined with shelves, each packed tightly with hardbound tomes. Many full body chairs where about, along with what must be a bar and a large center ceiling chandelier still holding half burnt candles. The room smelled of books, like the University Library back on campus, and carried the air of higher learning. This made Chris a bit uncomfortable; it is what he tried to escape when he agreed to come here. When he inspected the spines of the crowded books, he found he did not recognize any of the titles, some of which were not even in English. He knew as well as anyone that he was not the literary type, but there should have been at least one he recognized. What he could tell, even considering his minimal exposure to reading, was that they were very old.

Ethan and Madison had wandered into the length of the passage leading to the rear porch. Two other rooms opened off this passage, not with doors but, like the others, with arches. Ethan turned into the first he came to, apparently the kitchen. It held multiple potbelly stoves, larger than the ones he was familiar with, as well as two large opened fireplaces, one with a spit for roasting. They were clean and neat but sooty with use. Large wooden islands were about, one scored with slash marks, the other dry and dull as if used for baking and now stained with flour. A small table and chair sat near the only window—a place for the servants to eat, he imagined.

Madison had chosen to turn right, directly across from the kitchen, where she found an enormous dining hall. It held a dark colored wood table, ornate in carvings and curved of leg. The most noticeable characteristic, though, was the surprising length of it: nearly twenty feet long. The sides were lined with ten matched chairs of the same artistic cut and bowed-leg design as the table. At the head and foot of the table sat matching chairs, but wider and with a much taller back. On one side of the room silently sat a wide fireplace, useful for cooking as well as heating the room. On the other stood a hutch, still filled with china and glassware, and cabinets wide enough for placing trays of food. Hung over the table was a pair of chandeliers, both with many candleholders still stocked with thin yellowish candles. To Madison, this was the epitome of grandeur and decadence. She could easily see herself hosting a dinner party in here for important people of the film and modeling industries—after her discovery, that is. Famous actors and directors and other important celebrities would sit about, sipping the best of brandy, gushing compliments about her style and grace as a host and model, maybe even as an actor.

After many moments of exploration, and for Abby many shots with her camera, the group gathered at the foyer, just at the foot of one of the grand stairways. It was clear that each one of them stood impressed by what they had seen in the house, moved to either dreams of grandeur or disgust in decadence.

“Who wants to check out the upstairs?” Chris asked, always in some form of a rush.

“I have to go up there, take some shots. Ethan, I am going to need to dump this camera soon; we forgot to do it last night, and I am almost full.”

“Did you bring another memory stick?” he asked knowing she had not.

“No, just the one…” she replied with an apologetic smile.

“I’ll set the laptop up down here. Hey, you know what?” Ethan asked thoughtfully as he began to scan the higher reaches of the room and stairs, into the huge chandelier over the foyer.

The others began looking around the room in the same fashion, but saw nothing more than the richness of the place and the layer of dust over everything.

“What, Sherlock?” Chris asked sarcastically. “Are you going to tell us?”

“Uh, yeah…” His voiced was strained from looking directly overhead. “There are no cobwebs anywhere…”

“So?” Chris asked quickly.

“With the dust over everything, and a house this big, what keeps the spiders out?” he asked softly. “If you look around, you won’t see any bugs at all.”

“What do spiders have to do with cobwebs?” Madison asked.

“That’s where they come from, sweetie,” Abby responded gently before Chris could toss an insult at her. He was always quick to nip at people, even those he was sleeping with. Abby simply liked the sweet ignorance of Madison, and had, since she met her, protected her like a child.

“They do? Aw, gross! I hate spiders!” She shook a bit as if she could feel one crawling along her flesh.

“So what’s the big deal?” Chris asked, clearly becoming agitated at the fact he did not understand.

“No cobwebs, no spiders. Have you ever known a house that didn’t have spiders?” Ethan posed.

“Well, the doors and windows were all closed,” Chris reasoned.

“There is no such thing as an air-tight house, Chris,” Ethan explained, “especially one this old…”

“Once more: so? Who really cares if there are spiders in here or not? I’m going upstairs.” He began climbing the stairway, his aggravation at not understand Ethan’s concern obvious.

“Don’t you find it a bit odd that there are no spiders in a house this old?” Ethan asked Abby.

“Actually, I do. It’s not…I don’t know…natural?” Abby knew when Ethan was serious, and there was something about this lack of insect thing that really bothered him, which worried her as well.

“Hey, it’s fine with me; like I said, I don’t like spiders anyway,” Madison said brightly as she began following Chris up the steps. “Wait for me, Chris.”

“I’ll setup the laptop; you go get your pictures before the light’s gone completely,” Ethan urged Abby. It was getting on in the day, and with the sun nearly set, photography would be difficult without using the flash, which meant less battery life.

Abby stared at him a moment longer, sharing with him a splinter of apprehension, a fragile blossoming of dread that something was not right with the Heart House. It was almost imperceptible, a stealthy figure of wrongness, but she could not get her hands around it. She stared a moment longer, then favored him with a crooked smile before beginning her climb to the second floor.

Chapter 5

Ethan drew his laptop from its protective casing and set it on a small table behind one of the grand stairways. He angled the screen upwards and hit the shiny silver power button. It clicked, chirped, and then displayed a bright blue logo on the screen.

The computer and its inherent technology seemed grossly out of place here, it as odd an entrant as the people walking around upstairs. The thing whirred and popped softly as the cooling fans kicked on and then off to save the battery. Suddenly, Ethan felt a chill run across his ankles as a very light breezed played over the tops of his hiking boots and under the cuffs of his pants.

He looked down and scanned the floor for the source. He noticed a door next to the table which opened under the stairway. It was not an obvious door, designed to look much like the wall and moldings around it, but it was a door nonetheless. It was short, squat, and just slightly ajar, enough to allow the chilly breeze to waft across his feet.

He could hear the others walking around upstairs but chose not to call them down to see what he had discovered. He eased the door open and found a brick wall, not like the foundation or the steps to the front porch, but pitted, reddish bricks, very old and held together with aged and crumbling cement.

This was the first real sign of wear or apparent age Ethan had seen. It made him think the house was just a shell, a shiny wrapper for some bitter tasting candy. The house was actually old and near collapsing, as only seen in this small part hidden behind a small door, under new moldings and countless gallons of white paint.

The bricks were dirty orange and rounded at the edges. Clearly stamped in each one was the moniker U.S., which was worn and faded as well. They made him think of gold bars hidden deep within some vault somewhere. He reached up and gently felt the bricks. They were icy cold and vaguely moist. As his hand crossed a line of cement holding the bricks in place, it crumbled away like dry cookie dough, much more easily than it should have for old cement. He prodded it gently with his finger, and accidentally made a neat hole through the sandy stuff. He heard the smaller bits falling on what sounded like wood and then skittered down into oblivion. When he drew his finger out of the hole, he felt a rush of cold air. A rancid, sickly stench assailed his nose but quickly dissipated.

He made his way to the other stairway, but there was no door there. He returned to the glowing laptop, now ready for his user name, and logged in. He could hear the others coming down the stairs above him, talking loudly and sharing quips among themselves.

“Almost ready here. Come check this out, you guys,” Ethan called to them.

“What?” Chris asked, overzealous as usual.

As they came around the side of the stairs, Ethan absently pointed at the brick wall behind the door.

“Why would someone put a door there? You think they needed easy access to the foundation or something?” Abby asked as she shot a couple of pictures.

“It's not part of the foundation,” Ethan said as he took the camera from Abby. “There is a room or something behind it.”

“Why does it look so old?” Chris asked.

“I don’t know. I just found it myself. It’s really weak, too. See the hole there? I made that with my finger.”

The others just stared at the wall, all of them apparently as puzzled as Ethan was. He began to transfer the images from the camera’s small memory card onto the laptop as the others began investigating the wall.

“Why would someone wall this off?” Abby wondered aloud.

“Maybe there is hidden treasure behind it!” Chris offered quickly, ever hoping for the get-rich-quick solution of his life.

“Give it a rest.” Ethan said dryly and Abby chuckled.

“No, really, maybe someone hid something valuable behind here. Maybe it’s been forgotten about,” Chris seemed rather excited, even for him.

“Well, we won’t be busting down any walls. We are just guests here, and Mr. Brighton is not even charging us to visit,” Abby said flatly. “Can I see the pictures when you’re done? I want to get a closer look at the guy we saw on our way up.”

“Yeah, it’s almost done…”

Chris trailed off as a thud sound came from the wall, and each of them clearly heard it repeatedly as if something was rolling down wood steps.

“What the fuck, Chris? Didn’t you hear me?” Abby shouted. She was clearly upset now, her face washed in red.

“I didn’t do it! It fell all by itself!” Chris protested, his voice a bit strained. He was not actually close to the wall, but enough so in Abby’s opinion.

“He didn’t do it. I saw it. It just sort of fell,” Madison added quickly, trying to quell a building argument.

“Bullshit, guys. Come on, close the door. Don’t touch that wall anymore, okay?” Abby’s voice had softened and become more pleading.

“I didn’t do it!” Chris shouted louder. It was clear he was angry at the accusation, but almost unreasonably so.

“Fine. Let’s just close the door,” Abby said, sounding much like a mother counseling unruly children.

“Well, since there is this hole,” Chris said as he stepped aside to show a neatly missing brick, “couldn’t we take a look inside?” His anger had given way to that old excitement of adventure.

“Just be careful, don’t knock anymore bricks out or Mr. Brighton will be pissed,” Abby pleaded again.

“Yeah, sure, it’s not like he comes up here often enough to find out. I’ll get my flashlight,” Chris volunteered as he rushed toward the front door where the packs waited.

Madison tried to peer through the hole, but it was too dark. “It really cold in there,” she mused.

“Done. Here, click on ‘Slide Show’ to walk through the images,” Ethan offered as he slid the now-empty memory card back into the camera. “Just don’t take too long; the battery is already at ninety percent.”

“No problem. Thanks.” Abby rewarded him with a smile. She began to tap on a single key as the images changed on the screen.

“Here, look out,” Chris said as he worked his way around Madison. Ethan just stood back and watched the couple try to fit their face into the small hole where the brick had been.

“Ah, cool, you guys! There’s stairs going down and a room at the bottom. We have got to go down there!” Chris sounded like an over-imaginative child.

“Ethan, isn’t this where we saw that guy?” Abby asked as she scrolled quickly from one frame to the next, then back again.

Ethan leaned close; he liked hovering just out of touch with Abby. She was so warm, and even after two days without a shower, smelled fresh and wonderful. “Yeah, he was right there, next to the tree…” The man was absent from the photo.

“What’s that thing? No, other side, near the bottom,” Madison asked.

“I took eighteen pictures of that guy, and he is not in any of them. Could that be?” Abby asked the always-levelheaded Ethan.

“It looks like a dead rat or something. But look at this, over there, see it?” Chris pointed out to Madison.

“Could it be? It would have to be; it’s what we are looking at,” Ethan replied.

“Is that a coin?” Madison asked.

“What’s really strange, Ethan, is see there next to that small tree? See how in this picture it is bent, then in this one it isn’t? Almost like something was holding it down and then released it. See in this frame, it is past where it should be, then in this one standing straight up again?”

“No, it’s too big for a coin. Maybe it’s a pocket watch. I think there is a chain attached to it,” Chris said through the hole in the bricks.

“That’s precisely where he was when he started back down the hill again. Maybe the wind?” Ethan pondered.

“Maybe it’s a broach or something!” Madison began to sound as excited as Chris did.

“The other trees aren’t bent; the leaves are not even moved. Do you remember a breeze?”

Another brick fell free, coaxed by the faces pressed against it, and tumbled loudly down the stairs.

“Shit,” Abby whispered.

“Alright, guys, enough of that. Let’s shut the door before the whole wall comes down,” Ethan said authoritatively.

“Who put you in charge, man?” Chris asked defensively.

“Just shut the door, Chris, alright?” Abby asked, her voice strained with aggravation.

“I’m sorry, Abby. I didn’t think a brick wall could be so, I don’t know, easy to break,” Madison said, clearly sorry.

“It’s alright, Madison. Let’s just get the door shut. Maybe Brighton will think it’s just from age.”

Chris eased the door shut, obviously trying not to knock any more bricks loose. “Sorry, Abby,” Chris finally offered.

“We better get our beds made up and what not, and it really is time to eat.” Ethan said, trying to sound brighter than he felt. The person missing from the photos was a bit disturbing—too close to a need for the medication he had taken in the past. Even though the others had seen him, it was still just like it had been when he was younger and haunted by that bum with dead eyes.

“Can we cook in the kitchen, you think?” Ethan asked. “There was some wood there, and we need to eat the stuff in the cooler tonight before it goes bad.”

“Yeah, why not. Do we need more wood?” Abby asked.

“No, there is plenty in there. It’s old, but dry wood burns well. It will warm the house a bit, too. It’s getting cold in here.”

“Like a witch’s tit,” Chris said as he groped one of Madison’s ample breasts.

“Bite me,” Madison said as she rolled her eyes.

“Yeah, sure, but let’s eat first,” Chris retorted.

Ethan shut the laptop down as Chris carried the cooler into the kitchen, trailed by the others. He decided to leave the computer where it was and went with them into the kitchen.

“After dinner, can we take some pictures in that big room by the front door?” Madison asked Abby as she was cutting open pouches of used-to-be-frozen pasta.

“Yeah, I guess, if you want,” Abby replied trying not to sound too uncomfortable.

“Can I watch?” Chris asked, leaning closely toward Madison.

“Actually, I would like certain parts of your body in them, if you don’t mind.”

“That depends on what parts…” Chris trailed off slyly.

“Well, your arm or a leg, maybe a hand or two. Implied pornography.”

“If it’s got to do with porn, then I am there.”

“I sort of thought so,” Madison said while rolling her eyes again.

Abby leaned closely to Ethan who was monitoring a pot on one of the wood-burning stoves. “You will be there as well, my good man. I am not shooting this shit alone, got me?” she whispered to him.

Ethan turned and smiled into the red spreading across Abby’s face. “Sure, whatever you say.”

“What was that?” Chris asked.

“I said, ‘I am sure he won’t make you pay,’” Ethan replied loudly.

“Who won’t make you pay?”

“Brighton,” Abby answered.

“Listen, if he wants that damn wall fixed, I’ll pay for it, alright?” Chris sounded as though he was becoming angry again.

“Okay,” she replied quickly, clearly not believing he would.

“Tomorrow, can we do some artistic photos outside on the dry dirt out there? I think there would be a nice contrast with my skin,” Madison asked, trying to change the subject.

“Yeah, okay, if you want—but it will have to be right before we leave when the sun is on the other side of the house,” Abby said uncomfortably.

“That sounds great. Thanks for doing this for me.”

“Can I have a copy of the pictures?” Chris asked hopefully.

“Well, if you pay for them, yes.” Madison smiled at him.

“Maybe I can take my own pictures…” Chris offered.

Ethan came and sat at the small table carrying a couple of tinfoil trays of food. Abby followed shortly behind him with a couple more.

“Did you get enough photos of the place, Abby?” Ethan asked.

“Not quite yet. There is still a garden somewhere around here with an attached greenhouse, and I would like to shoot the rooms the escaping slaves stayed in when they were here.”

“Do you know where those are?” Chris asked, trying to work his way into the conversation. He never did like not being the center of attention.

Abby hoped silently that by the time they returned to the university, Madison would have grown tired of him and sent him on his way. She could just find another to share her bed with while failing out of college. Out loud, she said, “No, actually I don’t. I was hoping it would be obvious when we walked around the house. I had forgotten that other people had lived here. I am sure they have been done over—could have been one of the bedrooms upstairs.”

“Maybe they stayed down in that room behind the wall,” Ethan said.

“Could be; I hope not. I am not going to knock that wall down for pictures,” Abby stated firmly as she eyed Chris. He just raised his hands up defensively.

They finished eating but stayed to finish a couple of warm beers and pass another of Madison’s special Jamaican cigarettes around. This time, they all shared, even Ethan, certain he would need something to get through the photo shoot and the social discomfort that was to be a part of everyone’s evening.

Chapter 6

By the end of the hour, the group made their way back to the entry where Madison made a decision about which room to shoot in. To Abby’s chagrin, she chose both the library and the greeting room. She attached the flash to the top of her camera and set the white balance while Madison did her makeup. Chris sat and chatted with her, completely comfortable with what was about to happen. Ethan attempted to make himself a small piece of unobtrusive furniture in the corner, trying desperately to not draw attention. Abby was fine with this as long as he was close by.

The love seat, sitting off to one side, proved to be a fine pallet for Madison’s skin, and some of the sheers gently removed from the windows added mystery to the scene. Chris made a quick round with the lighter, sparking the candles that remained to life, giving the entire scene an ethereal sexy feel while still being warm and eclectic. Abby began to feel as though she might have a knack for this sort of thing, this type of photography—well, at least at setting the scene.

She had never done any form of model photography, had never directed a model, positioned her, or oversaw the application of makeup. She was trying to be a photojournalist not a fashion photographer. This would be a new experience, and since Abby did enjoy studying women, even in the nude, she thought this might not be too uncomfortable after all. She had never been attracted to another woman sexually, but found great beauty in the female form with just a small helping of lustfulness.

The sky had long since lost its grip on the sun and had grown dark and overcast. Not even the glare of the moon invaded the now bare windows. Beyond was a perfect blackness, broken only by the reflection of candlelight on the glass.

“I am going to have to use a slow shutter speed here, so when we frame up, you’ll have to hold real still. I don’t want to let this warm lighting go,” Abby instructed.

“That’s fine,” Madison said as she approached the couch. She suddenly pulled her shirt off, being careful not to smear her makeup, and dropped it to the floor. “Can we get this same light you think in the other room and maybe on the stairs?” she asked as she removed her bra and dropped it on top of the sweatshirt.

“Cold in here, toots?” Chris asked jokingly.

“It’s freezing in here,” she replied as she rolled her tight jeans to the floor.

Ethan’s breath stopped short, taken with the purity of her skin, untouched by freckle, scar, or even a simple birthmark. She was slender across her midriff and taunt muscles played just beneath her ripened, full breasts. She was a magnificent example of a woman: young, fresh, and almost overly-developed.

When she stood, Ethan was surprised to see she had not worn underwear. Her hips rounded perfectly along the sides and dissolved into legs, long and slender, even for her diminished height. He was also shocked to see she had trimmed her pubic hair into the shape of a heart, neatly, as if she had been to see a barber. Even the mound of her womanhood was smooth and developed without a blemish of any kind. Ethan was unsure he was going to be able to watch this play out as aroused as he was at that moment.

“Where do you want me, or how do you want me?” Madison asked as she shook her hair into a more passionate and wild cascade.

Abby found herself swallowing hard; her throat had become dry. Suddenly she felt both completely plain and unattractive as well as strongly aroused. She had never been this turned on by the sight of a woman before, and found it oddly curious, even considering the female perfection before her. Perhaps because it was real and not some movie one of her girl friends liked to share. “On the couch…however you’re comfortable, I guess. I have never done this, remember?”

“That’s fine.” Madison sat on the couch with a severely arched back. She parted her legs, threw her shoulders back, and let her head fall to one side, her hair washing down on one shoulder, her eyes searching longingly to the floor. “How’s this?”

Abby found she was speechless. This was the most outrageous thing she had ever done, the most erotic, the most enticing, and Madison was so perfectly sensual. She realized she had not said anything for a time and rushed out, “That’s good. Hold that.” She snapped a few pictures, from vaguely different angles. “I think I got it. You know, you’ll be able to see, well, everything in these pictures.”

“Great! That’s what I wanted. Here, try this one.” She stood, turned her back to the watchers, hiked one leg up onto the back of the couch, and poured her upper body into the cushions.

“You’re so fucking hot, babe,” Chris said, his voice clearly dry as well.

“You think so?” Madison asked sweetly.

Ethan cleared his throat nervously.

“Are you sure you want to go this far, Madison?” Abby asked.

“Oh, sure. In fact, can you come around a bit and get this one from almost behind me but not quite?”

“I thought this was supposed to be…what did you call it…implied something.” Abby’s voice suddenly sounded wet, as if her mouth was trying to hold too much saliva.

Madison rested her hiked knee on the couch and said, “Well, I sort of lied, I guess. I want to start my own website, you know, to make some more money. I was going to ask Ethan there if he could help me.”

Abby looked toward Ethan, but he just looked at her wide-eyed. “If that’s what you want, sweetie; I am sure it will be popular,” Abby said as she made her way a bit around Madison as she brought her knee back up. Abby steeled herself and knelt a bit to get the well-angled money-shot.

“Hey, Madison, give us a smile, won’t ya?” Chris asked, once more overly excited.

“You can’t see my face in this shot.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Chris replied with a chuckle.

“Oh… Hold on.” She reached beneath herself. “Like this?”

“Perfect!” Chris beamed.

Abby swallowed hard again and snapped multiple shots from varying angles. She felt her body reacting to Madison’s soft flesh, becoming warm all over and a bit moist. She wondered how well Ethan was handling all of this. Abby was sure it was much more erotic, a much stronger turn-on for him than her—at least she hoped. With this new rush of desire to have another woman—to hold her, caress her, taste her—she began to question her own sexuality.

Madison flipped herself over the arm of the couch and hugged her midriff; lifting her breast and making them appear even more firm and full. She perched her lips and gave Abby a wry smile. The camera sounded its artificial shutter many times. This rotation continued for some time: Madison changing her position, each either pornographic or sensual, Chris vocalizing his innuendoes, and Ethan remaining utterly silent.

Abby was becoming comfortable with her reaction to Madison and began to enjoy the animalistic arousal. Her direction, when needed, produced very provocative images and she began to think this might be a heretofore-untapped talent sitting recessed in her artistic mind. That is when the camera began to beep that it was full.

“We have to dump the camera; it won’t take very long,” Abby said.

“That’s fine,” Madison said breathily.

It dawned on Abby that Madison was most likely as aroused as she was, if not more. Abby was certain Madison was an exhibitionist, and most likely living out a fantasy.

“I want to do a group of masturbation shots next, if that’s okay.”

Abby felt herself shudder in anticipation. She hoped she would be able to contain herself for that, not do anything embarrassing. She was certain that some lesbian switch had not just been thrown, but she was more than ready to have her first encounter—even hoped for it.

Ethan powered up the laptop again without further prompting and began copying images. He was a brilliant red, and Abby thought this the cutest thing. She suddenly wondered if she had begun to love him. No matter, tonight she was going to tear him apart and leave him as a steamy puddle.

“You want to proof these, Abby?”

“Yeah, if I can.”

“Sure, here, you know what to do.” Ethan spun the laptop around to face her.

Abby began to scroll through the images she had just captured, every one something for her to be proud of even considering the content. She was certain that Madison would like them, especially if she wanted to do this website thing. Then something caught her eye: a shape in the background of one of the images. She looked up and scanned the room, but the shape was not there. It certainly did not take anything from the picture itself, so she continued.

Some fifty images later, the shape was there again, only this time much more prominent. It was most certainly the outline of a person standing near the couch but still out of the way. It was dark and not entirely in focus, but she was almost positive it was Chris. She just did not remember him getting into any of the shots.

“Chris, did you walk behind the couch while I was shooting?” she asked without looking away from the picture.

He was sitting next to Madison, and kissing her ferociously; Abby felt an unreasonable twang of jealousy at this. “Chris?”

“Yeah, say again?” he responded huskily.

“Did you go behind the couch while I was shooting?”

“No,” he said flatly and went back to his groping and facial sucking, Madison moaning in delight.

“Ethan, what do you think this is?”

Ethan came close to her and peered into the glow of the laptop’s screen. “Looks like someone standing there behind the couch. Here, let me see it.” Ethan took the laptop and drew a square around the section. It leapt forward and redrew down the screen. The shape was clearer, enough so to say it was a man who looked to be wearing all black. Abby glanced over at the couple on the couch just to make sure Chris was not dressed in black. He was still in his flannel and faded jeans but now wearing Madison like a school ring.

“Oh, great,” she muttered. “Can you get closer? It may be an aberration or reflection or something.”

Ethan drew the box two more times, and the screen took its time drawing the image again. This time it was clearly a man, wearing black, but the black of a priest. He wore around his neck the white collar and a gold cross suspended on a gold chain. His eyes were shadowed and dark, giving him an utterly evil appearance, a horrific semblance of a priest. Abby felt an icy chill run down her back as she searched the room again.

Although it was dark, all of the walls were visible around her, and there was no priest. She tried to reason this in her mind, but it would not come. Abby began to be afraid, and suddenly decided it was time to leave this house and go home.

“You guys should come and see this,” Ethan called.

“What? Are they good?” Madison asked from around Chris. “Let me up, you horn dog. I want to see the pictures.” She pushed off Chris who sat back with a huff. “Let me see,” she said excitedly.

Abby felt the spark of desire again when the naked Madison leaned over her shoulder, pressed her bare breasts warmly into her back, but it did little to belay the horror swelling in her chest.

“Who is that? He looks creepy as hell,” Madison said.

“He was behind you in the photo,” Abby said. Her mouth had gone dry once more, but this time from a building fear.

“No way, guys. You put him in there, freaking computer nerd. That’s not funny, alright?”

“I didn’t put him in there,” Ethan replied defensively.

Everyone but Abby looked around the room again in search of the figure in the photo. Abby had become transfixed with the darkness that should have been his eyes. She searched the black depths, looking for some semblance of eyes, she knew somehow that if she could find them, then he would not be so horribly frightening and would become just a man.

A loud rumbling sound came from the foyer, from beneath their feet, followed by a terrible earthy crash. The laptop shut off, the screen going dark in an instant. Madison let out a scream, which made Abby scream and grab on to Ethan. Both Ethan and Chris held their tongues, but neither of them had ever been this starkly afraid before.

“It was the wall,” Abby suddenly realized. “The damn wall fell.” Her anger bullied her fear aside as she stood.

Ethan went into the foyer first and turned toward the brick wall. Abby rushed up beside him. They turned on their flashlights and began scanning the floor. There were chunks of brick and concrete dust everywhere, scattered all around the floor, some of it still suspended in the air.

“That’s just fucking great!” Abby said hotly. “How are we going to clean this up?” She cradled her head in her hands, exasperation suddenly filling her with hopelessness.

“What is it?” Madison asked, hunched and close to Chris and, not surprisingly, still entirely nude.

“The damn wall came down; we really have a mess here. Brighton is going to be so pissed off,” Abby said angrily.

“Abby…” Ethan said gently.

“No, I don’t want to hear it. We should not have been poking at the damn wall. Now I have to come up with the money to replace it and clean this mess up. And just look at the wood floor!”

“Abby!” Ethan shouted urgently.

“What?”

“The door was closed, remember?”

“So? The bricks knocked it open, so what?” She sounded angry but just a little curious at the same time.

“The bricks fell upward hard enough to force the door open. Shouldn’t they have fallen down and into the cellar?”

Chapter 7

Abby stared at the pile of refused bricks and mortar trying to reason why they had not fallen down into the cellar. She thought that possibly there was a slight slant in the floor—maybe it was not perfectly level, perhaps it was just enough that it allowed the bricks to tumble outward and their weight forced the door open. It seemed reasonable to her, but it did nothing to quiet the uneasiness growing from the seed planted by the picture of the dark priest.

“Abby, we didn’t do that, did we?”

“No, Madison, you didn’t,” Ethan replied. “You may have weakened it, but by what I felt, it was about to come down anyway.”

“Abby, I’ll pay for it anyway,” Chris offered earnestly. It was rare to hear him speak sincerely.

“We can’t leave it like this. We have to find a way to clean it up. Madison, you better get dressed; this will be hard enough to do with flashlights without you being naked.”

“Yeah, okay. Really, Abby, I’m sorry about this.”

“It’s alright, Madison. Let’s just get it cleaned up,” Abby said with a sigh.

“What about the picture?” Ethan asked.

“You tell me, you’re the computer guy,” Abby replied as she knelt to inspect one of the bricks.

“Well, I guess it could have been an image at one point and it did not completely delete or something like that—sort of like double exposure with real film. I can reformat the card. That will make sure nothing hangs out. Do you remember taking a picture like that of a priest or something?”

“No, I’m sure I didn’t,” Abby said, wiping the dust from her hands, her face a twist of worry.

“Where did you get the memory card?”

“Online.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it then, but it is still very strange—almost like he was looking at Madison.”

“Yeah, I noticed that, too.”

“I’ll go get some flashlights, see if we can find something to sweep this up a bit,” Ethan said.

“Brighton is going to have my ass over this.”

“No, he won’t,” Ethan said over his shoulder, “that’s already mine.” Ethan always seemed to make her smile just when she needed it most.

Madison returned, fully clothed but still buttoning her jeans. “What should we do with these bricks? Take them outside?”

“You know, maybe we should just wait till daylight to do this. I don’t want to damage the floor, especially the marble in front,” Abby sighed.

“It will be okay, Abby, I promise. We can take the bricks to the woods and hide them, then close this door; could be years before farmer-dude down there even finds out,” Madison said cheerily.

This piqued Abby’s interest. “That just might work, but we would have to clean all this up like it never happened.”

“I promise not to leave until it’s done.” Madison smiled at her.

Now that she was clothed again, Abby did not feel the same odd desire she had before. She was just the cute, little, silly-minded Madison again, but this time with a good idea.

“Here are the flashlights.” Ethan said as he returned with arms full. “I brought the rain tarp to stack the bricks on.”

“I think we are going to do it in the morning, when we can see what we’re doing. Madison thinks we can hide the bricks in the woods and just shut the door. Do you think Brighton would find out?”

“I don’t see why that wouldn’t work. I really doubt he comes up here very often; he is too old, the hill too steep, the hike too long, you know?”

“He didn’t seem very frail to me,” Abby said, looking more for an argument than an agreement.

“He has arthritis in his hands; I could tell that when I shook it. If he has it there, it will also be in his knees or ankles or shoulders…”

“Alright, I was just ready to leave, but we can hide the bricks tomorrow morning and clear this dust and make it all nice again. We can leave in the afternoon or the day after.”

“You have all of your pictures for the book thing?” Madison asked.

“Enough, I think. We will see. I just want to leave now.”

“Where is Chris?” Ethan asked, suddenly aware one of them was missing.

“He was right here a second ago,” Abby responded as she looked around.

“Maybe he went outside to take a leak?” Madison offered.

“I was just at the door,” Ethan countered.

“Chris!” Madison shouted, but not very loud.

There was no answer.

“He’s like babysitting a—”

A scream ripped through the house like a shot of lightening—not the scream of someone simply scared, but the scream of a soul tormented. If not for the missing Chris, Abby would have sworn at first it had been a woman. Madison screamed in response, shocked at the sudden sound of it, haunted by the anguish in it.

“He’s in the cellar…” Ethan said. His voice staggered with fear and run dry. He ran back toward the door to grab his small backpack, the one with the gun.

“Chris!” Madison screamed. “Where are you?” Her voice pierced the ear, but still so utterly feminine.

“He is in the cellar, Ethan, hurry!”

The scream came again, crawling up the stairs like some wounded animal, squeezing the hearts in their chests, driving icicles like nails into their spines.

Ethan jammed a flashlight into Abby’s hand. “Why don’t you guys stay up here, I’ll go down—”

“I’m going with you.” Abby said firmly, “There might be a real story in this.” She remembered her camera and rushed to retrieve it.

“Here, Madison. Don’t drop this, we may need it. Did we bring a first aid kit?” he shouted toward Abby who skidded herself into a turn and rushed to get that as well.

Ethan went to the cellar door and shined his flashlight along the steps. They were made of a thick wood, dry and dark with age, bits of mortar settling on them. They had been solid enough to hold Chris; he and the others should not be a problem.

“Chris! Are you down there, Chris?” Ethan shouted down into the dark hole.

No reply came.

When Abby returned, Ethan started down the steps. They did not creak or give any sign of collapsing, but still he went slowly. A rush of dread and wrongfulness washed over him as if he were submerging himself in a pool of water gone wrong. This was a bad place, but not just in his mind. This was a real honest-to-God bad place, and he did not need a doctor or medication to help him understand this—he could feel it in his heart.

The walls were layered stones, flat like river rocks and stacked to the wooden rafters above. The steps had no handrail, giving anyone attempting to descend a feeling of instability as though at any moment a light breeze may whisk them off and into the darkness below.

“Chris!” Ethan shouted, but there was still no reply.

He continued slowly down the steps, still nervous with the wrongness. Suddenly, the steps seemed to sag a bit.

“Chris!” This time it was Abby’s voice which made Ethan jump. She had begun to come down the steps as well, placing each foot as gently as Ethan had.

Ethan reached the dry dirt floor of the cellar and began to search the large chamber with his light. It was utterly empty, a void of stone-stacked walls and dirt flooring. The air stank of wet mold, and the temperature was noticeably cooler than it was above. It reminded Ethan of his grandmother’s basement, a desolate place of stacked memories and mold, magazines and forgotten times—that was except for the fact this basement was starkly empty, not just of boxed memorabilia, but of Chris as well.

“Chris!” Abby shouted again, this time as she reached the bottom of the stairs.

“I don’t see him, but I know the scream came from down here,” Ethan said, his voice a mixture of fear and apprehension.

“Christopher!” Madison shouted from the steps. To Ethan, she sounded like an overly concerned Smurf. Her voice was too small for the volume she gave it, too delicate for such worry.

Chris and Abby began to circle the room, going around either side of the steep wooden steps. They met on the other side having found no trace of Chris, just the stacked stones and hard earthen floor.

“Where are you guys? I’m scared,” Madison whined child-like.

“Right here, sweetie. See the lights?” Abby responded gently. She realized that if Chris was in any real trouble and this was not some form of prank, her little Madison might not be able to handle it, might crack herself and become a useless puddle of weeping emotions.

“He is not in here,” Ethan whispered.

“He has to be somewhere down here… Wait, do you hear that?” Abby asked in a hush.

Ethan strained to hear over the sound of Madison’s feet scuffing through the loose dirt floor. Faintly, from a corner, he could just hear a distant sobbing, a deep and emotional release—the crying of one mourning the loss of their soul…or perhaps their sanity.

“Over near that corner,” Ethan pointed as Abby turned and followed. He walked gingerly to the recess, sweeping the floor with his flashlight before seeing Chris’s footprints. “Chris! Where are you?” he shouted loudly. Urgency was building in him; he had a feeling, a premonition that something horrible was about to happen. He felt this way often enough to not be mastered by it, but here and now, it was different, oddly-flavored compared to the other times before.

The footsteps stopped at the wall, and beyond, he could hear the mournful sobbing. “He walked through a wall?” Ethan asked aloud, clearly in disbelief.

Abby reached up and touched the wall. It was stiff but most certainly fabric. She whisked it away with her hand, sending an explosion of dust into the room. Behind laid a dark passage, near the end of which a faint sobbing echoed about.

“Chris!” Abby shouted down the passage. “What’s wrong, Chris? Answer me!” Abby felt the foreboding pressure, the self-preserving need to stay out of the passage, and so her voice became frantic.

The sobbing was the only sound that drifted back.

Ethan worked his way around her and started down the passage. It had the same dirt floor of the cellar but the walls were not stacked stones or brick, just the naked walls of carved rock. It was moist enough to almost rain, and chilly enough to give rise to gooseflesh. Their steps were almost silent, the dirt of the floor as fine as chalk dust. The beams of their flashlight flitted chaotically around the passage as they went, giving the whole scene a nightmarish fervor with glimpses of stone and earth, aged dark iron and rust.

“Chris! Answer me, damn it!” Abby almost screamed down the corridor.

Her urgency and franticness became infectious and Ethan began to move faster, almost running. He was afraid something might happen if they went too quickly, but could not contain his own insistent need to see Chris safe. The feeling of impending doom fed the urgency, and so he allowed himself the hazardous pace. A building cloak of fear began to weigh upon him, prod him, and threaten his already fragile sanity.

Ethan came to a skidding stop before what he had just now realized was a cell, a prison cell, and found Chris sitting within, hugging his knees in one corner and sobbing horribly. Ethan found it rather unsettling finding the most egotistical, self-important, and masculine among them reduced to a lost and tormented child.

“Chris?” Abby whispered gently, using her mother-of-Madison voice. “What’s wrong?” She tugged on the cell door, but it refused to move. “How did you get in there?”

Madison began to whimper as though she were about to cry.

“Chris, come and open the door. Chris!” Abby sounded every bit the concerned mother.

Chris did not move to open the door or even raise his head. His back jerked with spasms of crying, the only sign he was still breathing.

Ethan began trying to figure out how to open the door. The darkness and rust lent very little aid to discovering what released the door and allowed it to swing open. There was a latch, but it did not move, frozen in layers of rust. He found a large keyhole, almost large enough for his finger, but he had no tools with which to try and pick a lock.

“Chris! Come to the door!” Abby shouted at him, and Madison finally burst into fearful tears.

“It’s too late…” Chris croaked. His voice sounded dry and torn. “The captain is here now, and he wants to know things…”

“Chris, stand up and come here,” Abby demanded, once more in her gentle, motherly tone.

“He wants to know things…but I didn’t tell him. No.”

“Chris, you’re starting to scare me and you’re making Madison cry now.”

“Captain Black wants to know things…”

“Chris!” Abby screamed.

“Come on, Chris; let’s get out of here, alright?” Ethan urged.

“He wants to know everything,” Chris said firmly as he stood, facing away from the others. “I didn’t tell him anything, though. Captain Black didn’t get anything from me. But now it’s too late…” Chris unsnapped the leather sheath that came with his simple wood-handled Buck knife, and withdrew it.

“Chris, come on!” Abby pleaded. She was becoming mastered by the dread about her, the insistent pressure that Chris was about to do something terrible.

“That’s enough, Chris; time to go, dude,” Ethan added.

Chris pulled on the blade until it clicked open. “The Captain got these sticks, they burn… He wants to know things…” Chris said as he turned suddenly.

His skin now crowded with burns not much bigger than a thumbprint, oozing blood softly. There had to be hundreds of them, but the most horrible were his eyes, now burnt to empty sockets. They stared hollowly, but still wept blood down among the pockmarks on his face.

“Oh my God…” Abby sobbed.

“Chris! What happened to you? Come to the door!” Ethan shouted at him.

“Captain Black wants to know things …but he ain’t gettin' nothin’ outta me…” Chris trailed off and suddenly drove the knife into the side of his neck and forced it through his throat.

Madison screamed brutally as Chris sputtered through a wet breath and fell to his knees.

“Chris!” Abby screamed as she began to cry.

Then the blood came. A torrent of crimson rushed across the beams of the flashlight and Ethan began to hammer on the latch of the cell with his bare hands, cursing his helplessness as the flesh tore from his fists. Chris fell to his face and began flooding the cell with an unimaginable amount of blood.

Abby grabbed onto Madison and they wept together, the horror of what just happened almost too much for them to hold onto as a concrete reality, and Ethan stopped pounding on the cell door. He spotlighted Chris once more and took a step back to be closer to the girls. As he did, the cell door eased open slowly, shrieking through the rust like a bad violinist. Ethan wrestled his mind to calm, as the doctors had taught him, and it suddenly filled with an old black woman, warning them out of the cellar.

Chapter 8

Ethan’s feeling of encroaching dread, the premonition of unstoppable doom, did not want to subside even with Chris’s act of violent suicide. It began to consume his thoughts, overwhelm his personal despair, and his shock at the violence he had just witnessed pushed slowly to the back of his mind.“You all keep out dat cellar, hear?” echoed through.

He took Abby by her shoulders, the girls having collapsed to their knees to weep. “We have to go, Abby. We need to make our way down the mountain, get to Brighton or to a cellular signal or whatever, and call for help.”

“Why… why did he do it?” Abby sobbed, no longer the calm and collected mother of the group.

Ethan knew why. He had tried to take his own life when he was thirteen, haunted by that homeless man no one else could see. The terrible things the bum had told him, the horrible things he had shown him, it was more than any man should have to stand, less a child. However, to explain that to a normal person, one that had not seen it, was just not possible. “He was sick, Hon,” was all he could muster to say to Abby.

Madison stood first, her face streaked in mascara and other photo-ready makeup. She helped pull Abby up to her feet. “I want out of this fucking place,” Madison said through clenched teeth. “Take us out of here, Ethan, right now.” Her voice was bitter with disgust, but not loss.

“What would have made him do that? Really…” Abby pleaded for an answer.

“Don’t worry about it now, Abby. Let’s just get out of here.”

“He cut his own throat, for God’s sake! Who could do that?” Her voice was becoming stronger, angrier as she spoke. Ethan could tell she had met with a crossroads in her mind, one where three of the directions led to madness.

“Abby, look at me,” Ethan said sternly. “It is what he felt he had to do, and it was nothing you did. There was no way to stop him; there was no indication he was going to kill himself. This is not your fault, not my fault, not Madison’s fault. He is dead, and that is what happened.”

“Ethan, number one: do not talk to me like I’m a child. Number two: do you understand the determination you have to have before you can cut your own throat like that? Oh, and, three: he was covered in burns!”

“Yes, Abby, I know, alright?” Ethan spat back. “Now, we have to leave.” Ethan tried to lead her away from the cell.

“We can’t just leave him down here…” Abby pleaded as she craned her neck back to Chris.

“Listen, Abby, how did he get burned like that? Answer that, then ask yourself if you are coming with me or not!” Madison’s voice was becoming hysterical.

“I think it would be best if we all went,” Ethan added.

“We’ll call the police as soon as we get a signal on the phone,” Madison said in an attempt to convince her friend.

“Fine, it’s settled; now let’s get out of here,” Ethan said as he pulled her toward the end of the passage. It seemed much longer than it had when they came down, the end lost to the darkness.

After many moments, Abby planted her feet firmly, stopping the others. “Were all these cells here before?”

Ethan looked around like Madison was going. “I did not notice them before, but I was just trying to get to Chris.”

“I don’t think they were here,” Madison said worriedly.

“We should have reached the end,” Abby sent her flashlight’s beam down the passage, “and I don’t even see it.” The bite in her voice was beginning to mellow with fear again.

Ethan turned back to where they had come from, and the flashlight, left with Chris in his barred tomb was no longer visible. “What the…?”

“Alright, stop,” Abby commanded, once more in her mother’s voice, but clearly upset and afraid. “How the hell did we get lost in a straight passageway? We went back the way we came, right? Or did we go the wrong direction?”

“We went the right way, I’m sure. Chris was on the right side as we were coming, and then on the left when we were leaving.”

“I’m getting confused, guys,” Madison whined.

“Let’s go back the other way. How we went the wrong way, I’ll never know.” Abby turned and started out on her own.

“Abby! I know we went the right way. We had to!” Ethan shouted as he began to follow her, more important to keep everyone together then back tracking. “Abby, wait!”

In a few short steps, they came to a hole, a large hole with an iron rung ladder fixed into the stone, rusted and gritty looking. There was no way around it but to try to leap over, which was not an attractive idea considering the drop.

“This is just fucking peachy,” Abby said. “Have I gone insane or something?”

“Maybe,” Ethan said just under his breath. “But if you have, you are not alone.”

“How did we get lost? Guys, really, I want to get out of here,” Madison whimpered.

“Back the other way. This is really sick,” Abby said.

They did not make it back more than a few yards before another of the holes presented itself, the top rusted rung bent slightly. “I’m getting really scared now,” Abby whispered to Ethan.

“Yeah, me, too,” Ethan agreed. He dropped his pack and drew out a length of orange rope and the nickel-plated revolver. He shoved the revolver in his waistband and offered one end of the rope to Abby.

“What’s this for?”

“If we tie ourselves together, we won’t become separated. Either of you two have a cell phone?”

“Mine’s with my stuff,” Madison said.

“No,” Abby replied simply.

“Well, let’s just stay close together and find our way out. How big is this prison, Abby?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t know anything about it until Brighton told us.”

“It appears to be huge. I can see sixteen cells in either direction, and I know there are more, and there is another floor beneath us with more cells maybe. It’s just seems like a lot of prison space for captured troops.”

“I really don’t know,” Abby responded weakly. “Maybe they surrendered in battalions back then or something.”

“Alright. I’ll go down first, since it’s the only direction we seem to be able to go in, and I’ll let you know if it is safe.”

“Are you going to tie yourself to us?” Abby asked.

“No, I might fall or something. I don’t want to drag you in behind me.”

“You know this place isn’t…I don’t know…right?” Abby asked almost under her breath.

“I know.” Ethan placed his foot on the first rung and tested it to make sure it could hold his weight. It did, so he tried the next, and then the next until he found himself some twenty feet below the girls and their flashlights.

He found himself in a large room, this time with some sporadic fixtures. The pieces had succumbed to decay and age unlike the house above. From here, four wooden doors led in four different directions.

The oddest thing in the room was an enormous wooden cross leaning in one corner. It was made of wood and nailed together with large, block-headed iron nails. The wood was worked sloppily into a semblance of art, but so poorly as to make it look almost like someone was belittling its symbolism. He signaled the girls to come down while he went to inspect it.

As he expected, at the ends of the crossbeam and near the base, he found stains of a ruddy brown color, almost rust. He knew this had to be old blood, dried and absorbed into the wood. The idea of crucifying people so recently disturbed Ethan greatly, and he jumped when Madison dropped to the earthen floor.

Abby came down shortly after and they began to inspect the room from where they were, using their flashlights like holy relics ordained to ward the bearer from evil. Near the center and cut into the rock under the sandy floor was a hole suited to hold the large cross erect, satisfying Ethan’s questions as to if crucifixion actually did happen and the idea of it not a product of his slowly warping mind.

Abby approached the door closest to her and peered through the tiny window filled with rusting bars. Just beyond was a room, dark and ominous, with what her flashlight revealed to be a large wooden bed. Chains hung from the ceiling and draped to or close to the floor. Odd stains scarred the walls with a dark rust color. As she searched the floor with her light, she hovered on what looked to be a small white stick, dull and a bit dirty. Just before moving on, she realized it was the skeletal remains of a finger and screamed for the others’ attention.

“This must be where they tortured the soldiers,” Ethan thought aloud.

“This place is sick…actually I think I’m going to be sick…” Abby said around a mouth too full of spit.

“Can we go now?” Madison asked, clearly agitated.

“Yeah, let’s check the other doors. You know, I just thought of something: did you say, Abby, that they put a road up to here back in the fifties?” Ethan wondered.

“Up to the house, I think,” she said after clearing her mouth onto the floor.

“How did the Hearts get supplies up here without an access road?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Well, I’m betting that there is a tunnel out of here near the foot of the mountain. They had to get horses and food and prisoners and, you know, stuff up here.”

“I guess; I have no idea. Why are you asking me?” Abby was beginning to sound irritated as well.

“Just thinking out loud.”

Madison began to climb the iron rungs back to where they had come, and the first one pulled from of the wall. She fell to the floor with an audible rush of escaping breath.

Ethan went to help her up. “You alright? That had to hurt…”

“I’m fine. I guess we aren’t going back up there,” Madison said, still short of breath

“I got the feeling that we were not going to get out up there, anyway.”

“Why not, Ethan? Do you know something?” Abby asked him, accusation in her voice.

“Well, we walked in a straight line and got lost. Turned around, walked in a straight line, and almost fell in a hole. Turned around, there was another hole. You guys don’t feel the, I don’t know, strangeness down here?”

“I just feel like I need to get out of here,” Madison whimpered.

“Yeah, I feel it,” Abby agreed, her face a mask of growing desperation.

“Let’s look for another way to go,” Ethan suggested as he strode to another of the four doors.

The second concealed a rack of chisels and augers and other rusted iron hooks, all for the same apparent purpose. This room as well was spattered in layers of aged blood, rusted into the walls and on the wood racks.

“There seems to be a bit more to this place than what Brighton told us. I think a lot of torture happened here…and not so long ago,” Abby said.

“Who knows?” Ethan replied as he moved on.

“There is a passage in this one,” Madison called from the next door. “It goes on forever.”

Ethan peered into the small door window expecting to see another of the cruel chambers, but instead his light vanished down a lengthy brick passage. A bitter odor drifted in on the stale air; something acrid and woody was burning somewhere. “Do you smell something burning?”

“No…” Madison said thoughtfully.

“Let’s find our way out.” Abby unlatched the door and began walking down the hall.

The others fell in behind her with shuffling feet, scraping at the sandy floor. The walls seemed wet, oozing moisture along their height. The ceiling was tall, easily twelve or thirteen feet up, but it did little to ease the oppressive feeling of being underground. It made Ethan rather nervous, he being slightly claustrophobic.

Abby suddenly stopped, her flashlight held out before her like a shield. There in the glow stood a man, or a man-like thing, its skin a hideous gray color, scabbed and pitched. It wore a jacket of some kind, but shredded and torn and without any emblems. Its head leaned sickly to one side, dangling a stringy mat of hair that collected on the ground. On many areas of its body, small cracks had opened in the mushroom-colored skin, which leaked a puss-like fluid. All along its body, fixed deeply in the skin, were embers, small, smoking embers burning away at its flesh.

Madison looked at the thing, gagged once, then wretched small bits of pasta at the wall. The odor suddenly became so strong it was hard to breath.

Abby began to step backwards, pushing Ethan and Madison with each step. She was terrified beyond reason, and she could not take her eyes from the thing as she attempted to flee.

It turned its crooked neck slowly and peered at them from around the greasy mat of tangled black hair. When it did, Ethan could just make out the rod in his hand, the grotesque rod with the small clasping mechanism at the top. Like the ones in Mr. Brighton’s house, it was a cinder stick, and possibly the very thing that had tormented Chris before he took his own life. It wore as well a cutlass on a ruined belt, more rotten leather than useful harness. Ethan was suddenly sure that this was Captain Black.

Abby finally lost all control, spun on the two she had been pushing, and screamed, “Run!”

They all took off as the grotesque thing dripped and shuffled after them, its hair dragging on the ground, its steps tearing strands free. It trailed behind it the greasy smoke of burning flesh.

They reached the outer chamber quickly and rushed through the door. The first thing Ethan noticed was the cross now stood firmly in the stone cup in the floor. Nailed to the dry wood was the remains of Chris, his body gray with the lack of blood, the flesh of his neck yawning open to show his spine. Adding to the horror of this desecration was a savage mutilation that allowed the softer parts of him to fall out and collect in a pile of bloodless tubes on the floor. Madison vomited again.

Abby screamed an ungodly scream, a scream that Ethan had never imagined coming from a person, and ran to the next door. Madison stumbled and spit as she followed after. Ethan spun on his heels and drew the revolver tucked at the small of his back. He aimed with the flashlight’s help and waited until he could see the thing that pursued them.

“Ethan! There’s another hall! Come on!” Abby voice was as high pitched and strained with horror as Ethan felt.

“Don’t wait for me!” he shouted back as he began to fire. The large caliber hollow tips struck the figure and blossomed into explosions of gray flesh and puss. He pulled on the trigger repeatedly until the explosive retort became a metallic click. Even with the large, snot-filled holes, the thing continued its pursuit, slow and purposeful, intent on some wicked deed.

Ethan sprinted to the door the girls had gone through and turned just in time to see the thing tear an ember from its own flesh, affix it to the cinder stick, and begin to burn Chris’s corpse, already deeply branded, already long dead. Ethan closed the door and turned to see the two flashlights bobbling from floor to ceiling and back to floor as the girls ran down the passage.

Ethan started running, and after a few moments, found he was having trouble catching up to them. They were running headlong and hazardously as if Death on its pale horse rode behind them.

Chapter 9

The passage ended in a crossway. To the left were doors and more passage; to the right, a large room.

The girls slid to a stop, Madison bumping the wall before turning back to Ethan. She saw him coming, his face a grim standard, and screamed for all she was worth. Abby threw her arms around her and tried to staunch her own scream.

“What the fuck was that! Oh my sweet Jesus! What the fuck was that?” Madison screamed at Ethan.

“I don’t know! We have to go—now! I shot it six times; it didn’t even look at me!”

“Wait…stop…think…holy shit, guys, what do we do?” Abby seemed to be trying to regain control of herself, her eyes flickering down the passage.

“We get our asses out of here!” Madison shouted.

“We have to think, guys! We can’t just go running through here like prey! God, where are you?” Abby’s voice spun down to a whimpering cry.

“Alright, think…” Ethan said, the empty revolver still in his hand. “We can’t just run, I agree, but which way?”

“I don’t give a frog-fucking damn, people! Let’s just go!” Madison sounded on the verge of bolting.

“Okay, alright, let’s go this way,” Abby said, indicating the large room. “Its closer and we can always run back here. Where is that thing?”

“It stopped to burn holes into Chris. Did you see what happened to him?”

Abby did not answer and headed off to the large room. Ethan yanked the box of shells from his bag and started to fill the revolver as he followed her, Madison trailing by his shoulder, her eyes behind them, seeking the abomination.

The room was large and centered with a square hole the size of a car. All around the room, chains hung from the brick walls with tight loops of iron on each end. Inside these loops were the skeletal necks of many souls who lay scattered about the room in varying positions, only some of them complete. Near one side of the room, a skeleton leaned against the wall, as if sleeping, and around him were scattered many of the long bones of those closest to him. These bones had been broken or smashed and clearly picked clean.

“What kind of place is this?” Ethan asked. “This is sick.”

“They let them starve,” Abby whispered.

“It looks like they started to eat each other.” Ethan whispered. “What kind of demented person…” he began but did not finish.

They entered the room more slowly, uncertain of the reality of it all considering the visage giving them chase. In the center and over the edges of the hole lead three of the chains, at the end of each the remains of those finding suicide a better release than starvation.

“They hung themselves,” Madison said with breathy horror.

“Or were thrown in by the more cannibalistic of them.” Ethan’s voice sounded as if he were about to be ill. “There’s more in the hole,” he added after shining his flashlight down. “That’s a bit of a drop.”

“Let’s go back; we can’t get out here,” Abby urged as she started for the door.

They headed back toward the passage and stopped when they hit a wall of stench, the stench of burning flesh.

“Oh my God, it’s coming!” Abby gasped, frozen where she was.

“Go, before he blocks us in!” Ethan shouted.

The greasy tangle of hair made a lazy turn around the corner and stopped. The head rolled back with a crunching sound and the thing’s sword came free of the rotting belt. Its hand shook slowly, like an old person fighting a losing battle with age. It made a sinister sound, a wet hiss, but not like an angry snake, more like rusted iron drug across stone.

“Go back!” Abby pushed. “Go back!”

Ethan let the girls push past him as he raised the gun once more. He fired, striking the thing in the head. Behind him, one of the girls screamed at the sudden loud noise. It fell from the force of the round and struck the wall behind it. It slid a bit before trying to work itself back up. He fired again, each shot releasing more of the rancid ilk to splash across the wall and filling the passage with a rotting sickbed stench.

The second shot caught the thing in the chest, and this time, it fell flat on its back, yet it did not drop the sword or the cinder stick, still sizzling around bits of Chris’s flesh.

Ethan turned and ran after the girls.

He found them on the far side of the room, clutching each other, trying to shake their terror free.

“Did you kill it?” Madison screamed.

“No, the damn thing won’t die! I hit it in the head, and it didn’t even drop the sword.”

“Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed…” Abby began, her eyes clenched tightly.

“What do we do? We got to get out of here!” Madison screamed. She was clearly losing her mind, and doing so rapidly.

“Down! Let’s climb down the chains.”

“…on Earth, as it is in…”

Madison rushed for a chain and started to scramble down, leaving Abby to her prayer.

“…this day, our daily…”

“Abby! Come on! We are leaving!”

She looked up at him, but clearly frozen in terror. The stench of burning flesh and the gritty sound of iron and stone began to invade the room.

Ethan rushed to her and dragged her to the hole on her knees. “I can’t carry you down, Abby. You have to do this yourself.”

Madison had reached the end of her chain. “It’s not far enough to reach the ground.” She screamed, “Ethan, help me!”

Ethan was quickly approaching a point where he would snap. When he did, and this was his greatest fear, all bets were off, and he was sure that for an eternity, he would walk these halls seeking prey like this thing entering the room. “Abby, climb down, sweetie,” he said calmly as he brought the revolver back up. “Climb down, Abby.”

She finally rose and grasped the large links of one of the chains. Ethan fired a round, carefully aiming for the thing’s head. It flew backwards again, flinging the mockery of blood from the other wounds as well. Abby suddenly got hold of herself, shocked by the sudden retort of the gun, and scrambled over the edge, dropping quickly.

Ethan waited a moment for the thing to gain its knees and fired twice in rapid succession. Without checking his shots, he grabbed a chain and slid down, leaving flesh in the rust adorning the links. He had trouble stopping himself before sliding completely off the chain. He dropped his flashlight and pistol to use both hands, and he heard the unmistakable sound of dried bones crunching beneath their weight.

“I can’t hold on much longer!” Madison whined, the skeleton that once hung from her chain now shattered and fallen to the floor below.

Abby had managed to get her feet to clamp on the iron loop at the end of her chain, and seemed rather capable of holding there for some time. Ethan found himself stretched and swinging slowly back and forth almost by the tips of his fingers. “I’ll drop first. Try and hold on, Madison,” he ordered through clenched teeth then let go of his chain.

He felt as though he hung for just a split second before falling. He was not sure the distance, and at this point, did not bother worrying. He struck the floor hard, sending a raging burst of pain up his feet and into his ankles before rolling through the skeletal debris.

“Ethan!” Abby screamed down to him.

“It’s not that far, just try to roll when you land!”

Madison landed hard, but instead of rolling, she sat smashing a skull beneath her. She shrieked in pain and rolled to her side.

“Is she alright?” Abby shouted down. Before anyone could answer, a tangle of long hair oozed over the edge of the hole.

“Abby! He’s there, above you!”

Abby looked up and screamed in pure terror. The thing pulled an ember from the side of its neck and dropped it over the side, right at Abby’s open mouth. She tried to squirm away from it, but it glanced off her shoulder and she screamed again, this time in pain. She did not wait for another pelting, and let go of the chain.

“Roll!” Ethan shouted to her as she landed, and she managed to do just that, scattering bones as she went.

Another cinder came down and landed close to Madison who began to squirm out of the way on her side, much like a snake trying to escape that which had wounded it. Ethan crawled away from the opening as well, not ready to put weight on his feet quit yet. From above, a screech—more iron across stone—lanced down, sending waves of nausea through them.

“I don’t think he can reach us here,” Ethan spoke his hope aloud.

“I think I hurt myself,” Madison said matter-of-factly. She lifted herself up and threw her bottom out at Ethan. In two places, bone had pierced her jeans and stabbed into the meat.

“That doesn’t look too bad, Madison—could have been much worse. I don’t think I have any permanent injury. How about you, Abby?”

“My feet are ringing like bells.”

“That will pass. I need the first aid kit; we got to patch Madison up.”

“So much for the website, huh?” Madison asked sarcastically.

“You’ll be fine. You could always get a tattoo to cover these if they scar.” He gently removed the bone fragments and was pleased to see they had not gone in very deep. “These look superficial, but I want to scrub them out a bit. These bones don’t look very clean.”

Madison said nothing and just rose to her knees and dropped her pants. Ethan began rubbing the cuts with small peroxide pads, cleaning out the bits of debris.

“Anything for a burn in there?” Abby asked. “That fucker got me in the shoulder.”

Ethan used a few stretchy bandages on Madison before condemning her wonderful flesh to the confines of her tight jeans. “Let me see the burn…”

Abby dropped the side of her flannel then skinned her t-shirt over her arm. There, but thankfully small, was a length of seared flesh. It was cauterized and dry, but clearly painful. Ethan knew that if it had been worse, it would not have hurt as much. That was the merciful thing about burns, if there was such a thing: the worse they were, the less nerve there was to tell you about it.

“It’s pretty much a clean wound, Abby. I can use some of this cream stuff to make it softer and not crack open, but that’s about it.”

“Have at, Dr. Phillips,” she replied dryly.

As Ethan dressed the burn as best he could, Madison approached the flashlight Ethan had dropped and searched upward. “I think he’s gone.” She retrieved the loose flashlight and pistol and brought them back to Ethan.

Ethan began to look around the room with his light while Abby pulled her shirt back on. The space was so large that no walls could be seen around them, just scattered bones and endless brick flooring. “Well, someone has to pick a direction.”

Abby stood and pointed in a direction, wincing at the pain biting into her shoulder. “Let’s go that way.”

Ethan stood slowly, testing his feet. He found them sore and knew there would most likely be bruising later on, but he could walk. “Let’s go,” he said and began leading them in the direction Abby had chosen.

Before they could take their first step, a tapping sound came to them from many directions—a single tap of metal against stone, just once, but enough to freeze them in their tracks.

“What was that?” Madison whispered, and it sounded again.

Chapter 10

The sound echoed back to them over and again, its source still unclear, their direction now a question. The tapping sound was somewhat mechanical, but still something they immediately dreaded, not for the burning thing above, but of its own evil merit. Whatever the source, it was clear it was of ill intent.

“Which way is that coming from?” Abby whispered, straining to hear the sound again.

Before anyone could answer, the sound drifted through the darkness of the room.

“I don’t know…” Ethan whispered as he fumbled bullets into the spent chambers of the revolver.

“Witch…” The word groaned from every direction, a hideously dry voice, but wet in its consonants, then the tapping sound again.

Chills rose upon three necks and fear bloomed among them as an ugly flower.

“We can’t just sit here, we have to go,” Abby hissed as she pulled Ethan in a random direction.

Madison came as well, clinging to Ethan’s shirt like a lost child. Within a few paces, they came to the first gravestone. It was simple and arched across the top, pitted gray stone bearing no cross. Inscribed in the stone was a single word, WITCH.

Within a few steps, the three found countless more head stones, rotating outward in a spiral fashion, all etched with the word WITCH. There was barely enough space between them to place a body, if a body actually hid beneath the brick flooring. Abby reasoned that if any remains did exist below these bricks, they would have to be as ashes, a common end to a witch.

The tapping sound came again, this time not near them but to one side. The deceptive echoes had been overcome with what they hoped was a wall close by. They tried to quicken their pace, but the small headstones slowed their progression, the spiral staggered and careless in its construction. The darkness around them was perfect, with the exception of their flashlights, but they finally came to a curved wall. It was not the stacked shale stone of the other rooms or the large stone blocks, but the same small bricks of the floor. They stacked one atop the other with gritty cement and gave no clue as to the direction they should go.

The three paused briefly until the tapping sound echoed to them from the other side of the room. “Witch…”

Abby chose once more and made a right in search of a door or arch, a ladder or rope, some form of escape from the dreadful presence. Their lights seemed inadequate, too weak to guide them through a room of this size, but they continued heedlessly, spurred on by the continued metallic tapping.

Madison had known fear in her life—had thrilled in it, paid for it in theaters and in amusement parks; however, this was beyond even her tastes. A graveyard could be scary enough, but in this pitch-blackness, it could still the heart, shorten the breath. Add to this the tapping. The ominous quality of this metal against stone sound would have been enough without the bone-dry voice calling out from the pitch. This was not scary, it was insanity incarnate, and more than she thought her mind could handle. All Madison could focus on that very moment was Ethan’s shirt. Over and again she told herself not to let go, to grip it like a lifeline, like the only thing left to her of reality and normalcy. Inside, her mind screamed and struggled against reason, writhing in the bounds of her clarity and threatening to push her beyond the extent of her own limit to reason.

“There is an archway ahead; I can just see it,” Abby huffed over her shoulder.

“Go!” Ethan whispered harshly.

They shuffled their way through the many headstones, trying their best to avoid them, tripping against many of them often. Their fear pushing them faster than common sense should have allowed. The faster they seemed to go, the quicker the dread grew within them, which drove them to greater speed. Just ahead, gawking blackly before them was the archway and their escape.

Abby grasped the edge with her hand as the tapping sound filled the room and heaved herself inside. She threw her back against the wall, her breath fighting for more than her throat would allow.

Before them sat row after row of small, simple wooden benches. On many were skeletons still sitting erect, held upright by chain bonds, each one bearing a wooden placard also on a chain, and like the grave markers, each was etched with the word Witch.

At the end of the chamber stood an altar of ashen wood, grainy and drawn, fibers of its former self were missing along the length. In the center stood a wooden cross, adorned in the same mocking fashion as the one holding Chris, but this one vacant of any corpse. The whole scene appeared as some grotesque congregation praying for the release of their very souls, holding silently in their shackled bonds.

“I don’t see an exit…” Abby fretted.

“Behind the pulpit, there has to be one,” Ethan urged as he went forward and in between the remains of many of those marked Witch. They sat fixed; their mouths hung open in a gruesome semblance of laughter. So many left to die, praying for their salvation, knowing nothing but this bitter cold place with its unending darkness.

Behind the pulpit was no door or passage, no means of escape, convicting the threesome back to the graves of witches.

“Shit!” Ethan shouted and he turned to leave.

There in the entrance of the chapel stood blackness, blackness deeper then the darkness around it. Ethan lifted his light to it, and found a thing, a thing of long hair and ashen skin and of burned priests’ clothing.

This creature had a face, a face of contempt and rage, of ash and scar, of pure hideous evil. In its hand was an ornate walking stick, black of shaft but silver at the very tip—the tapping sound on stone. The thing’s palm, gently trailing smoke into the air around it, hid the other end. Then the thing smiled.

“Witch…” it hissed in its arid voice and began to walk toward them. This one did not move with the same stilted sloppiness of the creature above, but stiffly in the manor imagined of those dead.

Madison screamed an atrocious scream driven with a stellar volume, and Ethan leveled the barrel of his revolver at it.

“We want out of here! Show us how to get out of here!” His voice was high pitched and urgent, tossing the girls as victims to their own fears.

“Witch…” was the only response.

Ethan fired. The bullet struck the thing in its chest, and it stumbled backwards, seemingly more affected by the gun than its kin above. He fired again, this time aiming a bit higher. The round struck the throat and laid it open in a wide hole.

The thing wrapped a tendril-like hand across its throat and shook its head side to side.

“Tell us the way out!” Ethan screamed.

“Kill it!” Madison screamed.

He fired again. The thing’s head fell open, a splash of fluid spraying backward and upward from the ruined scalp. The thing stumbled again and paused. It raised its head and locked its remaining eye with Ethan. It then inverted the cane to reveal a glowing ember, the size of Ethan’s fist, and began toward them.

“Kill it!” Madison screamed again.

“Take the legs!” Abby shouted. “You can’t kill it, cripple it!”

Ethan lowered the gun a bit and fired. The flash blinded him for a moment, but it was easy to see he had hit the upper leg. The thing collapsed to one side, his leg nearly in two. It continued its progress on one knee, dragging the damaged leg. Ethan squeezed the trigger again, but this time, the round glanced off the floor and hit the thing in the abdomen. Even with the explosion of flesh from the other side, it did nothing to slow the now dangerously-close monstrosity.

The three began to back themselves closer to the wall, trying in vain to shrink away from it.

Ethan fired again and struck the good leg in the knee. It shattered visibly, and the thing fell to its face.

“Go! Go!” Ethan shouted.

They ran along the wall, the light whisking this way and that across the ancient bricks. The thing tried to reach them with the glowing end of the cane, but it had fallen just out of reach. They made the exit of the chapel, and Abby turned right.

Ethan grabbed her quickly, “We’ve been down there! This way…” He headed off in the other direction, avoiding the tombstones as he went.

Madison began to cry loudly and clutched onto Abby as she followed.

The room continued in a slow curve for many feet before letting them out and into a wide corridor. The walls here were like the room, constructed of brick, but they appeared redder, wetter. The floor became a worn wood plank decking. It was the color of the deepest soil but dry and brittle, splintering along all of its edges. On both sides stood gloomy wood doors with large iron handles, all of them black as coal. The passage ended abruptly in a wall of iron bars, a black void agape on its other side.

They entered the passage slowly, flashlights trying to be everywhere at once, trying to illuminate every detail. Each of them was driven by urgency but moved to caution by their fright. Slowly, their shoes scuffed the sand along the uneven wood of the floor, softly.

Abby noticed an odd-looking moss had overtaken the upper edges of the walls and hung downward limply, but she said nothing, still unreasonably afraid.

The doors offered no windows, just blank, aged wood patterns and an iron handle. Everything seemed moist and humid, even in the chill air. When they reached the bars, they found no latch, hinge, or any other mechanism that would allow them to move. The other side offered a continuance of the passage, continuing onward to the extent of their lights. An odd wind-driven howl held steadily in their ears from deep down the passage, far beyond the bars.

“Do you hear that?” Ethan asked.

“Is that wind?” Madison wondered hopefully.

“It sounds like it, huh?” he replied.

Abby suddenly grabbed the bars and threw her weight back and forth trying in vain to work one of the bars free. When she realized she could not, she tried to squeeze herself through.

“Abby, let’s try these doors. Maybe they will get us around there,” Ethan said gently.

“If they wanted us to get there,” she said in a strained voice, still trying to fit between the bars, “they would not have put the bars here.”

“Abby…”

“Fine, alright. Which door?”

“I would guess all of them,” Madison said as she pulled the nearest one open. It was a small storage area still stacked with old wooden crates, some stamped with illegible text, some still holding the remains of hemp rope handles, all covered in that grayish-green plant.

Ethan turned and opened another to find much the same thing, this room not quite as full as the other. There were some hides of some sort piled to one side, now almost completely gone to soil, and a small collection of iron cinder sticks leaning in one corner. They moved on to the next.

Each room had some quantity of crates stored within and a number of artifacts. There were colonial uniforms and insignia, black powder muskets, black powder horns, shot, utensils, and old fragments of clothing. In one, there was even an extensive collection of oil paintings now given to the mold that grew there.

Nearest the entrance of the large corridor, the door hid no room but another passage; this one filled with the stench of rot and wet, so much so the three where loath to enter. It appeared to slope downward and turned to the right near the end. The horrible looking plant had found purchase here as well and grew stagnantly along the walls and hung as snotty filaments from the ceiling.

They paused at the entrance until the sound of dragging and scraping came to them from the large graveyard. The priest-thing had worked its way from the chapel and was now dragging itself toward them. They took a moment to look at each other then entered the moist passage to escape the abomination drawing near.

Chapter 11

Ethan closed the door behind them, hoping their pursuer would be unable to reach the door’s rusted handle. The moisture had collected on the floor, pooling in some areas, making their footsteps sound hideous, like hissing whispers of wet sand against the ancient wood planking. Droplets of icy water fell from the stone ceiling and randomly pelted them, adding to the chill of the air.

Misery began to mix with their constant nagging fear, the pain of wounds and burns, the bone-chilling splash of water droplets, the unending suffocating darkness, and the constant nagging feeling of something watching.

Ethan, considering his past, was more capable of handling these feelings. The dirty bum that had stalked him as a preteen taught him how to cope with these feelings. Years of the bum’s torments handled by his adolescent mind produced calluses that remained even now. There were places within himself where the child-like fear could go and hide, lock itself behind a door, and cut itself off from the oppressive fright.

Abby clung to her stone-like common sense, her rock solid belief in normalcy. This all, to her, could not actually be happening, and in some small way, it provided her a shield, a lanyard to grasp instead of slipping into an infinite madness. This protection had begun to weaken, the reality of what had happened too harsh and perfectly real. It shook her bastion of beliefs and drove her to her faith for reassurance. It was weak shoring but the last of the remaining tools she could use to cope.

Madison had no such defenses, her life a script of manufactured thrills joined later by sexual frenzy. The unbridled exhilaration of roller coasters and horror movies, the timid and raw vulnerability she felt during her sexual exploits with multiple men and women was the sum of her experience and wisdom. None of what was happening now fit into any of this. She knew that no matter how terrifying a movie was, it was always hers to stop. She was free to select her own partners for her exploration of sexuality, and her no had always been no. What was happening to her now was beyond her control and something she was not ready to handle. The numbing effect of horror movies actually proved to be fragile, and this stark reality had penetrated her soul, which in turn began to change her perceptions of reality. The shift was not subtle, but an almost violent rending of her sanity.

She had first thought Chris was playing some cruel joke on them, but then when he ended his own life, she thought it the bitter result of too much liquor at too young an age, maybe even an acid trip revisiting him; but then the burning corpse thing, the priest from hell, the tormented souls, and the witches…none of this would fit easily into her understandings. Instead, they forced their way in, in a painfully jagged way. Early on, she knew somewhere deep in her mind that she might be going mad, but that was mostly a lost memory, and her thoughts now came from the darkness within her.

Many years ago, Madison had watched and thoroughly enjoyed a movie that had addressed a prime evil, an entity of Hell itself. This character had affected her greatly, and she had spent months trying to forget it, to abandon the unease and terror the memories had brought. Now, the voice spoke of its own accord, echoing through her head, nudging her toward mistrusted violence. The voice had started with simple words and short statements, but now it had become a complete and independent inner monologue ranting in her head. It told her things she knew were not true, but somehow seemed reasonable. These doubts were the fulcrum it used to unseat her sanity and send it tumbling. Its hideous whisperings, its threats against her had worn her into a deeper misery than the others.

Ethan came to an abrupt stop. Another hall had presented itself as an option to their progress. It was dark, dank, and smelled of rotting mold. “I think we should just keep following this one. It does not feel quite so wrong.”

“It also keeps leading down,” Abby added in agreement.

Ethan continued on his way, following the dryer wood-floored passage downward to his white whale of an escape. Abby followed wordlessly, the ever-droning follower of any that cared to lead her. Madison did not follow, but watched them walk into the distance, mindful to keep her light shining downward to keep from drawing their attention.

The voice had called to her and told her to stop there, told her that death and ruin would be hers should she continue with them. It was the first warning or threat she had heeded, and she was not exactly sure why, but at this moment, her reasoning was a small, child-like voice in a torrential storm of her madness. She turned down the other passage as the voice instructed and continued alone without the condemned to bring her to their deaths.

The dampness, the hideous looking tendrils hanging from the moss growth above, and the wet wood below her feet suddenly seemed more appropriate, as though it should be, and her discomfort began to swirl in the storm ravaging her mind. Her surroundings began to feel more right, more proper and wholesome, and she began to find comfort in it.

She found herself facing a large door of wood and iron but not of the same dilapidated age of the others she had passed through. The voice urged her to open it, to be welcomed in the domain of Father Burns. Somewhere deep within herself, she felt vaguely that this was wrong, that she could trust her friends, especially Abby, but her hand grasped the lever like door knob, and she eased it open.

The light from within took her sight for a moment before she could see the enormous number of candles burning in the chandeliers overhead. The room appeared finely decorated with Old World furniture, paintings, and even a large oval rug that covered almost the entire brick flooring. It was dry and warm, a large fireplace made sure of this, and in the very center stood the most beautiful man, young and vibrant in priestly garb. His hair was short and his eyes a soft, welcoming blue. His hands he held in front of him in a very unthreatening way, one clasping a Bible, and he smiled a dazzlingly warm smile.

“Welcome, my child. Come and be warmed.” He indicated the fireplace with a sweep of his hand. “Are you hungry? I have some fruit and some very nice wine if you like.”

The raging storm in Madison’s mind calmed suddenly, opened an eye like a tornado, and presented her this scene in utter clarity. The past few hours remained torn and fragmented in the gale, and she chose not to even reach for them. She had found her solace, her escape, and her heart sang in the triumph. “Please. Who are you?”

“I am Father Burns; I oversee the chapel here underneath the Heart House.”

“Am I still in the House?” Madison asked as she approached the fire.

“In a manner of speaking, yes you are. Why, don’t you like the House?”

Images of the dining hall, the grand sweeping stairway, the memory of yet-to-be-hosted parties fell from the swirling storm. “Yes…it’s marvelous!”

The fire began to penetrate her clothing, to warm the chilled flesh beneath it.

“That’s wonderful, child. Have you given any thought to staying here?”

His voice was sweet and encouraging, entrancing to Madison, and she found herself entertaining the idea of having sex with a priest.

“Actually, Father, I had thought of it. I have a promising career in modeling and had daydreamed of buying this house.”

“It is a grand home indeed. The Hearts loved it, had their children here, and flourished, they did.”

“Are they no longer here?” Madison was not sure why she suddenly asked this, but was certain of the answer.

“Yes, in a way, they are still about, but they do not claim ownership of the House, not in the way you are thinking. They would like such a lovely girl as you to own it.” He handed her a small tray with some sliced peaches and a medieval-style goblet filled with red wine.

“Thank you, Father,” she said and sipped at the wine. It was fruity but dry and wonderfully aged. “Can you tell me, Father, what happened here? Why are there so many dead?”

“Oh, that, child, is nothing to be worried about. This has been, and for many years, a place for the cleansing of witches.”

“But why have they died?”

“We do not execute witches, dear child. We make an effort to exercise the evil in them, and return them to society. Some, alas, chose not to allow the cure. This does not keep us from trying.” His voice was thick with sweetness.

It sounded perfectly reasonable to Madison, who found a chair to fill near the dancing flames. He was doing good works here, trying to rid the world of evil, and these catacombs certainly teamed with it. She could hear a tiny voice inside her, screaming from a great distance, demanding that she flee.

Father Burns took the seat across from her and crossed his legs with complete elegance. “You seem troubled by this, child.”

“It’s not that, Father. I am surprised you would be here and do such work alone. Isn’t it dangerous?”

“Oh, child, I am not alone. I have many helping me; they serve me and my cause with great devotion.”

Madison tried desperately to remember why she was here, but the wine seemed to be going straight to her head, clouding the memories of her most recent past. She fought for control of her thoughts. “How does someone serve your cause?”

“Well, in many ways, actually. Are you entertaining the notion of helping me?” His voice was gentle and not expectant. It was as though he had all the time in the world, and did not wish to rush her from the fire.

To Madison, this seemed like an inviting idea. She could gaze into those warm blue eyes forever, and to help such a just cause was a noble thing. Still, she hesitated. “It sounds like a good idea…”

“But you are young and full of the lust for flesh and are not ready to give that up,” he stated with authority.

It was as though he had not just plucked the idea from her head but placed it there, even though she knew it to be wholly her own. “Yes,” she said as she lowered her face in shame.

“Well, we can serve that here as well, and in such ways you have not even begun to imagine.”

She looked up again, and locked onto his eyes. Her face ran warm with red, and her mouth wet with the thought of having him. “Father?”

“No, child, not with me, but with others more apt to serve such a need.”

“Others?” she asked gently.

“Yes…” he trailed off in almost a hiss, but still with the same gentle warmness in his voice.

At this, men began to enter the room from a recess she had not seen—large African men, well muscled and beautiful, their faces all of them different but chiseled from the same marble. Their physiques were magnificent, and their eyes held a longing for her she was not used to, but reveled in. They stood in a line, shoulder to shoulder, looking at her with a barely-bridled passion, all completely nude. Madison found herself longing to have them right there, right now and in front of a priest.

“See? I am not ignorant of need. If you join me in my cause, these men will be yours to have as you like, whenever you like.”

Madison found her breath short, and it was almost painful to look away from the magnificent dark skin before her. “For how long would I serve?” She could think of nothing else to ask, her mind made up but almost not by her.

“Only until you wish to leave. None are bound to service. They may choose to go whenever they like,” he said simply around his warm and trusting smile.

“I think I might like that,” she said entranced by the priest’s eyes, longing to return her gaze to the engorged manhood beside her. The desire sent the storm in her head into a wicked howling frenzy.

“You just have to allow me to give you Communion, and it is done.”

Madison would have given him an arm at that moment, just to be able to tear her own clothing off and join with these men. She slid from the chair and to her knees, bowing her head as she had seen on television. “I have never done this before, Father.”

“It is a simple thing,” he said as he took one of the wet peach wedges off the tray. “This is my body…” He held the peach before her lips.

She opened her mouth and felt an exhilarating arousal at his placing it in her mouth.

He took her wine goblet and held it before her. “This is my blood…” he almost sang, his voice perfectly made for the bedroom.

She allowed the rim of the goblet to part her lips, and she drank deeply, imagining it was really of his body.

The priest stood abruptly. “That is it, child. Now, enjoy yourself and we will talk of duties later.”

“You will not be staying, Father?”

He stopped and turned back to her, his face suddenly cold and distant. It had changed so severely that it shocked her.

“No, I have others to attend to,” he said as he turned to leave the room.

The turmoil of Madison’s mind suddenly froze, and her former conscience formed in the eye. This was her last moment of clarity, her final grasp of reality. The men began to encircle her, grabbing and squeezing painfully at her more tender places. As she looked to them to raise a complaint, she saw that they were actually rotted corpses, almost gone completely to bone with the exception of their scabbed and bleeding manhood.

She turned to scream and caught her final vision of the priest as it really was: its dilapidated body, its fist smoking around the head of the walking stick, its legs whole once more. Then the men fell upon her, smothering her voice, and she allowed herself to slip back into the comfort of her own madness.

Chapter 12

Ethan and Abby continued, both unaware that Madison was no longer with them. The stress of the past hours and their steel-like need for each other did not allow for such an observation, at least immediately. The passage’s darkness drew from them their need to care for anyone other than themselves, each other, and their current situation.

The passage they traversed broke many times to allow traffic to turn this way or that, but the pair remained steadfast with their decision to seek the end. Maintaining a constant direction should allow, at least at some point, for the running out of mountain, which then would require it to grant them their freedom. It was an unspoken hope between them, an understanding neither of them had to voice.

The mold had grown thicker as they went, hanging like the tendrils of some odd spider, threatening to grapple and suck from them their dissolved innards. They had to, in some places, move it to one side with their arms, loathing the wet and clammy feel of the grayish yellow flesh, but not ready to turn back and seek out other directions.

The passage seemed to continue infinitely, certainly more than was required for a prison and rooms of torture. This place must have served other purposes, most certainly those dark and sinister. Bits of debris found scattered here and there were most certainly bones—human bones—and likely the remains of digits from hand or foot. It was as if the entire British army had come here and been tormented by, Ethan supposed, Captain Black.

Abby suddenly took Ethan’s hand as they walked, and he was glad she had. Her hand was alive and warm and part of Abby, unlike this maze of passages and evil rooms. It was near an hour that they had been walking when they came to a sudden end. The passage, having no doors, suddenly terminated in plated iron riveted directly into what Abby was sure the skin of the very mountain itself. Her heart dropped at the sight, and she just stood there, trying to hold back a rushing need to weep. Ethan seemed to be doing the same thing, but with more grace. They stood there, hand in hand, mourning their situation for many moments, and then the floor snapped.

It was a loud retort in the dead silent passage, the sound of a large branch snapping from a tree. At the same instant, the floor sagged suddenly many inches beneath them, and Abby chirped a surprise scream. Then the entire thing gave way and they fell in a shower of ancient wet lumber to a dirt floor below.

Abby screamed again, this time clearly in pain. She had landed on her feet, but not quite squarely, the fragments of wood twisting her foot. She collapsed to her side and grabbed her shin, rolling back and forth in agony reciting every curse she had ever heard in her nineteen years of life.

Ethan managed to land mostly on his feet, where an explosion of white pain shot through his bruised heels and out the top of his head. He grunted loudly as the air rushed from him and he sat hard. A growl of anguish and pain came from him, slowly building in volume until he finally screamed and pounded the floor with his fists.

“Ethan…I think I’m hurt this time…” Abby said softly, her eyes squeezing tears from her closed lids.

“I’m coming; give me a sec. Damn that hurt!”

“I think I broke my ankle. Fuck!” Her shout echoed along the passage.

Ethan crawled over to her on his stomach and lifted the cuff from above her shoe. It looked solid, but a blue baseball was slowly replacing her ankle. He quickly untied her shoe, and pulled it open. “I don’t think it is broken, but it looks like it is. Did you twist it?”

“Yeah, I landed on a piece of wood.”

“It could be a tear, not sure. We will have to bind it after it is done swelling.”

“Are you hurt?”

“I don’t think so… I will need a few minutes before I can walk again, though.”

“Madison, are you hurt?” Abby asked while prodding at her ankle.

Ethan began searching around them with the flashlight. Each second that had passed without an answer made his search more and more frantic. “Madison! Where are you?” he shouted.

“Where is she?” Abby asked frantically. “Wasn’t she right behind us?” Her voice was becoming accusatory and angry.

“Madison!” Ethan shouted again. “She was. Maybe she didn’t fall…” He scooted backwards, still sitting, and searched the above with his light. “Madison!”

“Find her, Ethan! She’s like a child. We can’t lose her! Not Madison!”

“I’m looking!” Ethan shouted at her. “Madison!” His voice went hoarse.

“Madi!” Abby screamed. “Oh my God, not Madison…Madison!” She hung her head and began to weep, weep for the poor, gentle Madison, weep for the pain of her ankle, and weep for their situation. She chose that moment to have it out, to let go the weariness and pain, the fear and self-pity.

Ethan crawled up beside her and held her as close as he could, cooing and coddling her, allowing silent tears to fall from his own eyes. He had not particularly known Madison, she was Abby’s friend, but he could hear Abby’s loss in her sobbing, he could tell her soul lie twisted to a painful place. Therefore, he wept with her, for her pain, for her loss, for her sake.

After many minutes, the pain had subsided in Ethan’s feet, and he felt confident he could walk again. Abby had shown signs of ebbing, and he leaned her back against the wall gently. “I have to check that ankle.”

“It sort of burns, tingles like it was asleep,” she said after sniffing and running a sleeve across her face.

Ethan put the light on it and her ankle purple and angry. He was no doctor but thought that if it had been broken, she would be in much more pain than this. “Think you can try standing on it?”

She scooted her back up the wall, bobbling the foot in front of her until she could rest it easily on the ground. She put some weight on it, and it seemed to hold. “It doesn’t hurt very much, but it feels wet and I don’t know…sloppy?”

“That’s good; no break but I am pretty sure there was a tear, so it would be best if I help you walk until we get you to a doctor.”

“Why don’t you look in the wood there, see if there is enough of a piece to make a cane or a crutch?”

Ethan looked around him as if the wood had just suddenly appeared. He kicked some of the debris around until he found a length sturdy enough for a cane. “This might work. Let me work some of the edge off…” He turned the wood over and began working it against the brick wall, sanding it roughly down and into a rounded top. The other side he worked into a flat surface to give it a bit more stability. Satisfied with his work, he offered it to Abby, “Here, try this.”

Abby was able to hobble around well enough for them to continue. The corridor was much like the one above, but this time the floor was dirt instead of the wood planking. The outer end of the passage was also covered in iron plating, and it continued back in the direction from which they had come.

“What do we do about Madison?” Abby asked with the slightest glimmer of hope in her eye.

“We go and get help. We bring the police or the army or whoever, and we take this damn place over until we find her.”

“She is going to be so scared by herself,” Abby said sadly.

“I didn’t even notice she was gone until you said something.”

They started down the passage, no longer holding hands to allow for use of the cane.

“Do you think we will find her again?” Abby sounded on the verge of crying again.

“I think so. Depends on how fast we actually get out of here and bring help back.”

They came to a cross section where they could go left or continue straight as they had above. Ethan looked at Abby and could see the pain on her face, the small beads of sweat collecting on her brow. “Does that hurt now?”

“Yeah,” she huffed. “A little now.”

“Let me see what we have for pain.”

“I could use something to eat and drink. You don’t happen to have that in there, do you, my little Boy Scout?”

He did not answer but offered her an energy bar, the kind that mountain climbers or long distant runners eat for quick energy.

“Are there a lot of calories in this?” she asked him.

He rolled his eyes at her. “They are all good calories; just eat it. I have three bottles of water also, and nine more of those bars. Here we go, and some Tylenol for that ankle.” He offered her a bottle of water and a fist closed around some pills.

She took the pills and they shared the water as Ethan worked his way through the mostly-oat energy bar.

“So, which way you think?” Ethan asked.

“Let’s go left this time; the air that way doesn’t seem so stagnant.”

They continued on, moving much slower than before, but Ethan did not say anything. He could only imagine the pain she was in and did not want to push past her tolerance. The concern for Madison was urging her hard enough, and to push further could cause her worse injury.

“Oh my God! Do you smell that?” Abby asked excitedly.

“What?”

“I smell pine! This is fresh air; we’re close to being outside again! Come on!”

Exhilaration raced through him, riding on a wave of excitement: the darkness was about to end, they were about to be free. He rushed to keep up with Abby, who seemed suddenly unaware of her own pain. There was no light to be seen ahead, but the air was warmer here, fresher.

The passage came to a sharp curve, and then to another. As they rounded that, they could see light, not the blaring warmth of the sun, but the soft subdued glow of the night’s sky.

When Abby caught sight of this, she immediately began to weep again, this time from pure relief that it was about to be over, this tormented journey through this God forsaken dungeon was over, and they could get help for Madison.

As she was about to leap out from inside the passage and into the night air, Ethan grabbed her violently and pulled her back. She revolted, her eyes blinded by the tears, her fists pummeling him. “Let me go! I want out of here!” she screamed desperately, hovering just above sanity.

“Abby! Stop for shit’s sake!” She had caught him in the eye, and he held it now gingerly. “Look out there!”

She wiped away the moisture from her lashes and blinked herself into focus. There before her was the cool but still warmer night air, the stars and moon hidden by the mountain. However, below that was a sheer cliff, smooth but for a few fissures and a drop of some eighty feet or more. She had almost leapt to her death in an attempt to be free.

“We have to think this through, Abby,” Ethan urged.

She began to weep again, her emotions a conflictive surge, she hated and loved, despaired and hoped all at once. She threw her arms around Ethan. “I’m so sorry…” she wept.

“I know… I know…”

“Let’s jump for it anyway, what do you say?”

“Abby, it will kill us…”

“I know!” She shouted, and then began to sob in earnest. “I don’t care anymore, Ethan! We’re going to fucking die in here anyway! Let’s just get it over with! We can die together…” she said this last softly, tenderly.

“Not going to happen, Abs.”

She sagged in his arms and cried, cried for near an hour; all that time, Ethan looked out at the open sky for what he was certain would be the last time and enjoyed his closeness to Abby and the aroma of a wild forest in late autumn.

Chapter 13

After crying for some time, Abby fell into a fitful sleep, comfortable if only for the fresh air and secure feeling of Ethan’s arms. He let her sleep while he struggled with his own guilt and fears, his sorrow and feelings of helplessness. Madison was not his girlfriend, or even really his friend, but he could not convince himself that he was not responsible. His father had taught him early that women were a treasure to cherish, to look after and keep safe. In this, he had failed.

The sun slowly began to rise, almost without Ethan noticing. He wondered if perhaps he had fallen asleep as well. His back had locked long ago in a cramp, and one of his arms had fallen asleep, yet he loathed waking her—she was at least resting and would need her strength, especially with the injury. He would just allow her to wake on her own, something he hoped he would not have to wait for long.

The edge of the sun broke over the horizon and began to pour like hot milk, setting the forest below to blaze. Ethan felt his throat tighten at this, the majesty and wonder of the beauty.

“Isn’t it gorgeous?” Abby asked sleepily.

“Incredible…” he said, waiting patiently for her to rise on her own. After a number of minutes, she did not seem likely to move herself, so he said, “You should sit up and see below.”

She rolled up from him and peeked down the cliff face to a small lake below. The brilliance of the sun had just begun to reach the water, and the ripples of its surface began to toss it about like a glimmering plaything. “It’s dazzling…”

“I knew you would like it,” Ethan said as he began to rub his arm and arch his back. “Aren’t you glad you stuck around to see it?”

She turned on him, her face glowing with infant sunlight, her eyes wet and excited. She suddenly leaned forward and kissed him hard, searchingly, lovingly. “Yes, I am, Ethan.”

“I’m glad you did, too. Hungry?”

“Not as much as thirsty.”

“Me, too, but we are light on the water, just a bit, okay?”

“I know, just a bit,” she repeated and sipped at the bottle of water Ethan offered. “It looks like we are still about fifty feet up. Do you really think there is an entrance down there somewhere?”

“I really don’t know; God, I hope. For all I know, this could be it,” Ethan said, the glimmer of hope waning in his voice.

“How would they get supplies all the way up here?” Abby asked sarcastically, trying to reignite both of their hope.

“I don’t know. It does not seem like it would work, I guess. However, there had to be a way to get people up here in secret and supplies to the jail that would not go the same way as the house, if this place was supposed to be so secret. We will find it.”

“I think we will, but not sitting here,” Abby said longingly, taking in the sky and the faint warmth of the sun.

They sat together for a short while, the sun growing warmer and more intense as the time slipped by. Neither cared to abandon the outside, the smell of pine, the still remaining splashes of fall color, but both knew they were not to be rescued from there and must make their own way out. Still, it was some time before Ethan nudged her.

“Come on, let’s get moving. The exit won’t come to us.”

They stood together, Abby still hindered by her ankle, but not so much so as yesterday. The cane, even with its off-balance center and crude handle, had become more comfortable, easier for her to manage. It thumped rhythmically with her footsteps as they headed back toward the main passage.

They made the left as they should and worked themselves deeper into the unending darkness. After some time, the floor of the passage became naked rock, the sand behind them scattered to the sides where it made tiny drifts like snow. The walls as well became rough, more like a mining tunnel than a proper passage. The ceiling had become rougher still, a frozen undulation of rock, like the tide of a never moving ocean frozen in its rush toward a missing shore.

“Maybe this had started as a mining project…” Abby mused quietly.

“If it did, dear Abby, then they had to have begun digging at the base of the mountain.”

“That means there is a way out of here!”

Ethan could hear the smile on her face.

“Unless they had not finished construction…”

“Shut up,” Abby said lightly as they continued down the now-curving passage.

The faint sound of dripping water came to them, sharp and echoed, but certainly distant. It was the sound of many drops of water falling into a body of itself, a musical tinkling that for whatever reason inspired an even greater hope. Water—one of the primary staples of life—was somewhere inside this hellish place. It was proof that God had not abandoned them entirely, that even the evil here could not stop the gentle persistent hand of nature.

They decided not to stop for a rest but to push on to the water. Abby longed to wash her face, wash the filth of the dirty passages, the collapsed floor, and the bones she had touched from her hands. Ethan hoped that the water had found its own way out, possibly running to the outside and the lake below. The tunnel they were in was descending in a slope, and it was very possible they had gone down the fifty feet and they were that much closer to being free.

They began to find old wooden supports along the passage, shoring up the ceiling where rubble had fallen and left gapping openings in the ceiling above. Thick lengths of timber were fixed together with the same large iron nails, their heads pounded and misshapen. It reminded Ethan of a Wild West tour he had taken as a child, one that included a manufactured gold mine.

Abby suddenly stumbled, her feet troubled by something on the floor of the passage. She caught herself by way of Ethan’s shoulder. She turned quickly to see what had tripped her, and her flashlight fell upon a ravaged corpse of some animal, some creature, about the size of a small dog, left heaped in the corner, useless. Its coat was torn and laid open from the thin white bones now poking through. Whatever it had been, it was unconsumed.

“What is it, Ethan?”

“It looks like a dog, but it’s hard to tell…about the size of one anyway.”

“What’s it doing here?”

“You missed something, Abs. If it got in here, we can get out, right?”

“Oh, that’s right! Let’s keep going.”

She turned and headed down the passage, her light illuminating the floor, his the roof. More and more of the torn corpses littered the ground as they continued, each ravaged but seemingly unconsumed. It began to disturb them. Neither were naturalists, but Ethan was sure that man was the only animal that hunted for the pleasure of it. He wondered if perhaps these were digested creatures, swallowed without chewing and defecated whole. He wondered if it were perhaps a large snake; he was sure they swallowed their food whole, but what did it look like coming out the other end? Then they found the deer carcass.

It was broken, the bones pulverized in many places, and its hide bore large, gaping claw marks on its flank, one of its legs cleanly cleaved away. The savagery of its death upset Abby greatly, but what bothered Ethan was the fact that the meat had just barely begun to swell with rot and the blood around it was still red, the deep red of dried blood not yet oxidized.

He drew out his revolver and replaced the spent cartridges with fresh ones. He did not know what would take such morbid pleasure in the rending of forest animals but he did not care to be the next one.

They continued along until the tunnel suddenly opened into a large cavern, a sizeable lake in its center reflected their lights in a dead sort of way. The explosion of open space was disorientating, as if they had just fallen into open air and had begun to float. It took them many moments to orientate themselves. The room was chill, but the air was fresher and once more pine-scented, but something else infected the air: the stench of rotting flesh. Ethan was not surprised considering the murdered animals that had begun to choke the passage.

They approached the water’s edge together and looked into its midnight depths. It was still with the exception of the randomly falling droplets from above, which sent ripples rushing across the surface. It would then settle to an inky black, concealing its depths, hiding its contents. For some unspoken reason, the lake filled them both with an uneasy apprehension, a building desire to be away from it. It was a simple mockery of how pooled water should be and completely unnatural.

Abby seemed transfixed on the surface, looking deeply for an answer to some question she had yet to ask. Ethan began to look around the cavern with his light, finding a number of passages leading away again. There were too many for him to consider, and he hung his head in defeat. It was a dangerous emotion for him to have, but why should he be that bastion of hope for others? Why could no other give him an anchor in the storm of life’s unfairness?

He battled shortly with the emotion and defeated it with sheer willpower, a raw and ancient desire to survive. If not for him, he would push on for Abby and see her back to the true and good sunlight.

When he brought his head back up, he caught sight of a faint glow within one of the numerous passages leading away from the lake. “Abby, turn off your light,” he instructed quickly as he switched his off.

“Why?” she asked, genuinely curious.

“Turn it off and look,” he said as they were plunged into darkness.

It took Abby a few moments to adjust to the darkness, but faintly, a whisper of light came from the passage on the other side of the lake, the true white light of the day’s sky.

“Oh, thank you, God! Let’s go; I want to see the sky!” she shouted in exuberance and turned her light back on.

Ethan helped her rise again, and they began the lengthy trip around to the other side of the lake. It was difficult going—spilled boulders slippery with a colorless moss or slime in some places; dangerously narrow strips of ground in others. They navigated all of this while desperately trying not to touch the black water of the lake.

When they had worked their way around to the far side, they heard the water moved by something but they could not locate it with their lights, just telltale ripples across the water’s surface. Being this close to their freedom, fear began to rise but more as desperation, and Ethan began to rush Abby toward the dimly glowing passage ahead.

Something was building, growing, and becoming a threat to them, as it had the forest creatures. It was a hideous thing, and it pleasured itself by rending flesh. Whatever it was, Ethan refused to see it. He pushed Abby harder; she already began dragging her cane in a desperate attempt to get out before whatever was about to happen did happen.

Just before they passed the glow, the wash of dim light from the real world outside, they heard a voice.

“Abby… Ethan… Come and stay with us…”

It was Madison, but her voice had been twisted and dried, baked into a raspy hiss of its original musical sparkle.

“Madison!” Abby screamed, and there she was, just beyond the daylight, standing almost timid, bleeding from many places. Her head hung from her shoulders and her normally vibrant hair lay limply across her face. She was nude except for the torn flesh yawning open to reveal the red beneath. She raised her arm toward them, it clearly broken in places, twisted and crooked.

“The Captain wants to know things…and if you tell him…he can make you feel wonderful…” Her voice trailed off in a pleasurable hiss of agony. “He really wants to talk to you, Ethan…”

Abby began to cry, screaming repeatedly, “Madison! No!”

Ethan swallowed the building surge from his belly and brought the gun up. He hovered just before the limp hair, where he was sure her head would be, and fired.

Her head exploded out the back, and she leaned forward for a moment then collapsed backwards, the young vibrant beauty now nothing more than a brutalized corpse. Abby screamed a long and mournful scream, joined by many other spiteful voices filled with hatred, a wild calling for vengeance. Ethan played his light around the room and found a large number of corpses, all long dead but their decay incomplete and their flesh dripping with the water of the horrid lake.

He shoved the still-screaming Abby into the mined passage and toward the sunlight. He turned with his revolver held out, warding him from the onrush he was sure would be there but did not find. In its place was a pair of blood red eyes, still just under the edge of the water. He lowered the revolver and saw a black segmented leg gently break the surface and come down softly on the shore. It gripped the ground with its wickedly long talons, which sank deeply into the rock.

Chapter 14

They rushed from the rough cavern, the ceiling hanging low enough they had to hunch over and move slow for final few feet, avoiding carefully the rounded protrusions of rock. The sun screamed its brilliance at them as they came free, and they stumbled down a short incline, the trees stopping their wild progress.

“I can’t believe you shot her!” Abby screamed into his face when they stopped. “How the fuck could you kill Madison, you son-of-a-bitch!” She began pummeling Ethan with both arms, trying desperately to hurt him as he had her.

“Abby! Stop, Abby! It wasn’t Madison. Didn’t you see her?”

“You don’t know that! It was her; I saw her eyes!”

Ethan grabbed her wrists and held her close from behind, both in an attempt to comfort her and stop the battering. “Whatever lives there, in that hole, it had her. She was not Madison.”

“And you know this for sure, you bastard?” she screamed into the trees.

Calmly, he responded, “Yes, I was sure.”

Abby struggled a moment more, then slumped in Ethan’s arms to continue sobbing. The freshness of the air, the warmth of the sun, the fact that they finally broke free of the horrible underground place fell on her like rushing water, and she cried her grief, her anger, and for her hard won freedom. She had proven herself strong; no matter what else may come to her, she knew this one thing with certainty.

“We can’t stay here, Abby. There was something else in the water, something I…we do not want to know about it. We need to leave.”

He released her and began to draw her down the mountain, trailing her by a reluctant arm. She began to stumble after him, not quit done crying herself out. “Where are we going now? Do you even know where we are?”

“We are on the west side of the mountain. We need to make our way back to the east, to where the car is, where Brighton can call for help.”

“Why? You killed her, remember?”

“Abby… There will be questions; we need to file a police report, get all this documented.”

“They can’t do anything now. You shot her, remember?”

Ethan did not reply, but continued to pull her along like a spoiled child mid-tantrum. He was exhausted—every fiber of his body throbbed in weariness, and his feet ached in a way he had never known. However, he knew the sun would not be in the sky much longer and he had to get them both as far away as he could before it set. For some reason, he was sure the thing that was crawling from the water was waiting for darkness.

Abby began to try to use her cane again, and Ethan eased the pace just enough to allow her. The ankle had pretty much gone numb, but it felt squishy and gritty. She was not sure what kind of damage she was doing, but abhorred the idea of being crippled. She could not imagine herself as a photojournalist with a gimp foot.

The thought shocked her. Two people, people her age had died in there, and she was still forward looking, concerned about her future. They were both dead and gone, their futures ending with them. She suddenly felt ashamed at her own selfishness.

The loss that hurt most was Madison. They had known each other for three years: Madison, the young, full-of-life girl, and Abby, the caring, ever-watchful mother figure. Madison had taught her much about living and enjoying life, and Abby taught Madison responsibility, making her study for the nonspecific classes she was taking in college.

Abby knew that Madison had been more than corrupted, she had been ruined, body and soul, and there would have been no saving her, even if she had somehow brought her out of there. Why she had attacked Ethan so, she was not sure. She did know that he was there and available for her to vent her rage, and anyone cold enough to shoot a dear friend, even in that condition was a real bastard, and as soon as they were out of here she was going to break up with him. She never wanted to see him again…or remember this horrible weekend.

The ground became more level and more wild. Trees were thick in every direction: some almost bald, others coated in fine green needles. Nevertheless, it cut their sight down to only a few yards, and they had to snake their way through the thick underbrush. Abby could feel the desperation in Ethan and began to feel the same as the sun descended toward the horizon.

Ethan led her to the left and around the base of the mountain. She was not sure why he went this way but hoped he knew what he was doing—he was the one with hiking experience, after all. She had never spent the night in the woods until they came here, more or less attempted to navigate them.

The forest floor was thick with fallen leaves, and the smell of their decay was comforting in an odd way; it was more of a proper decay than what they had so recently escaped. The refuse did manage to hide the smaller rocks, making their travel more difficult. Ethan discovered the pitfalls first and did his best to steer Abby from them.

The hidden stones and roots more than once twisted Abby’s foot painfully, but Ethan would not let up. The further the sun sank, the faster he wanted to move. Deep inside Abby, there rose a desire as strong as his, and so she did not complain or object. The sun had begun to disappear behind the horizon, just a sliver, and time was racing past them. Abby knew something awful was going to happen and like in a dream, she was helpless to escape it and helpless to give up her escape.

“What are we going to do when it is dark, Ethan? We can’t keep going in the dark, can we?”

“I don’t know, but we are going to try. Do you feel it?”

“Yeah, we are about to be hunted, aren’t we?”

“It feels like it, huh?”

The sun had almost made good its abandonment of the sky when the mountain curbed sharply to the left. Abby found it hard to catch her breath, and her ankle was demanding attention, trying to argue with her to stop and rest. Ethan, as well, was breathing heavily, but fear set his face like a mask comfortably embracing determination. Then the sun fell from sight, and the sky grew a deep, pale purple.

From a distance, and around a major portion of the mountain, came the screeching roar of something bent to the hunt. It was not the deep rumbling roar of a jungle cat, but the voice of many women, screaming through their deaths but with violent intent. It made the blood run cold through Abby’s veins, and Ethan literally screamed a short burst of fright.

“We really got to move now, Abby—like run! Come on!”

He yanked on her arm and began to drag her before she got her feet moving. Her ankle exploded in pain, a deep-inside bone pain with every step, and she began to sob again. Her desire to live, the drive for self-preservation was waning, and the uncomfortable idea of giving up began to swamp her mind. She did not want to end up like Madison, but the pain was near unbearable, even as horrified as she was.

The screeching sound came again, and this time the forest animals began to cry out as well, but they in fear and warning. Something was walking the forest this night and the forest loathed its passing. Whatever this creature was, the animals here knew and feared it, their brethren broken and ruined in the passages of the prison.

“Ethan?” Abby finally asked, having reached the very end of her endurance.

“No, Abby!” he shouted and pulled her harder.

“Ethan, please…” She fell in spite of herself. The ground rushed up to her like something from a movie, and the wind rushed from her in a gasping sound.

Ethan grabbed her, hauled her up before she could even draw breath, and heaved her over his shoulder. He continued on, pushing harder but moving slower.

The thing’s enraged call came again. This time, it was much too close and there were very few animals brave enough to answer it.

The rhythmic pounding of Ethan’s shoulder into her midriff made it difficult for her to catch her breath again, but she did not care. Abby had crossed that line, had given way to her hopelessness, and the fight fled from her. She had simply given up. Again, she recalled the Lord’s Prayer and began to recite it quietly to herself.

Ethan slowed to a walk, both because of the dense forest and his own exhaustion. He did not show signs of giving up, but his breath began to take voice, and grunts of strain escaped him with every step. He started to use the trees around him to steady his footing, certain he was close to collapsing.

Suddenly, a weight lifted from him, and he stumbled forward. Abby screamed horrifically, as if a nightmare she knew was not true suddenly appeared before her. He spun, and in the defuse light of deep dusk, he saw the hunter. A number of segmented legs suspended a large bulbous body above the ground. The torso of a man rose from the spider-like body, the flesh glossy and black as coal. Its arms were insect like, black with patchy fur, and in its hands, it held Abby, its wicked claws already sunk deeply in her chest and legs.

Ethan pulled free his revolver as Abby screamed again. His heart wrenched painfully at the mournful death screams, and he fired into the thing’s grape-like body. It tore open sickly and splashed free gruesome puss. It roared its roar, and Ethan’s legs threatened to drop him on the ground. The thing dug its claws a bit deeper, and Abby screamed again. Before she finished, the thing ripped her in half, snapped like a pencil, torn like a length of sodden leather.

This time, Ethan screamed and fired again. Not afraid of hitting Abby any longer, he aimed for the chest. The bullet entered above the thing’s left nipple and burst out the other side with more of the sickly fluid. Then Ethan ran, ran out of pure desperation to escape. He could hear the thing rasping behind him, and he pushed himself harder, trying to put distance between the hunted and the hunter.

The tree line broke suddenly, and Ethan ran headlong into a lake. He did not think or consider his options, but began to swim into the deeper parts of the lake, ignoring the frigid spike it sent through his body, desperate only to be far away from the pursuing creature. He swam for some time until he thought he was near enough the center. He stopped and began to tread the icy water. The thing screamed again, but this time it was ragged, as if the last shot might have actually wounded it.

Ethan searched for and found the thing on the banks, refusing to enter the water, but stalking back and forth, waiting. In one hand, it still held a large piece of Abby, the upper part, which swung back and forth as it walked. Ethan tasted the bitterness of vomit but held himself. The sheer helplessness of his situation drove him to sob, to mourn the loss of his Abby and most likely himself.

When the water become too cold for him to tolerate, he attempted to swim to the other side of the lake, but each time, as he started out, the thing would move with incredible speed to where he would reach the bank. Ethan’s arms began to weaken, and his breath was coming in quick, shallow breaths. He knew that hyperthermia was closing fast, and if he did not get himself warm soon, he would die in this lake.

He decided to try for the shore once more, but the creature raced around the bank to meet him. This time, a little out from shore, he came upon a small floating dock, wood fixed to large metal barrels, but dry on the top. Using the very last of his strength, he hauled himself up, collapsed on the rough but dry wood, and slipped into a frozen unconsciousness.

Chapter 15

Cold, deep, bone-chilling cold—it was the first time Ethan’s heart had felt chilled, slow, and lethargic. It brought him to consciences with a painful desire to survive. It was still dark, but the inky blackness of night was slowing giving way to the approaching sun. Ethan knew he would not last to feel its warmth. He had to do something now before blacking out again, this time to his own death.

His arms were frozen and hard to move, as if they had been asleep for too long. His hands where thick and clumsy and he had trouble opening his pack. When he did, a small rush of cold water greeted him. He began to dig about the pack, searching for the small silver packs he knew were there. His hands had almost no feeling left to them, but his slow grip, tightened with much effort, was able to guess the correct size and he drew forth a package of three aluminum squares.

Ripping and tearing at the package, he finally succeeded when he brought his teeth to it and bit through the cellophane sheathe. That is when the warmth set in. He felt the gentle oozing of heat through his body and he knew that he was coming dangerously close to death. It was not a real heat, but the final effect of hyperthermia. He pulled out the first pack clumsily, and made many attempts to break it before he finally put it on the wood decking, and smashed it with the side of his forehead. The small pack burst in heat, real heat, not like that lie creeping through his torso.

He worked the small heat pack into his shirt and under one arm. It burned painfully, too hot for frozen bare flesh, but he had to bring his temperature up, the temperature inside his chest. He smashed the next with his head, and worked that under the other arm. He felt as though he were about to burst into flame. The final pack he was able to break with his hands, and he jammed it into the front of his pants where he held it between his thighs. The pain was incredible, but he had not given up on himself just yet.

He rummaged his pack once more, this time pulling out a silver tube. He broke the seal with his teeth, unwrapped a thin silvery blanket, which he worked around his body by rolling a short distance across the dock. There was nothing that he could do for the wet clothing, but this should ease him back from the precipice of a frozen demise. The sun would rise soon and then the silvery blanket would really begin to warm him. That should be about when the small packs would begin to expire.

Cold started to fill him again, and he knew his simple design was beginning to work. There would be a couple of hours of the worst deep aching pain he had ever felt followed by uncontrollable shivers. He hoped the sun would be high enough to help warm him with the solar blanket. Then he remembered calories; he had to give his body something to burn. He fished out a power-bar and crunched on it with chattering teeth. He could not bring himself to drink water as wet as he was, but the bar went down easy enough.

The creature screeched again in rage and sheer hatred. It knew the sun was approaching, and it would have to give up the chase for another day. Even though he was almost frozen, Ethan felt a chill run through him at the thing’s voice. His focus on survival waned as his thoughts drifted back to his friends, now dead, and this rather dangerous position.

There had been plans, a future plotted if only with pillow promises, but one he had looked forward to, one he had thought about often. The thing hunting him had ruined them, and Ethan began to realize their loss. Abby was not gorgeous, but beautiful in her own way. She had been rock-stubborn, but Ethan had learned to handle that, and she would relent if she understood his passion. She was not going to be a perfect wife, but she was going to be his wife, and he had wanted that desperately.

The sun had lifted itself beyond the edge of the horizon, and almost above the tops of the trees. Color was blooming everywhere, replacing the bluish gray of early dawn. His shivering was now under his control as the solar blanket began to ply its effectiveness. Even the small heat packs were still hot, although no longer painful. He sat up, careful not to release warmth from under the shiny silver blanket, and surveyed the banks.

He was some thirty yards from the closest shore, and he could not see the creature anywhere. He decided, after a long search, it had abandoned the hunt and returned to the blackness it had come from, that he himself had come from. He did not like the idea of entering the frigid water again, but knew he had to make it to Brighton’s before dusk…or be prey once more.

He woofed down two more of the power bars, saving the last for midday, and drank an entire bottle of water. He was not sure how far he had to travel today and wanted to be prepared. He stripped the solar blanket away, and the chill air bit at him through his still damp clothing. It hurt enough to make him moan, but he forced himself to wrap the heat packs in the blanket and stow them in the pack.

After many moments of mentally preparing himself, he eased down into the water. Like the air, it had teeth as well, but not quite as sharp as he had imagined. He lifted his pack, held it above the water, and did a side stroke for the shore. His teeth began to chatter again, the unbearable cold working its way to the very core of him. He made the shore before losing too much of his heat and drug himself out and onto the dry bank. He drew out the solar blanket and wrapped himself again, the heat packs tucked tightly in his arms and groin.

He lay there for some time, contemplating a frigid slumber before noticing the sun had advanced itself further than he had hoped. He rose suddenly, worked the water from his clothing as best he could, stuffed the heat packs into his pockets, and started along the bank. He had a general idea of where he needed to head, and overshot his direction by a bit. If he went too much to the south, he would continue through the forest for days; too much to the east, he would end up at a farmer’s field or the road. He decided he preferred the road.

His legs felt gummy and weak, his feet tender and bruised. Warmth eased into him as he walked, and his pace improved steadily, although his feet ached more for it. Even after hours of walking, his clothing remained sodden and wet and his shoes still squished and rubbed on his feet bitterly. He began to feel sorry for himself, angry at his situation, and wanted nothing more than to stop and rest, perhaps sleep a bit.

It was his instinct to survive that provided his motivation, and he began to sing tunes, first in his head, then aloud in an effort to steer his thoughts from the darker places in his mind. Ethan knew that if he were to stop, even for a short rest, he would not be able to get himself going again. They would find him either dead from exposure or torn to pieces by what they would call wild animals.

That was when he realized there were no animals. He had not been singing loud enough to chase anything away, nor was his progress through the forest debris loud enough to announce him as predator. Nevertheless, no winter birds, deer, or anything else moved through the forest. He felt so utterly and completely alone. This added fear to his desire to survive, and he tried to quicken his pace, even though his feet began to slice pain up and along his calves.

He had run through just about every song he could remember and began simply to talk at random. His clothing had finally begun to dry a bit, even though the heat packs had gone cold, but his shoes did not seem to want to release the moisture they held. His thick socks, he was sure, were to blame. He did not stop, however, to remove them or his shoes; he had to get out of the trees before darkness fell.

As the sky grew duskier, he began to rush. He was certain that the forest should have released him by now, but it had not. Color began to drain around him as the light was slowly fading. He tried to run, but the forest floor was too chaotic and the trees too thick to allow it. Even a steady jog was not possible, but he pushed himself past the pain, past the failing hope, and as eastward as he could.

Suddenly, the ground became soft, almost like sand, and he fell forward and into a recently tilled field. The dirt wafted around him in a cloud and filled his mouth with grit. He rose tenderly, his feet now screaming with angry spikes of pain. The sun’s light was brighter here, but still obviously about to escaping the day. He looked around, trying to get his bearings, and saw a small white farmhouse far in the distance.

He began to stumble toward it, relief beginning to weep from his eyes. He had made it from the forest and soon he would be warm, dry, safe. If he had to, he would break into the home to use the phone. Desperation drove him past the pain, the exhaustion, and he ran toward the house and his salvation. The dirt gave way under his feet making his progression slow and enraging.

He caught sight of the tired blue Nova parked next to the house, Abby’s Nova. This was Brighton’s house, and lights were on, convincing Ethan someone was at home. Then he fell, this time harder into the dusty soil. He saw a bright flash of white, and his vision went dark and cloudy for a moment. His ears rang, but he fought for his feet. This time, they did not oblige, and he fell to his knees. He abandoned them and began crawling toward the house.

His desperation had become perfect, and his mind a jumble of rage and relief, guilt and loss. He watched the soil beneath him as he crawled, falling away from his knees as he smashed into the furrowed lines. The taste of it filled his mouth and picked at the edges of his eyes. He ran headlong into something and collapsed to one side. It took him a moment to realize he was staring at the treads of a tire just below a rusty blue quarter panel.

Ethan dragged himself around the side of the Nova and pulled at the door—locked. Abby always locked her car as if someone would steal it. He had teased her about this on more than one occasion, but it never changed. He began to pull himself toward the porch. He could hear the old television talking about the weather for tomorrow and the rest of the week. It was loud, and the normalcy of it spurred him on until he reached the steps of the worn porch.

Ethan pulled himself to a sitting position on the first step, and saw the old woman, still in her sundress and apron, the scarf tied tightly around her head, some distance away. She looked at him sadly, her face a mask of disappointment. After a moment, she turned and walked back toward where Ethan had come, her head hanging slightly, her age apparent in her walk. He had wanted to call to her, plead for help, but somewhere in his mind, he knew it would have been fruitless.

He pulled himself up each step, sitting on each like a geriatric climbing from a bathtub. His arms were close to giving out when he reached the top. He lay back for a moment to rest, and the mixtures of orange and purple staining the sky surprised him; there was more night than day there. He worked himself backward on his elbows until he met the side of the house and pounded on the door urgently.

The door screeched open, and Mr. Brighton looked down on him with no emotion. He stared for a moment, “You went down into the basement, didn’t you?”

Ethan croaked, “Help me…”

“Ya shouldn’t of gone down in the basement. Stupid kids…”

Ethan realized then that Mr. Brighton knew all about the house, what lay beneath it, the horrors in the darkness there. Fear bolted through him as this realization struck, and he yanked the revolver from his pants. Brighton jumped back toward the warm glow of the inside of his house. “Mr. Brighton, go and call the police, right now.” His voice was calm, the calm of one that had finally given up his hope and was now ready to die.

Brighton eased back into the house, and Ethan let the weight of the gun fall to his lap. He was panting with exhaustion, but if Brighton had known and did not tell them before they went up to the house, who knows what he could do. He heard the old man’s tired fingers spinning the dial of an old rotary telephone.

“This is Brighton. Can you send the police and an ambulance, Edna? No, nothing too serious, but tell them to get here as fast as they can. Yeah. No, I’ll tell you later. Thanks, Edna.”

Ethan could hear the old man rummaging in the kitchen before he reappeared at the door with a cup of steaming something. “Trade you this cup of coffee for the gun, son.”

“When the cops get here.”

“Well, take it anyways.” He offered Ethan the cup. “They are a bit slow getting all the way out here.”

Ethan took the cup and drank it quickly. It burned his throat, but the warmth spilled through him. “Why didn’t you tell us about the basement?”

“It was walled off about a hundred years back. Didn’t think you would go down there…”

“What’s down there, Mr. Brighton?”

“I don’t rightfully know, nor did I ever want to go down there and see either.” Mr. Brighton sat in an old rocking chair on the porch. “Hear tell it’s just the prison they used back in the war.”

“There is more to it than that, and you know it!” Ethan surprised himself by shouting.

“That’s just a legend, nothing more.”

“No it’s not! That place is evil, and you let us go up there anyway!”

“Where are your friends?”

“They’re fucking dead!”

Brighton looked down at Ethan, a look of disdain and disapproval in his face. “Alright…” he said simply.

Far off and in the distance, many miles from the sound of it, the same chill-raising screech bled over the top of the mountain. Ethan began to shake again. “You hear that? Huh?”

“That would be a cougar…mayhap a bobcat.”

“It’s that thing, the thing that killed Abby!”

The distant sound of sirens began to reach them as well.

“Those are just legends, son, rumors. Nothing more than stories.”

Ethan wanted to shoot the man, drill him in the face, but he was too tired. Anger could no longer spark him into action, and he just stared at the wrinkled old face trying to will it to explode as an ambulance rushed into the dirt parking area with its lights screaming through the night’s darkness.

PART 2

Chapter 16

“So, you heard the pounding at the door and found him just lying there on your porch? Is that it, Mr. Brighton?”

“Yeah, that’s it, Steve. I don’t know where the other three are and such, but the way he yanked that pistol at me, who knows?”

“Well, did he tell you anything about that?”

“He went on about some monster or something killing them. They looked like decent kids; would have never thought one of ’um might crack like this.”

“A monster, huh?” The cop arched an eyebrow at him.

“Don’t look at me like that, Steve, I know your father…”

“Mr. Brighton, what did he say about the monster?”

“He said the place was evil and that some monster or another done killed the others. That was about it. Oh, then he heard a cat screech up on the hill there and said that was the thing that killed ’um.”

“The three others, Mr. Brighton: what did ya say they looked like?” The officer leaned over his small pad of paper with his pencil nub and stared at the old man intensely.

“Well, the first girl, this Abby person, she was sorta plain, but pretty enough, being so young and all. She had light skin, light hair, freckles. The other boy, he had long, dark hair like he was one of them hippies or something, and real cocky-like. Then there was that girl…”

“What about her?” the cop asked after writing furiously.

“She was a real beauty, like one of them movie stars. She had that dark hair, you know, that flowed like water, bright, perky eyes, and a figure that would make spoiled milk fresh again.”

“Did any of them have any tattoos or any distinguishing marks on them?”

“Well, the real pretty one, she had a tiny mole or something just above her lip, like Marilyn Monroe had. The short haired fellow, he had on a gold chain with some kind of Egyptian symbol or the like.”

“Alright, Mr. Brighton. Thanks for your time and the coffee. Think you can make it down to the shack tomorrow and sign a statement?”

“Well, the old Ford ain’t running right now. Clinton said he got the part on order, but who knows when it will come in.”

“That’s fine. I'll drop by with it tomorrow when I get back on shift, if that’s alright with you.”

“Sure. Hey, would you mind retuning this here video I rented the other day? I haven’t been able to get by there, and Betty's going to be sore with me.”

The officer took the offered video tape and tipped his hat with it. “You try to have a good rest of the evening, hear?”

“You, too, Steve. My best to your ma and pa. Will that boy be okay?”

The officer stopped and turned back to him. “I reckon, just chilled to the bone. It’s his head that has me concerned. I think he may just be a lunatic.”

“You think maybe he shot those others?”

“Could be… Night, Mr. Brighton.” The office waved as he descended the porch steps and climbed into his cruiser, the one he smashed into a guardrail and the department could not afford to fix yet. He worked his underwear into a more comfortable position before radioing in. “417 en route to the hospital.”

“417, clear,” a woman’s voice crackled back.

Steven knew all about the legend of Black Water Mountain; he had shared it with friends in school, even added a bit to the story here and there that still persisted to this day. He knew this because his own son was sharing it now with other children in school—the legend of Black Water Mountain and Captain Black. Some even tell the tale of a Father Burns. Nevertheless, it was all make believe, a lie passed among the children and shared with friends and family.

He even recalled reading about it in some book about myths and folklore in college. However, that did not make them real, just stories told, retold, and embellished along the way. He looked down at his notes, trying to read them in the soft amber glow of the dashboard. One word he had written repeatedly, monster. He dropped the pad back onto the passenger seat; the boy was just crazy is all.

“417,” the radio hissed at him.

“417,” he replied after retrieving the handset.

“417, they are moving the boy to Glendale Psychiatric.”

“417, 10-4, en route.” He clipped the microphone back to the dash. “So he is crazy,” Steve said to himself, satisfied with his own diagnosis.

* * *

“Good morning…” the man in the white lab coat paused to read the papers held firmly on his clipboard, “Ethan. And how have they been treating you?”

“Fine,” Ethan replied dryly.

“Well, seems you had a bit of an episode…” The doctor flipped a page, and then another. “Up on Black Water Mountain. What can you tell me about it?”

“I already told the doctors at the other hospital. That’s why I am here, isn’t it?”

“Well, yes, I suppose. I read the statement you gave the police.”

“What can I help you with, Doctor?” Ethan asked, both bored and irritated.

The doctor dropped the clipboard onto the small table, the only other piece of furniture in the room besides the bed. “I just want to know what happened. They found the girl, you know that?”

“That would be Abby, I suppose?”

“Yes, Abby; the search party found her, or what was left of her, this morning. Can you tell me how she died?” The doctor leaned against the table and crossed his arms in an air of superiority.

“It’s in the fucking report,” Ethan replied angrily.

“They found two large pieces, Ethan, well chewed by animals. What they also found—that is what is troubling so many people. She had been shot.”

Ethan’s mind raced back to the prior evening’s events. He knew he fired twice at the thing, but he did not think he hit Abby. “I did not kill her,” he declared flatly.

“But you shot her?”

“No, not on purpose. If I did, she was already dead.”

“You don’t remember if you shot her, Ethan? Do you expect the police to believe that?”

“I don’t give a shit what they believe, or you, either. I did not kill her or the others. Go to the house; see that I am telling you the truth!”

The doctor lifted the clipboard from the table, accounted for his pen, and left the room without another word. He closed the door and latched it, and headed back to the nurse’s station. Gretchen was there talking with a younger cop, one with youth in his hair and build, but age in his eyes.

“So what did he say, Doc?” the cop asked.

Gretchen turned back to her monitors and paperwork.

“He’s having trouble remembering; most likely a psychotic episode brought on by something. Did you find the others yet?”

“No. The detectives in charge are heading up the mountain now. Do you think he could have killed the others as well?”

“Most likely. It’s pretty clear he killed the girl, right?”

“Yeah, looks like it. She has one bullet wound in her wrist; the coroner will tell us more when he has completed the autopsy. The animals really made a mess of her.”

“I’m going to start him on a medicinal regiment; maybe we can clear his memory up in a few days. I am sure, though, he will be with us for a while…” the doctor trailed off.

Chapter 17

“There it is, finally. I have not hiked like this since I was a kid. I’m going to be hurting in the morning,” the older detective said.

“Ah, come on, old man, we can rest when we get there,” the younger and somewhat attractive Shelly teased. She was in her late twenties and made detective not only early, but also as the only woman on the force.

“When you going to find a husband and badger him instead of me?”

“Actually I was thinking of you, Glenn,” Shelly laughed.

”I retire in six years, four months, and two days, and I already have a boil like you to take to my grave,” he shot back.

“The house looks almost new, doesn’t it?” Shelly asked with a voice softened by amazement.

Glenn looked up towards the house, “Yeah, it does. You don’t reckon that ol’ Brighton is coming up here and keeping it up do you?”

“Hell, he’s got ten years on you at least, and just look at you, huffing and puffing like the big bad wolf.”

“Ah, leave me alone,” he grumbled, long weary of the teasing about being older than her. He loved the girl like a daughter, but his joints reminded him of his age and he did not need her to remind him.

They came to the door and stopped in unison as Shelly pulled out a dust kit and began to cover the knob with the gray powder, her eyes knitted in concentration, the brush twisting between her fingers. She had just recently completed a crime scene refresher course by the state, and seeing as how crimes like this were rare in Black Water, they had both decided she would do most of the work.

Glenn waited patiently, taking in the beautiful house. It was large and welcoming, brilliant white in the afternoon sun. He recognized the place as his wife’s dream retirement house, like the one she had described to him for years now. The image of him and his wife, shuffling about under gray hair was easy to imagine. It would need a bit of landscaping, but for all that, it was a charming house.

“Okay, nothing here. Odd, perhaps they wore gloves when they came up,” Shelly reasoned, her voice betraying her belief in that.

“Let’s go in,” Glenn said as he reached for the dusty knob. The door swung open slowly, all by itself, and Glenn jumped back suddenly.

In the doorway stood the most sensuous young woman, her hair was dark and flowing, her eyes wide, large, and deep brown. She had the figure of a Greek statue with a tiny mole above her lip. She was shocking, wrapped tightly in an expensive party dress, which barely containing her ample figure, as though she where about to receive dinner guests. Glenn felt his heart do a slow roll in his chest, then pound hungrily. He would have given a finger to have this girl, right here, right now.

“Hello, and welcome to the Heart House,” she said pleasantly, her perfect teeth showing behind her full red lips, her voice husky and thick with sexuality.

Shelly felt her stomach tighten a moment, suddenly taken with the stark attractiveness of the girl. She was so perfect, so alluringly petite. She had never actually felt any desire for another woman, but somehow this girl drew from her a deep and instinctive response. “Uh, hi,” she rushed out, clearly ashamed of herself. “I am Detective Greenbrae and this is Detective Craig. We are here to investigate three missing college students.”

Glenn stood silently, grinning at the girl like a smitten teenager.

“Well, perhaps you should come in then. You will want to see the basement first, I’m guessing?” the girl replied as she turned and started toward the central passage. “That’s the last place I saw any of them…”

“Excuse me, miss, but aren’t you Madison Graves?” Shelly asked, still blocking the door of the house. Her instincts told her that there was something wrong—wrong in a sickening way—and she had learned long ago to heed these vague motivational sensations.

The girl stopped short, her long dress rushing past her before settling at her feet. “I used to be, yes, but not any longer,” she said lightly, keeping her back to them as if ashamed of her answer.

Glenn found himself transfixed with the perfect curves of her youthful bottom. He cleared his throat. His voice sounded dry and almost frightened, and he hoped Shelly had not realized how turned on he was.

Thankfully to him, Shelly spoke before he could. “You are one of the people we are looking for, Ms. Graves. Can you come out here and talk with us?”

“I have guests waiting, Ms.…”

“It’s Greenbrae. Who is here with you? Is Chris Porter here?” Shelly remained the stony professional, but there was something strained in her voice, something almost wistful or reminiscent.

Madison turned slowly, a sly sexy grin playing at her lips. “Why yes, and some gentlemen from Virginia and the Carolinas. Won’t you join us, detective?” she asked as she locked eyes with Glenn.

“Sure, Ms. Graves,” he said as he pushed his way past Shelly. He did not understand why but he knew he could no longer resist this young girl’s suggestions. He would give anything to spend any short moment in her company, even after the sixteen years of marriage.

“Glenn!” Shelly hissed low. “Wait…”

“You can stay here, Shelly, but I’m going in.”

Madison offered her arm to the aging cop, “This way, Detective.”

“Why thank you, Ms. Graves,” he said politely as he took her arm.

Shelly looked about quickly but could find no reason not to follow them. She released her sidearm from its holster, and followed a distance behind. Something was not right, she did not know what, but there was wrongness in the air, so thick she could almost taste it. She had not drawn her sidearm since making detective, but her instincts were no longer being vague.

Madison turned into a side room just past the stairway, and Glenn came to a sudden stop. He gasped a deep breath and froze like a threatened animal. Before him was an elegant dining hall, filled with a large, dark, wood table. Around the table stood a number of naked men, all in very levels of decay, feasting on the raw corpse of a white male.

“Detective,” Madison said sweetly, “won’t you join us? There is enough room for everyone.”

The next few moments happened in an instant for Shelly. She had thought that being a law officer, even in a small town, would have prepared her for such things, but she was wrong. Her first reaction was to scream Glenn’s name; however, he began grabbing and pulling at his sidearm, his face the ashy gray color of death.

Shelly, following her training, immediately shifted to a tactical response, leading with her weapon drawn. But before she got halfway to Glenn, something launched from the room and skewered him to the wall. As he fell limp, Shelly realized it was a bone, a long bone still pink and wet, small bits of flesh still attached to its length.

Before she could bring herself to scream, she realized someone stood behind her. Ignoring Madison, she spun, trying to bring her gun between her and the sudden threat behind her. A thing, a man-like thing with greasy long hair, his skin the pallor of dead fish, forced a slender rod to the base of her throat. It was wearing the rotting remnants of some dark blue uniform and encircled with an ashy smoke that stank of burning flesh. She saw all of this in an instant, and then screamed at the searing pain at her throat.

The thing forced her against the wall, the thin rod pressing harder, burning deeply into her neck. She found she could not draw breath and brought her weapon up one handed, the other sizzling along the length of black iron. The head rolled loosely to one side, and a milky pustule of an eye rolled towards her as she began firing.

Shelly had selected her weapon, a Sig Sauer model P226, 357 magnum, for its performance, reliability, and magazine capacity. She exercised all of these tactical features before the rod burned through her throat and forced its way into her windpipe. Blood burst into her mouth and began to run into her oxygen-starved lungs. Shelly suddenly realized that she was dead, that all of her training failed to prevent her own murder. Faintly, from down the hall, she heard Madison’s soft moan as she slipped into a narrowing darkness, the agony of her death stealing away with her sight.

Chapter 18

Joe forced the old Ford truck to a shuddering, screaming stop with both feet. The damn thing needed breaks, a transmission and who knew what else. Clinton would help him do those breaks on the weekend for a six of Bud, if he could only afford the new pads. Now that little Becky was here, it was hard to afford a six of Bud, more or less new brake pads.

The door stuttered a deep squeal as Joe forced it open. He dropped out onto the dried up yard of his trailer, a yard he could no longer afford to maintain. The trailer was not the best in the park, but it was a double wide and the view was great. They sat in the shadow of Black Water Mountain in a park called Blissful Acres, a name that had been more of a lie than a promise. Becky had tended some flower boxes and kept the inside picked up as best she could, so it was not all bad, except for the bills.

He climbed the single step and pulled the small door open. Just before him was Becky, a large cast iron frying pan in her hand.

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” she said and grabbed him in a hug. Somewhere in the trailer, little Becky was crying. She looked ashen and abused, almost as though she was hung over.

“What’s wrong? What’s been going on here?” Joe asked with a voice twisted in irritation.

“That screeching… I heard it again, this time repeatedly all day! It wouldn’t fucking stop!”

“Now, Becky, let me get inside. I told you it ain’t nothing but a bobcat. They are more scared of you than you are of them.”

“It ain’t neither, Joey. There is something up on that hill that ain’t right.”

Joey eased Becky back a step with both hands. “Well, I’m home now and I won’t let nothing happen to you, hear? Now where’s my Becky-bean? There she is!”

He released Becky to retrieve the little girl from her playpen. The child stopped her crying and her face lit brightly with a toothless smile.

“I’m not imagining things, Joey. That thing has been screaming all day up there and it ain’t no wild cat.”

“Now don’t scare little Becky-bean here. What you got on for dinner? I’m starvin’!”

“Rice and beans. It’s all we got—”

Becky did not finish. A short high-pitched piercing screech raced down the mountain and cut her short.

Joey’s blood ran cold and he felt his groin almost let go. “Fucking hell,” he whispered.

“You see? I told ya! And watch your mouth in front of the baby.”

“It’s got to be an animal,” Joe reasoned half-heartedly under his breath. “That’s all there is up there: animals…”

“I don’t know either way, but it’s been scaring me half to death.”

“Where’s my gun, baby?”

“You ain’t goin’ out there to hunt it!” Becky stated flatly.

“No, I ain’t goin’ out there to hunt it,” he replied sarcastically. “I want it just in case.”

“It’s in the bedroom closet. I don’t know where the bullets are at.”

“I’ll find ’um. Just get dinner on, alright?”

Joe placed the cooing baby back in her playpen. She fretted a bit before rediscovering the brightly colored blocks Annabel, their neighbor, had given them when she was born.

The bedroom still looked slept in, something Becky never let happen. Joe reasoned that she really had been scared the entire day. He wondered why she did not call him at the job site before realizing he had no more minutes on his cell phone; once more, back to the money problems. He loved little Becky, but she cost so damn much.

He pulled open the aluminum closet doors and fished around until he had the twelve-gauge shotgun and a box of slugs. He had not been hunting for some time and now the gun was bone dry and dusty, the ammunition almost two years old. There was nothing to do about that, so he loaded it with as many rounds as it would take, pumped one into the chamber, and jammed another in—just in case. He brought it back into the living room/dining room/kitchen and leaned it against the wall near the door.

The screech, somewhere between a bobcat, a screech owl, the tearing of metal, and the death scream of a woman, tore through the trailer again. Joe felt an unreasonable terror race down his spine and threaten to work his water loose. He knew some animals had a voice that could scare predators, but this thing was tormenting. Becky began to shake, her nerves scraped raw. Little Becky began to fret and whimper.

“I don’t know if I can take this much longer,” Joe’s wife squeaked. It was obvious she was about to have some form of a breakdown. “Every time I hear that thing, I almost wet myself, and I feel like I’m about to heave up. It’s driving me mad!” she screamed desperately.

Joe sat at the small kitchen table, his chair intruding into the living room. He had to agree that whatever made that sound was no animal, but what else could it be? “It’s been doin’ that all day?” Joe asked, trying to keep his voice calm and even.

“Yeah,” Becky replied shakily.

“Well, try to stay calm. I’m home now; I’ll keep you safe.”

The screech split the air like a wildly swung axe. This time, Becky screamed with it. The baby jumped visibly and began to cry loudly.

“Joe, can we go stay at my mom’s, just for tonight, until that thing stops?” Becky was wringing her hands like a worried preacher.

“Becky…” Joe disliked his mother-in-law greatly; she was little more than a tattooed bag of whisky sours with a jagged razor for a personality. “Everything will be alright, hear?” Anger began to build in him, an unreasonable irritation driven by the idea of staying at that woman’s house and the loud crying of the baby.

“Just for tonight; we can leave in the mornin’. Please?”

“No! Now shut that fuckin’ thing up and get my dinner!” Even Joe was shocked at what he had just said, the savagery in his voice.

“Joe?” Becky asked weakly.

“Becky, oh my God…I’m sorry, I don’t know…” The screech drove through his head again, this time he jumped.

“Fuck it! Get the kid; let’s get out of here.”

Joe stood so quickly, so sure of his decision that the chair fell and came close to glancing off the playpen. Becky rushed to the baby and lifted the screaming bundle into her arms.

Now that they had committed themselves to action, anger fled the rush of smothering fear. Joe grabbed the gun and forced the door open violently. The sound of a gunshot stopped him, and the trailer directly across from them flashed brightly with another shot.

“What was that?” Becky shouted.

Before Joe could answer, another shot rang out followed by another thought-scattering screech from the mountain. This time, Joe did wet himself. “I think someone is shooting over at the Leonards’ place!”

“Get me out of here, Joe, now!” Becky pleaded, holding the baby close to her.

“Come on, move!” Joe shouted as he rushed out of the trailer and into the darkness, the shotgun leveled and scanning the area for threats. In the deepest recesses of his mind, Joe suddenly knew they were in mortal danger, if not worse. Another shot rang out, followed by another.

Becky broke from the front door and rushed passed Joe, little Becky screaming in her arms. To Joe’s right, another trailer’s door slammed open, and Annabel stepped out. She was drenched in blood, more than Joe thought a single body could actually hold. It ran down her face, matted her hair, and made the logo on her tired t-shirt unreadable. Her eyes were wild, like that of a frightened animal, and in one hand, she held tightly a large chef’s knife.

“Shut that little shit ball up!” Annabel screamed.

Another shot rang out as Becky scrambled to get the door of the Chevy open.

“Annabel?” Joe said, hurt by the woman’s words, afraid of her appearance, and certain her husband no longer lived.

The woman took the single step to the ground and began to rush towards Becky. “I said shut that fucking brat of yours up!” Another shot rang out from the Leonards’ place, and the loud explosion seemed to have no effect on Annabel as she stalked forcefully towards Joe’s family.

“Annabel! Stop!” Joe shouted.

The screech came again, forcing the entire scene to a nightmarish level.

When the Chevy’s door slammed closed, Annabel stopped briefly then turned towards Joe. Another shot lit the scene briefly.

“You dog fucker!” she screeched as she sprinted toward him, the knife held high.

Joe fired at her, the lead slug catching her in the upper chest, tearing free her arm and shoulder, exploding her chest far enough back to add color to the rusting chrome of Annabel’s trailer. Becky screamed. In the distance, but somewhere within Blissful Acres, another gun barked repeatedly, rapidly.

Joe ripped the Chevy’s door open and leapt into the cab. Little Becky was still screaming, and Becky was weeping uncontrollably. He rolled the aging engine over and backed the car up. There, in front of him, suddenly stood Grandmother Leonard, a ridiculously large revolver in her hand. She pointed it directly at Joe and pulled the trigger.

The round pierced the windshield neatly, missed Joe by very little, and exploded the dirty back window into the bed of the pickup. Mother and child screamed at the same instant as Joe took a quick inventory of his face. He floored the gas pedal, and the Chevy spun down slowly, then lurched forward, striking Grandmother Leonard full on. She flew back and hit her family’s trailer where she slumped to the ground. Joe jerked the wheel over and smashed the gas pedal again. This time, the Chevy responded quickly, and the truck raced through Blissful Acres and toward the distant exit.

People were milling about everywhere, and Joe worked hard not run any of them over. They were all blood-splattered and armed with various things, from knives to guns, axes to baseball bats. The entire trailer park had gone mad, murderously mad, and Joe wanted nothing more than to get his family out of there.

They made the main strip and he turned right, still going at an alarming speed. He hoped the transmission could keep up with his need without vomiting pieces of itself on the dirt road.

“My mother’s is the other way, Joe,” Becky advised in a thin whinny voice.

“We are going to the trooper’s station down on McGee,” he stated, still not wholly the master of his own racing thoughts.

They sat in silence for some time, Joe contemplating his killing of two people, Becky trying to wrestle the torturous fear she had endeared that day. He slowed the truck as a fog began to lift around them, making the road a bit harder to see but not so much that he felt the need to stop. He rounded a bend and turned onto McGee, now just a few miles from the trooper station.

In the distance, a large and well-lit vehicle came into view through the fog. It was large, yellow, and carried before it a plow, and on top, a yellow strobe light screamed in two directions at once.

“Why the hell would Billy have the plow out now? It’s not snowing,” Joe wondered aloud.

The plow lifted a bit on the front of the truck, and it changed lanes to head right for them.

“Joe!” Becky screamed.

“Holy shit! Get down!” he shouted as he jerked the wheel over to the next lane.

The plow mirrored this lane change, again heading right for them.

“Joe! What’s going—?”

“Get down, on the floor, Becky!” Joe screamed as he pushed her down to the floorboard and cut the wheel once more. When he looked up, he saw the plow enter the windshield as the trucks collided bodily. The edge of it caught Joe in the teeth and removed the top portion of his head. The force of the impact sent his head rolling to the top of the plow and then back into the cab, salt, dirt, and sand stinging his eyes. Joe’s brain sputtered a moment and eventually ceased to think.

The dash of the old truck bent in and over Becky and the baby, trapping them neatly in a pinch of metal and fake leather trim. The shock of the collision had knocked the wind out of her, and the baby shot into the cushion of the bench seat and back into her mother’s body where she began to scream wildly. Becky felt and tasted blood covering her face and knew she was injured.

She tried to work herself out of the tight confines of the ruined dash to give the baby more room to move and breath. She forced her head passed the bench cushion, still unable to draw enough breath to scream for Joe, and saw Billy looking down at her.

His eyes were wild and mad, and his face bled freely from the numerous police badges that hung from the flesh of his face and neck.

“Hi there, Becky. Time for you to go!” he announced gleefully and forced the barrel of a police service revolver painfully into her eye. Before she could move, the gun fired, and Becky’s head burst across the remains of the dashboard. She no longer felt the pain that had racked her body, heard the screams of her little girl, or saw the second shot from the revolver, which brought the inside of the truck to a death’s silence.

Chapter 19

The deepening darkness brought no end to the nerve-grating howl. It had begun near dawn and continued throughout the day. There was no pattern, no repeated length or crescendo, just random nerve-ripping, spine-gripping, indescribable screeches. The constant tearing at Rich’s nerves had pushed him up to and then far beyond his threshold of tolerance. His senses, now swamped with an overbearing rage, were no longer his to control, and visions began to invade his sanity.

He had tried to reason with himself, to convince the voice in his head that being angry at some wild animal’s voice was unreasonable, but it simply prolonged his torturous slide toward insanity.

Julie had fared worse than he, she had always been a bit touchy and borderline enraged. When customers had come in, either to shop for their farming needs or to attempt escape of the mind-ravaging wail, she snapped at them, even threw old Ted Barton out for the color of his shirt or some such trivial thing. It was near closing then, but Rich could not afford a lost customer, especially a regular, and it set him off in a bad way.

“Julie! For the love of God!” he screamed at her, customers still milling along the isles, holding their hands to their ears, eyes clamped tight.

“Fuck you, Rich! You can just go to hell!” she screamed back, then threw an old metal stapler at him.

He ducked down in the isle to avoid the hurled stapler and found himself staring at the edge of a long-handled sickle, the Mike Hansel brand sickles he had just gotten in. His eyes fixed on the already sharpened edge, coated in some day-glow green rubber to keep the clumsy from cutting themselves. The rage that he had been able to hold at bay found a wicked beauty in the finely honed edge, and following the curved shape with his eyes seemed to lead his thoughts to a place where the unreasonable suddenly became reasonable…and now Julie most certainly needed to die.

Rich gripped the tool near the center of its wood handle and stood quickly, spinning around to find Julia looking for something else to throw at him. The cashiers’ counter held very little in the way of missiles, and she turned back to lock her maddened eyes on his.

He felt a rush of joy as her eyes went from rage to a shadowy and angry fear. He began to stalk towards her, slowly, drawing the fear out of her like a siphon, reveling in her fright.

“Rich, stop!” Daniel Becker shouted at him as another screech from the mountain subsided. He got between Rich and Julie, like some barrel-chested hero. He was a large boy, near seventeen now, and overly muscular. He had worked the farm since he was young and could wrestle the heaviest bales into the highest of barn lofts.

Rich did not pause, did not think, he simply struck at the hulking teen with the sickle. It came down at an angle, ripping open his throat and chest and cleaving the arm he had brought up in an attempt to defend himself just below the elbow. The teen crumpled immediately and began feeding a puddle of blood around him. Julia screamed sweetly before throwing a display case of Kershaw folding knives at him and making a break for the opening in the counter.

Rich barely got within reach of her as she leapt from the enclosure trying to flee his murderous intent. He brought the sickle down hard, catching her in the top of the head as she turned to run, impaling her like a macabre marionette. As she jerked and danced on the end of the sickle, Rich began to chuckle manically. Her brain-dying antics seemed to tickle him in a strange place, deep in his mind.

His heart flooded with euphoria, with a complete abandon of moral responsibility. In his head, he heard a voice that was not his, explaining that he could do this to anyone he wanted and release the tension and aggravation that had been building all day. This was the way of life now, it explained, and the avid executioner may find himself as favored acolyte.

He turned back to the store, the half-shelves not quite concealing the remaining patrons, two of whom were now also armed with tools of their own. The blood smell, the coppery tinge in the air had brought them to their own lust, and they began to stalk the others weaker than them.

This enraged Rich even further. This was his store, so these people were his to kill. Rich used his boot to remove Julia’s head from the end of the sickle and rushed up behind the closest one. He could not remember the old coot’s name but he did not care. The sickle cut through a shoulder and then neatly through the old man’s spine.

The man fell to his knees revealing a round woman, draped in a screaming moo-moo, holding a three-foot monkey wrench. Her face was a mask of bitter rage, and she rushed Rich as soon as she saw him. He brought the sickle up, catching her under her nose. Her face tore open and she fell backwards, her nostrils no longer attached to the puffy flesh of her makeup-caked face. Blood poured from the wound as she let go an angry yelp. The end of Rich’s sickle met her chest as her head struck the floor.

Rapturous joy flooded through him again, this time surging with an almost orgasmic strength. He had known the love of Jesus, sung about it in his small church, but it did not compare to this violence-spurred release. The warmth of the thick blood now sheeting his face and forearms, the dizzying knowledge that he was the superior killer and slayer of humans—his body shook with the pleasure of it all. He had to find more, others he could ruin to prove his worthiness to an entity he did not know but was sure watched his every murderous action.

Whimpering turned him around where he found a man coming toward him. He was limping from an open gash down the entire length of his leg, and his right eye was twisted and open, dead in the socket it had grown from. In his hand, he carried a sledge, the yellow plastic handle dripping blood, the heavy metal end adorned with a hairy piece of scalp. His clothing was blood-soaked and the leg he dragged left a smeared red trail behind him.

Rich, completely calm in his ecstasy, waited for the man to be close enough, for him to heave the maul over his shoulder. When he did, Rich reached out with the sickle and opened his throat just below the chin. The man’s head lolled back, and the weight of the sledge pulled him down and into a gushing fountain of crimson. He made a soft gurgling sound before the store went silent.

Rich slowly scanned the store, looking for others, someone else to strike at to prove his worth, but the shop was achingly vacant of the living. He could barely contain the elation swelling in his chest and ached to feel more. He wanted to scream his glee, draw others to him so he could kill them as well, amp his pleasure higher until he came to that moment of reward.

“Your path has just begun, Richard Bowman. Many others still wait…” a voice spoke in a stumbling Southern lilt. It was the voice of dry leaves rubbing, of rusted metal forced into motion, but it was still clear and powerful.

Rich turned to find the eternal force he had sought. Although the corpse-like body was an ashen gray, the clothing it wore almost rotted to thread, it was a thing of magnificent wonder…and the reward he sought for himself.

“Go, Richard… Find others… Bring them death in my name…” it drew out in a wicked wet hiss. “Take your trophies from these and prepare yourself for my coming…my judgment…”

“Yes,” was all Richard could form in his dark thoughts.

“There is one among them, Richard…one who shares his mind with another… Do not take him for he is my own prey…”

Richard placed the fat woman’s nose in the large pocket of his apron. “Yes,” Richards’s mouth formed from a mind no longer his own.

The thing who he now served turned and walked away, its long greasy hair trailing the floor behind him for some distance. “I take only the last…” it hissed as it eased into a bank of fog just now invading the store.

Richard collected the remaining trophies from the faces of those slain and left the store in search of further rapture. The street, chocked with hacked and mutilated corpses, ran dark with blood, pooling and scabbing in puddles randomly along its length. Distant shapes moved through the fog as shadows, shapes of inhumanity seeking the same reward as he.

Richard began to search them out, these vague shapes all about, just beyond his reach, killing any he found until another took him with a shotgun blast from behind.

Chapter 20

Kayla knew fear. Before last night, she had avoided with great dexterity the furry, black, kid-eating monster under her bed and always made sure her closet door remained closed to keep out whatever it was knocking around in there every night. It did not matter that she had never seen one of these childhood baddies—not seeing them did not make them less real—and so she remained vigilant and prepared.

Tonight, however, altered her perceptions of evil and her definition for the word monster. In a moment of clarity, she realized that monsters really do exist, but they are not furry, many-legged things creeping silently under the bed, they are people; not just certain people, but everyone. She also learned that her father had been keeping a gun in the house and her mother could still swing a cleaver even after Daddy shot her.

It had started with the screaming. Something far off began screaming just before lunch, and by the time school was over, almost everyone was in a terrible mood. There were arguments and even two fistfights on the bus, and the bus drive, fat Mr. Combs, broke them both up by smacking the offenders on the face—Bobby Daniels hard enough to bleed. That was enough to quiet the others, brooding and plotting events for after they were off the bus.

Luckily for Kayla, she was the only student who got off at her stop and one of the first to actually get off. This spared her torments and maybe even a beating from other unreasonably angry kids. Throughout the day, every few minutes, the scream would slice through the forest of the mountain and cut into her head, pushing her to an uneven edge, but she knew how to keep herself calm, her mom had taught her that.

When Kayla entered the kitchen, she could see her mother was having one of her off days. She sat at the kitchen table with a pack of Camels and a bottle of vodka. On her worst days, there would be no glass. Today, there was not even an ashtray, just a bottle, a pack of cigarettes, a disposable lighter, and countless snubbed butts smashed into the surface of the fine wood table Daddy had made for her.

“Mommy?”

“Leave me alone,” she hissed in a venomous tone.

Kayla, for the first time in her life, felt afraid of her own mother. The vodka and occasional pack of Camels aside, she had never been anything but a warm, tentative mother who was not afraid to tell stories of her own mistakes as a child, sometimes in jovial detail. Kayla was not used to this kind of tone, this kind of reaction from a mother who normally swept her up in a hug and tickled her to fits of laughter upon her return from school.

“Are you alright, Mommy? You look sad,”

“Kayla, just leave Mommy alone.”

“Yes, Mommy. Can I make a snack?”

“Kayla! Go do your fucking homework!”

Kayla dropped her backpack with her jaw. She was no longer afraid of her mother but now feared her. She had never been like this, never been mean to anyone.

“Go!” her mother screamed again.

Kayla grabbed her backpack and ran for the stairs. Up her feet bounded and down the hall to her bedroom. She closed the door and for another first in her life, Kayla twisted the small latch and locked her door. She walked slowly backwards, staring at the door as if it was about to burst open. Kayla knew some things about people who drank too much vodka: sometimes they got mean or silly. Her mother had never been either. Even after drinking a lot, she was more half asleep than anything, always a dreamy smile on her face as though she floated in a hot bathtub.

Kayla sat on her bed and cried, not loudly, just tears and the occasional sniffing. She pulled her schoolwork out and tried to make sense of the math but failed. Her father would be home soon, and he would make everything better with Mommy, stop that thing from screaming every few minutes, and help her do these fractions. Even with tear-filled eyes, she managed to finish writing sentences for her spelling words. Daddy would be proud she had finished this with no help.

When he did come home, he stormed through the front door like a tornado, yelling about something or another. Mommy began to scream back at him in a hateful, bitter voice. Then there was a crash, a screech from outside, and more screaming, but this time one side of the argument was coming up the stairs. Kayla did not know why, but she suddenly had an urge to hide. Whatever was coming up the stairs and yelling back down was not her father.

She quickly squirmed under her bed, not even considering the hairy beastie that should have been there, and peaked through the slats in the wood footboard. Fear had become a raging monster all its own, tearing at her insides, pounding on her heart. Then the doorknob turned slightly and stopped at the lock. Dread washed over her; she had left the door locked and whatever was on the other side was going to be very mad at her.

The door suddenly burst inward as the frame broke into large pieces and scattered throughout her room. There in the hall light was her father, more outline than detail, standing like some large predator, a gun in his hand.

“Kayla sweetie, where are you?” Her father’s voice was sickly sweet, almost as if he was mocking her.

“What the hell was that, Dennis?” her mother screamed from the bottom of the stairs.

“None of your business bitch!” he shot back down the hall. “Kayla? Come out, sweetie. Daddy wants to take you out for dinner.”

“You broke the fucking door down?” her mother screeched. “I keep this house clean for you so you can come home and tear it up, is that it?”

Daddy turned slowly, the edge of Mommy’s housecoat just out of sight around the ruined door jam, and fired his gun down the hall. The explosion was so loud it hid Kayla’s short scream. Then her mother screamed, “You shot me, you limp-dick waste-of-a-man!”

Daddy fired the gun again; this time, Kayla did not scream, but her mother howled in pain, or maybe rage. Her father suddenly fell backwards into the room, Kayla’s mother straddling him on top. She was sheeted in blood where the gun had made large holes in her flesh. Mommy began to hit him repeatedly with the kitchen cleaver, hacking into his head and chest as the gun fired again.

Mommy bucked upwards and landed straddling Daddy’s legs. Mommy swung the cleaver again, burying it deeply in Daddy’s chest. He fired the gun, catching her in the face and blowing most of Mommy across the remains of the doorframe and hallway walls beyond. This time, Kayla screamed loud enough for anyone to hear.

Daddy turned his head a bit and rolled his eyes at her. His face was slashed in many places, and blood was running into his eyes. When he found her gripping the wood of the footboard, he tried desperately to bring the revolver over his head and aim at her. Before he could, he seemed to simply fall asleep, his breath a gurgling refusal of the blood invading his lungs.

Kayla squirmed her way from under the bed and discovered her mother was almost completely without a head. Her father, though, still seemed to be fighting for breath, trying to draw in and around the blade of the cleaver in his chest. Kayla knew she had to find help, had to call someone, and right now.

She rushed from her room and toward her parents’, slipping and almost falling in the blood cooling on the carpet. She ran as fast as she could and grabbed the phone from its cradle. She dialed in 911 and listened to the phone ring over and again. She almost gave up when someone finally picked up the phone.

“911, what’s your emergency.”

In the background, Kayla could hear screaming, shouting, and the sounds of things being broken.

“Mommy hurt Daddy!” Kayla cried desperately.

“Is that so… Well, it was probably your fault, kid.”

Kayla sat there, suddenly unsure what had happened in her bedroom.

“No, I didn’t do anything! It was Mommy and Daddy! They fought and now Mommy is dead and Daddy is bleeding!”

The other side of the phone suddenly filled with snickers and giggling from more than one voice, and Kayla realized the sounds in the background had suddenly gone quiet. “It was your fault, Kayla. You drove them to it, didn’t you?”

“No,” She whined, trying hard not to cry. The principal always said to stay calm in an emergency and dial 9-1-1 on the phone if something like this happened.

“Why should we come and help you when you’re the reason they hurt each other? Huh, kid?”

“Help me! Please!” she pleaded.

The snicker turned to laughter, the giggling to hysterics. Then a woman’s voice came on the line. “Kayla, do you want to help your daddy?”

Kayla began to sob as she spoke, “Yes, please!”

“Does your daddy or mommy have a gun?”

“Yes.”

“Alright, now listen carefully, Kayla…” The laughter had simmered down to snickering. “Go and get the gun, and what you want to do is give your daddy a lead injection; this will make him all better.”

“How? What’s an injection?”

“Well, Kayla, it’s like a shot you get at the doctor’s. Now go and get the gun, Kayla, put the end of it against your daddy’s ear, and pull on the trigger.”

“Huh?”

“Hurry, Kayla! There isn’t much time!” the voice demanded.

“You want me to shoot, Daddy?”

“It will make him all better, I promise. Don’t you believe me?”

Kayla could hear the barely contained laughter in the woman’s voice. “No! It will hurt him even worse.”

“Shoot him, you little slut!” the woman screamed, and those around her began to laugh louder than before.

Kayla slammed the phone down and started crying in earnest. She knew that a police station was just across the street from her school and she might be able to find some help there. Her father always said that if she needed help, she should find a police officer.

She ran down the steps, leapt through the open front door, and began to run towards school. She knew the way, she had ridden the bus five days a week for four years now, but it was a long distance. She knew only that she had to find help for her daddy, and fast.

As she went, she began to find more and more bodies on the street, the sidewalk, in the lawns of the upscale houses of her neighborhood, some even hanging from shattered windows either by the glass or by rope. Her parents were not the only ones that had fought, and they were not the only parents that had killed one or the other of themselves.

Her parents had always been good about keeping bad things away from Kayla, but occasional news updates or accident scenes or those pro-life billboards slipped past the defensive duo now lying dead in her bedroom. However, to see it everywhere at once, at just about every house, all the blood… Kayla’s fear swamped out her sorrow and urgency to help her father.

Kayla made the shale stone pillars marking the entrance to the exclusive community in which she lived and turned down the wood-lined street towards her school. She could hear things moving in the trees, but the lack of streetlights made it impossible to see what they were. Even without the sight of them, Kayla knew they were cruel and evil things and she had to get away.

She pumped her legs hard, her breath coming in short gusts, her thighs burning painfully beneath her. Soon, she would have to stop, rest a bit. With all of this running, school was still far away. More things moved in the trees, seemingly towards her as she ran past, and she refused to stop until they were gone.

Light glimmered over the trees to her right. Kayla immediately knew that it was the sterile neon lights of the Sir Speedy Convenience drug store. It was near the middle of town, but also at the base of the hill. If she could cut through the trees, she could be there in just a few minutes, and there was a doctor guy behind the counter—maybe he could help her.

Disregarding the things hiding in the trees, Kayla made a sharp right-handed turn and spilled down the slope. It was hazardous and noisy going, but she could not let those tree things grab her, whatever they were, and so she continued at break-neck speed.

When she made the parking lot, she sprinted to the building and around the side towards the front. There she found Mr. Roy, still in his white lab coat, up on a ladder, nailing a person’s head upside down above the automatic doors. There were four others there as well, pinned unevenly to the stucco above the doors. Mr. Roy’s lab coat was red with blood, and he seemed to be humming softly to himself, as though what he was doing was normal. Kayla felt her mouth fill with wet and she backed around the side of the building before he saw her.

She let herself slide down to the cement sidewalk and vomited between her knees. A shot rang out, one much bigger than her daddy’s, and she raced to look around the corner again. Some woman was there in a torn flannel shirt and no pants, a shotgun trailing smoke as she walked toward the pharmacy. There, Mr. Roy lay torn almost completely in half and still squirming from his wounds.

The woman leaned over him a bit and fired again, this time into Mr. Roy’s chest. The shot sent blood, bone, and sidewalk in every direction. The woman then calmly knelt down and removed Mr. Roy’s scalp with a large knife. She lifted her shirt, under which she wore nothing but a thick leather belt and a number of other bloody scalps tucked underneath it like some horrible fur skirt.

Kayla had become so scared now she could not think straight. She ran to the back of the store, looking for a place to hide. The first thing she found was a large green dumpster with a cartoon rendering of a frog. She climbed in quickly and hid herself beneath rancid, sweating garbage and wept until she slept, slept until the sky began to lighten into a gloomy gray day.

Chapter 21

Stan had always been a loner. He had a deep seeded hatred of people in general. They were always out for themselves, never interested in each other’s problems. Every day, on the news, he could see the proof of this, the evil of man, and wanted no part of it. He worked his job down at the post office, sorting mail for the some thirteen hundred citizens of the town of Black Water, and then spent his time alone, at home, preparing for the end of humanity, something he knew was coming, forced on those like him by the endlessly greedy masses. Now it was actually happening.

His house, offset from the small town and some distance into the woods, was fortified in many ways. The walls had been reinforced with a surrounding of boles and the floor lowered somewhat to give him ducking space when the bullets started flying. Below the house was a rather complex network of tunnels, doors, and rooms. He had stocked them full of food and water, and even a small well if his supplies began to run low. This network he reinforced with metal plating and pillars capable of withstanding the house’s collapse if it ever came to that—at least he hoped.

It was coming on nine o’clock when he realized the faint popping sounds he heard were actually gunshots. Someone down in the town had begun shooting, and this seemed to set off a chain reaction. By then, it sounded like a war zone filled with rifle and small arms fire from just about every corner. Even with all of his preparations, it still surprised him when it happened, and it took him a moment to remember what it was he was suppose to do.

Now he sat behind his barricade, the front door opened to the world gone mad, waiting for people to fill the mantrap he had configured. Normally, he would have just locked himself in the shelter, but he had to know what was going on. The TV still worked, and some channels were on the air, but the only local news channel was unmanned. He had watched this for near an hour, the empty anchor’s desk, the complete lack of movement or sound before giving up. Even the radio stations were silent, save one. It droned on some best-of talk show rehashing quirky little jibes to callers’ beliefs in government or politics, all some weeks old.

It did not really matter to Stan now; the end had come. The shooting continued below, and occasional explosions or some such thing punctuated the gunfire. The town was tearing itself apart, and everyone seemed to have forgotten good ole Stan-the-man Clark, the gun crazed nut in his cabin in the woods. From the Meade telescope he had fixed to his roof, he could see on the monitor that a number of fires were burning, not exactly out of control, but unchallenged by the stark red flashing lights of the missing volunteer fire trucks.

Occasionally, in the soft glow of his laptop computer, the telescope revealed people in the streets, running this way and that, policed by no one. There were bodies, too, scattered about: some smashed by cars or beaten almost flat with cudgels, others burning or dismembered with hatchet or knife. Disgust rose in Stan’s throat as bile, and to his surprise, he found it mildly difficult to fight an urge to go and help, to try to bring the tattered remains of those still sane together and muster some form of defense or response. Still, all of them had made their fun of him and his hermit lifestyle. He decided they could all just rot in Hell.

He turned to his portable shortwave radio and began tuning through different frequencies. He hit on a number of different conversations and paused at each. The happenings here in Black Water appeared to be only happening in Black Water. None of the ham radio operators talked about it and the topics they did discuss where mundane and nerdy at best. This had to be a localized situation, but Stan reasoned that Black Water could be ground zero for a global event. It would be best if he just holed up here, protected himself, and waited it out. The shooting down there had to stop at some point.

The police and fire scanner had gone quiet some time ago. The last thing he heard was dispatch screaming to a patrol officer about Bill going crazy or something. It did not surprise Stan. Everyone knew Billy was a bit off kilter; not quit right in the head. It was bound to happen. Stan was surprised they even let him drive the big snowplow; the guy was so utterly stupid. However, in this crazy world, everyone seemed to have a place, even the borderline retarded. Stan was certain someone somewhere was benefiting from the dullard’s labor, probably that rotund mother of his. Someone had to feed that thing.

A sound came from the woods beyond the open door. Something large had entered the forest or come down from the mountain. It was most likely a white tailed buck looking for love, or even a bear seeking out the happenings below. Stan gripped the mounted AK-47 and trained it towards the mantrap. If it, whatever it was, happened in, it would not get far. As he readied himself, his scanner began to crackle softly, distantly, as if his squelch was set wrong and the volume was much too low.

The scanner eventually gave up on the signal and moved forward through the channels again. It paused for a second on dead air, and Stan picked it up to read the dial. It was the police band. Someone had opened their microphone and was saying nothing. Stan began to feel a dread pour over him, perhaps someone was playing with the radio of a dead cop, maybe a child.

“Is anyone there?” a voice whispered over the radio. It was strained and whispered but clearly masculine. Then the voice snickered lightly, “Anyone? Can anyone hear me?”

Movement sounded just near the door, and Stan put the radio down to return to his vigilance on the rifle. Something was about to enter the mantrap, and he needed to be ready.

“Stan!” the radio barked, and he almost squeezed off a round. He looked down at the radio in disbelief; it had stopped on Channel 000000.

“That’s impossible,” he said softly as something entered the mantrap. Stan leaned into the rifle and took aim on the shape before he realized what it was he was looking at. Before him stood Mildred Pierce, owner and sole employee of the Dainty Dots Day Care Center. She was nude but for a number of tiny corpses, hung from tiny hangmen’s nooses tied around her own throat. Her face had become bloated and purple, her tongue protruding, black in the low light. Her body violated many times by bullets, which shattered some of the tiny corpses as well. With all of the wounds, no blood spilled from the holes; she looked to have completely bled out.

The creature shambled forward, navigating the mantrap in a stilted clumsy manor, her child-corpse clothing swaying around her like strands of beads. Stan, prepared for people to destroy themselves, most likely in a very violent way, was not ready for Mrs. Pierce’s entrance. She loved children dearly and usually bored people with her stories and impromptu lectures on child rearing. To have even thought of her with a dead child was near blasphemous. She turned the first corner of the mantrap.

“Hi, Stan…” the voice hissed over the radio. “We have come to collect you…” This last part was in the voices of many children, distant and sad but gravely determined.

Stan suddenly wondered if he had gone crazy, and if so, would the courts forgive him the killing of Mrs. Pierce? He fired the rifle.

The bullet entered Mrs. Pierce in the chest and performed its acrobatic tumble before exiting in an explosion of bloodless flesh. Mrs. Pierce stumbled a bit but soon continued, so he fired again. This time he struck her in the belly, where the bullet pulverized her spine and jutted fragments of the white structure through the air. Mrs. Pierce stopped as the weight of the tiny corpses hung from her neck eased the top part of her body sickeningly backwards, allowing the tiny bodies to strike the floor. Now Mrs. Pierce was looking behind her, and her legs bent in determination to reach him. She started walking again, dragging the meat tied around her neck, her pasty gray legs trembling with the strain.

“You mother-hating bastard!” the children’s voices screeched over the radio in a hellish chorus.

Stan fired again, the bile in his throat reaching his mouth, the urge to vomit almost too much to aim. The round struck Mrs. Pierce in the hip, shattering that bone and collapsing the legs together. It stopped again and wobbled before falling to the ground.

“You killed us! You shit fucker!” the children screamed. “Now we have to go… Captain Black gets to takes us…” The voices began to sob and scream over the impossible channel locked on by the scanner.

Stan switched the radio off quickly and began to gag. Some twenty bodies now littered his porch, one of them still jerking and digging with its heels. This is not how he pictured it—men with guns trying to force him to give up or mindless, drug-crazed thieves shooting everyone and taking whatever they liked—not a nurturing mother-figure adorned in the hung corpses of her students coming to “collect” him.

Sounds came from the outside again, the sound of many things moving in many different directions. The gunfire was becoming louder and more distinct. Stan could almost guess the caliber of each weapon used, if it was a rifle or a handgun, and knew the battle lines were drawing closer. He shoved all of his small portable radios and his laptop in a ditty bag and lowered that down the hatch and into his shelter. He then staffed the AK-47 again, this time slipping the illegally installed switch to the full auto position that was not even marked on the side of the rifle.

People, one after another, sometimes in pairs, began rushing through the mantrap, all of them armed, some even shooting widely at him in a stark, guttural rage. Stan fired back, mowing them down best as he could, dropping some ten or fifteen before they began to bunch up at the doorway. There, they began to kill each other, clubbing or shooting in their rampage to get into the house.

What bothered Stan the most was that these were not some form of walking dead, these were living people driven to some madness or rage they could not control. They bled and died on his porch, people he knew, people he had seen before, some he had never met in his lonely job and life style. When he could take the carnage no more, he went through his mental supplies list then dropped himself through the hatch and locked it with the rebar locking arm.

He sat in the darkness next to his bag and listened to the combat above. Eventually, one of them made it to the AK and began spending the remaining rounds in the clip. Others were trying to open the hatch, pounding on it with rocks, clubs, or whatever in an attempt to reach him. Stan had come to know fear, fear of people instead of his normal hatred of them. They were mad and self destructive, but why so bent on killing him he could not say.

He dragged the bag into his makeshift datacenter and hooked the laptop up to the telescope cables. He began panning around the town, looking for some sign of hope or end to whatever was happening. What he saw was dilapidated buildings, some just burnt out shells, others weathered and aged in the glow of the streetlights. It was as if the town stood abandoned for many years and was now the place of ghosts and legends. All along the streets drifted a mist of deep gray; heavy smoke from the fires he was sure.

He looked down at the scanner again and after considering it for some time, clicked it on. It began racing through the preprogrammed channels again, searching for a signal stronger than the white noise. He watched it go through the sequence over and again before stretching out on the wall mounted rack.

All of his precautions and preparations had proven effective enough to keep him alive. He was now safe from the dangerous intent of the people above and could sustain himself for many months. He was used to being alone, and the solitude would not get to him; he had a large collection of movies and books and other distractions.

“You're not alone, Stan,” the radio whispered. “We can wait for you, wait until you decide to come out and join us.” The voice was barely more than static shaped in some unnatural way. In the background was the sound of droning machinery and grating metal.

“Leave me alone!” Stan screamed unreasonably at the radio.

The machine noise hissed and hummed in the background for some time. “We can wait for a long time…” the voice promised.

Stanly switched the radio off and returned to his bed, defeated. He curled up like a fetus, and feeling utterly alone, began to weep his end.

Chapter 22

She eased up, her eyes fixed on the thickly overcast sky. The length of her body ached with pain, the pain of assault and rape. It had started with the screeching, the horrible screeching from Black Water Mountain. The town had gone mad, stark raving mad. People running this way and that, killing and dismembering each other, adult and child alike. She had hoped it was a nightmare, but the raging ache and skin-cracking sting in her crotch told her it was not.

Her memory was like a velvet curtain, heavy and thick. All she could recall was the repeated rapes, the blood covered men climbing on her as she pretended to be dead. Some murdered as they took her, others just before or after. Bodies lay within an arm’s reach of her, all around her, and her skin stuck to the road by all the dried blood. Past this was a haze of darkness, soft but relentless, that hid from her even her own name.

During some point of the repeated violations, she had lost consciousness and slipped to a place where their penises could not harm her. It was from there she had come, to find the bodies, to see her own, forced nude and battered in such horrible ways. It was not her fault, she did not ask for this, and so she refused to loath herself because of it.

She was cold, dangerously cold in the early morning light. She had to seek shelter, find clothing, and get herself warm.

Tearing herself from the street-wide scab, she stumbled to the closest shop, now a mostly destroyed building. The front window that had once read “Mary’s Fashion Boutique” was now in shards, both inside and outside the store; the doors were now missing, pieces of glass and metal their only remains.

Inside, the racks and shelves had been overturned and tossed about. Clothing of all types lay scattered everywhere. She grabbed a particularly gaudy plaid coat from the floor and wrapped her nakedness within. Her body shivered against the aches and bruises, and she knew that she had to find more clothing quickly. She found a pair of black button-fly jeans and a tight little t-shirt that quoted, “Don’t expect a gift, I shop for me!” on the front. Atop this, she pulled on a rather woolly sweater with long sleeves and again the plaid coat.

None of the shoes here were functional for much more than clubbing, but she found some thick tube socks, which she put on in triplicate. She would have to find better footwear, and somewhere in her mind, she knew there was a Coach's Corner store a few shops down where they sold running shoes.

As she turned, she caught sight of herself in a fragment of a hanging mirror. Her face was bruised on one side from temple to the end of her jaw, and her other eye was swollen almost closed. Under that, she could see at one point she was a pretty woman, slender and petite with curly blond hair…and a squinted, swollen eye and purple cheek. She scrubbed some dried blood from her face with the sleeve of the coat, but still could not recognize the face.

She could feel the strangeness of not knowing herself pushing emotion to the top of her throat, and she turned away before crying. She had to find shoes, then her car, then a cop or a hospital. Whatever had come down from Black Water Mountain had not killed her, and she did not intend to give it a second chance.

She found the Coach’s Corner, and it was in much the same condition as the other store. The difference here was the bodies inside. Some seven or eight corpses lay twisted and broken throughout the small shop; they were shot, cleaved, or smashed in some sickening way. Overhead, some football game played out over a hidden radio as if nothing had gone wrong the night before. She held her stomach as she found shoes and left the shop quickly.

In the street again, she was shocked at how revolting the town had become. Even in the hazy gray light from the overcast sky, she could tell it had aged decades in a night, rust and corrosion taking its toll on the metal things, while the wooden ones looked weathered and dry. The streets were crowded with broken glass and trash, loose papers and tatters of clothing all amongst the randomly felled corpses.

From the darkness of her mind, Shakespeare recited, “Something wicked this way comes,” in an author like voice, to which she said, “This way came is more like it.” The sound of her own voice frightened her, broke through the silence of the streets and disturbed the death of it all.

She allowed her feet to pick a direction; she had to find her car even if she could not recall what it looked like, the make or model or even the color. However, they chose to lead her to the right and around the side of the boutique. As she reached the corner of the building, she found a purse there, splayed across the sidewalk, trampled and blood-spattered.

She squatted down next to it, and withdrew a dark faux calfskin wallet. Inside, she found a license with her picture on it. The face was pretty, petite, and lacking the damage it bore now. Just underneath her picture was the name Shannon Clemens. The name sparked like an empty lighter, a flash without a flame. Irritation drove a wedge through her; it was infuriating she could not remember who she was.

Still, she collected what she could of her things and continued. Subconsciously, she pulled out a cigarette and lit it before she even realized that she smoked. It would not have mattered if she did or not; the cigarette tasted good and brought calm to her nerves. She drew deeply again, had a sudden urge for Scotch, and continued on her way around the corner of the building.

The parking lot was empty. Not a single car was there, not even in ruin. What she found were six empty spots and a fifteen-foot tall chain link fence, bluish gray fog oozing through the diamond shaped holes. Far in the distance, she heard what she was sure was a single gunshot, and her nerves began to fray once more. She returned to the street, made another right, and continued into the deepening fog. Shannon hoped there was a gun store nearby, some place where she could pick up a weapon or something to protect herself; she had suddenly resolved not to become a victim again.

The fog was wet, cold, and heavy and allowed for only a few yards of visibility. It put her on edge even more, and she drew deeply on the cigarette again. No matter how hard she thought on it, she could not reason how she came to be in a place like this, in a situation like this. The only sign of life she had encountered was a gun shot from far off, a sign of not only life but the dealing of death as well.

In only a few shops, she found a sporting goods store with rifles visible on the back wall. She stepped over the broken glass and around the heavy camouflage coats. The counter had been smashed, but it still held a number of handguns. They were large and unyielding and Shannon had no idea what it was she was looking for. She knew it had to be small enough to fit her hand but have a big enough bullet; this was something her brother had taught her after her first break-in.

Her brother, she could almost remember his face, but the image eluded her. She could remember his voice, soft and drawn into a Southern twang. Aggravation began to rise in her again, and she wrestled it back down. She found a gun that fit her hand; according to the black plastic case, it was a Glock model 27, .40 S&W. She had no idea what all this meant, but the gun was small enough to fit her hand and the barrel was large enough to fit her index finger.

She found a clip and shoved it into her pocket and sought out the ammunition. The store seemed over-stocked with .40 S&W boxes, so she picked up one and dumped it into her pants pocket. It was a lot of weight, so she dumped another in the other pocket to even it out. She then used a third box to fill both clips and struggled for some time before being able to draw the slide back and bring a round into the chamber. Now she was ready.

Shannon stepped through the door and paused a moment. She had no idea which direction to go, completely unfamiliar with a town she knew she lived in. It was unsettling to say the least. She raged against the curtain in her mind, struggled to push it out of the way. Finally, she turned right, giving the fight over as lost. She continued down the street in slow fashion, unsure what was about to come screaming out of the fog and fearing it.

The sidewalk had begun to crumble in many places, giving way to the rapid aging affecting the entire town. She slowed even further to keep from falling over the refuse. With all the want of being free of this town but forced to go slow, anxiousness and urgency began to build in her alongside the irritation of not knowing herself.

“Hey! You, miss?” a voice called from the edge of the fog.

A man in a long coat came into view, and Shannon stopped, more out of fear than interest.

“Miss, are you alright?” the man asked as he started to approach her in a nervous, quick manor.

“Stop!” Shannon shouted.

The man slowed to an even pace. “What? Are you hurt or something? Did you hear the news?”

The man seemed in control of himself, not a raving lunatic like those from the night before. His question about the news interested her, but still she was nervous as all get out. “What news? Can’t you tell me from there?”

“No, but its wonderful news. But first, are you hurt?”

“Uh, no, not too bad. What’s the news?” She found the grip of the pistol in her jacket pocket and pointed it in his direction without pulling it free.

“Well, I tell ya, it is great news!” He stopped just in front of her looking like a computer nerd gone crazed weekend flasher. “He is coming! Are you ready for him?”

“Who is ‘him’?”

“Captain Black!” he shouted happily.

“Who is Captain Black? Is he a police officer?”

“No, silly, he is quite like Santa. He brings presents to all the good children!”

Shannon felt a chill run down her spine.

“Have you been a bad girl?”

“Mister, I think it’s time you leave,” Shannon said while taking a step back.

“You haven’t taken a life yet, have you?”

“What?” she shouted. “Are you crazy?”

“No, really! He rewards those that kill for him! Honest!”

“Get the fuck away from me!” she screamed.

The man’s face went from joyous rapture to a hurt, sunken look of rejection. “Okay, that’s fine. One more can only help, I guess,” he replied as he drew a long fillet knife from under his long trench coat. “Shame since you’re so pretty and all.”

“Get the fuck away from me!” she screamed again. Somewhere over her shoulder, she heard someone yelling, which fed the disjointed terror building inside her. The man approached her and she squeezed the first bullet through the first handgun she had ever fired. The explosion was terrible, even inside her pocket, and the man flew backwards a few feet before skidding on his back. The spent casing fell onto her hand and burned her. She jerked her hand from the pocket and shook it up and down.

The man lay prone on his back. He had been nude under the trench coat; his body covered in shallow lacerations, a crisscrossing pattern of self-abuse, but now with a neat smoking black hole in his upper chest. He had left behind his fillet knife and one shoe, still standing where she had shot him.

She pulled the gun from her pocket and then the empty casing. She released the magazine and added another round to it before putting it back into the gun. She wanted to make sure she kept the thing loaded until she was out of here. Then she would bury it somewhere so no one could say she killed this man; accuse her of murder even though she was just protecting herself.

“Hey! Up here!”

Shannon spun around and saw a man in the window of a large building some many yards away. She raised the gun and pointed it at him, and he ducked immediately. “I had to! He was going to kill me!” she screamed desperately.

“I know,” came the reply over the edge of the window. “I saw the whole thing. Can you get me out of here? I’m getting hungry and there are no nurses up here.”

“You’re in a hospital?” she asked after her heart slowed its hammering pace and she gained control of her breath again.

“Yeah, sort of… Can you come and let me out? The door is locked!”

“Why are you locked in?” Shannon asked as she approached the building.

“They thought I was crazy, but then they tore their own town apart.” The man peeked over the sill again.

“Are you crazy?”

“No, I know what I saw, and it’s the same thing that’s going on around here. They just didn’t know about it. I tried to tell them, and they locked me in here.”

“You know what’s going on then?”

“Not exactly, but I think my friends and I started it. Come let me out, please?”

“What are you going to do if I let you out?”

“Get the flaming fuck out of this town, that’s what! Please?” he pleaded.

“What’s your name?”

“Ethan.”

“Alright, Ethan, I’ll come up—but I will have some questions for you before I let you out.”

“That’s fine. Do you have any food with you?”

“We will worry about that after I get you out. Here I come…”

“Hey, what’s your name?”

“Shannon.”

“Nice to meet you, Shannon, and thank you!”

She walked along the side of the building searching for the entrance to the hospital. She was not sure who this guy was, but if he had any answers to what was going on, maybe he knew who she was, maybe he could help her remember. At a minimum, she could talk to him from a safe distance.

Chapter 23

Shannon found the entrance of the hospital, which was now shattered and broken, blood dried along the glass. Bodies littered the entry way, torn and battered during their flight. A stench began to rise from them, mixing with the air of decay and the faint smell of something sweet and rancid burning somewhere distant. Shannon decided that somewhere close by were the very gates of Hell.

The remains of a young nurse, no more than twenty, lay across the pressure switch of the large automatic doors, holding them open. The girl was clearly raped much like Shannon, but beyond that, she was dismembered and laid open across her mid-section, lengths of her intestines draped across her naked body like some ornament. Shannon shuddered and gritted her teeth, fighting back the sudden urge to wretch the nothing she had eaten. It had become clear to her that last night could have seen herself much like this young nurse, and she wondered if she were going insane.

Shannon worked her way around the nurse and entered the lobby of the upscale hospital, which now was a scene of soulless violence. Many corpses lay scattered about, all cut neatly into pieces, each piece placed in a pattern around the host corpse. The entrails of most draped along the walls like some hellish semblance of art, and dried blood sat frozen in mid drip, forming patterns of gore on the walls and the reception desk.

Shannon came to a short stop, shocked with the brutality and violence, the utter disregard for life or even the sanctity of a corpse. Every fiber of her being urged her to leave, to run from this place, this abomination of a hospital, and get as far away as she could. Deep inside her, in the hollow places not hidden by the thick velvety blanket, she knew that leaving Ethan up there, locked in his room, was just as much killing him as she had the nerd in the street.

The power had not been lost, so the unbroken florescent lamps illuminated the horror around her as she picked her footing slowly. After some time, she finally navigated the fleshy gambit and entered the darkened hall just beyond reception. It was as though the scene displayed out there was intent on keeping people out of the hospital, like a warding of some sort, a gruesome standard that warned against trespass. Nevertheless, she was through and quickly left it behind.

The hospital had suffered the same aging dilapidation as the streets, landscaping, and façade outside. The tiled floor was filthy and debris-strewn, the walls stained and mold-grown, and the drop ceiling threatening to come down in more places than it already had. Through the center of the passage traveled many long and bloody streaks, as though someone dragged corpses through to the reception area. Shannon took the Glock from her pocket and let it hang at her side.

Ethan was on the second floor, and Shannon hoped it was just above her. She found a single utilitarian elevator in a small recess, the kind large enough to accommodate a wheeled gurney. She pushed the call button and felt the floor tremble slightly as the car went into motion. From deep inside the large building, she could hear the aged cables and pulleys screeching their protest. The sound was ominous and painfully loud. If the decorator of the lobby was still in the building, then now it certainly knew she was here as well.

The elevator car came to rest with a long, sighing hiss, and the doors parted. On the far side of the car, doors came open as well, revealing not only another passage but also an apparition of a hellish nightmare her mind was incapable of inventing. A large, overweight woman was standing some yards down the passage but staring right at Shannon. It was mostly nude, its nurse’s uniform torn almost completely away. What made it so horrible to see was that its skin had gone an ashy gray, and all over its body in random places, it had stitched severed limbs to herself, as if to add many arms and hands and other more revolting things to the nurse’s ample frame. Not even these displaced parts were the same sickly gray of the host, simply the bluish tinge of anatomy gone empty of blood.

In each of its real hands, it held tightly large surgical knives—not scalpels but long toothy bone saws. Its face was a twisted semblance of rage, each crevice or crease stitched into place with black nylon by a sloppy hand. Its mouth, the lips pulled back with rows of wide stitches, opened horribly, and it screamed rage at Shannon, a deep-seeded rage and blind contempt for the living.

Shannon screamed back.

The thing began to shamble towards her, the limbs stitched about bouncing and slapping lifelessly along her ruined body. Shannon screamed again, raised the gun, and started firing. If she had thought better of it, she would have run, but the heart-squeezing terror had been impossible to think through, and her inner voice shouted at her to destroy this wrongness, to rid the world of such a bald evil.

Her aim was sloppy and confused by the powerful bucking of the handgun. Her arm flailed up with each shot, jolting the bones in her hand, arm, shoulder, and neck. Nevertheless, she gave no ground to the thing’s advance nor did she stop firing. Soon the creature was too close to miss, and its body began to tear as each round passed through it. The flesh pierced in the front and then exploded out the back, but it did not slow the monstrosity.

When it entered the elevator, Shannon realized her thinking was flawed, that the thing had her now and there was no fleeing it. Before the thing swung the wicked serrated knife, there was a twang, and the elevator suddenly dropped, fell rapidly, and crashed into the basement floor. From far below, Shannon heard the thing scream, the rage now impossible to believe. She did not wait, but leapt over the now vacant elevator shaft and went to the stairwell to the right.

Her breath was rushing in and out at an unreasonable pace, and her heart hammered against the inside of her chest; it is one thing to see people gone mad, but something entirely different to see them brutally changed into an insidious monster. There was no chemical in the air, no infection like airborne rabies; it was an evil thing happening here, a biblically evil thing that she did not understand or know how to handle. She had to get to Ethan and find out what was going on.

She ran up the gritty stairs and ripped open the door to the second floor. The passage was much like the one below but for the bodies instead of just streaks of blood. They were clearly dead but not ravaged like those downstairs. It scared Shannon to realize how wholesome it seemed that these corpses were still complete. Shannon began to wonder if perhaps she had gone mad and was just spending some time here in a mental ward.

She turned right and realized this was in fact a mental ward. The small windowed doors to almost every room stood open and were now broken or hanging crooked, all smeared with blood and bits of flesh. In some of the doors were what appeared to be patients, half in, half out of their cells, all lying lifeless and brutalized in bloody orange coveralls.

Shannon replaced the clip in her gun, unsure how many shots she had left and not wanting to run dry. She then began to walk slowly down the passage, leading with the gun, peering into each room before passing. The hall was long and as dark as the one below, the stench of blood and warm meat hanging thick in the air. A soft humming and occasional crack came from the florescent lights above as they fought to come on completely, forcing the passage into a maddening flicker from gore and human refuse to almost complete darkness.

At the far end of the passage, toward the outside wall, there stood a single door among many. This door, however, did not seem infected with the blight of the rest of the building. It was still clean and sterile, the light above the threshold still burned steadily, and the floor and ceiling were clean and without the stain of fungi. It seemed as if the Holy Grail was contained within, and the evil consuming the town could not approach. This seemed so completely odd to Shannon, enough to make her loath to approach it and see what the room actually held. That was until a face filled the small window and looked down the hall towards her.

She knew at once it was Ethan and she rushed to the door.

“Shannon! Thank God! I heard shooting; was that you?”

“Yeah. Back away from the door!”

“Can’t you just open it? What happened to your eye?”

She raised the gun and pointed it at him through the wire-filled glass. “Back up!” she screamed.

“Alright, don’t shoot!” Ethan hollered as he stumbled quickly back from the door.

Shannon inched the door open slowly until she could see the young man completely. She kept the gun trained on him, “Why aren’t you dead like the others?”

“I don’t know. Whatever happened out there stopped at my door. Can you lower the gun? I won’t hurt you,” he assured her, his hands held empty before him.

Shannon looked all around the small room, looking for any sign he may have an improvised weapon or something stranger. “Take off the coveralls,” she said flatly, seriously.

“Excuse me?”

“Take off your clothes!” Shannon screamed. “I don’t know what the fuck is going on around here, but I need to know you don’t have a weapon.”

“I don’t have anything under these…” Ethan began.

“Take them off now or I am leaving!” she threatened.

“Alright, relax. Here.” He unzipped the front and let them drop to his hips. “See? Nothing!”

“Drop them all the way!”

“I don’t… Fine.” He dropped them to the floor and shrugged his shoulders at her.

“Turn around.”

Ethan did as he was told, if not a bit quickly. “Okay?”

“Yeah, fine. You can get dressed. Nice birth mark by the way.”

“Yeah, thanks,” he replied dryly as he zipped the front of his coveralls. “Did you bring food?”

Shannon let the gun drop to her side. “No, and you’ll be glad I didn’t when we get out of here.”

“Oh, why? Never mind, let’s just go. Are you alone?”

“Yeah. Come on,” Shannon started back down the passage.

Ethan rushed to catch up with her, and suddenly saw the nightmare around him. “Oh my God…”

“It gets a lot worse,” Shannon quipped back as she continued.

“Why are we going so fast?” Ethan asked, still a bit sore from his trek to the Brighton house and the nightmare below.

“There are things in here I don’t want to meet again.”

“Like what?” Ethan enquired as they entered the stairwell.

“When we are outside, we can talk. We have to get out of here.”

“Yeah, alright.”

Ethan followed her over the empty elevator shaft, through the hallway, and into the reception area. Here he cursed under his breath wetly then dry heaved nothing onto the floor. Shannon took his arm forcibly and led him over the remains of the nurse and into the cold grayness of the outside. Ethan heaved again, this time bringing up some liquid from his empty stomach, which he spat to the ground.

“How do we get out of this town?” Shannon asked while keeping her eyes locked on the now aged hospital.

“I thought you would know,” Ethan replied around a mouth too full of spit.

“Don’t you live here?”

“No, I don’t, actually. I thought you did.”

“I might,” Shannon said under her breath.

“You don’t know?”

“I can’t remember much of anything, past last night.”

“Great. Now what do we do?” Ethan sounded exasperated.

“Find a map, a car, and get the fuck out of here.”

“So you don’t even know if you live in this town? How do you know your name?”

“I found my wallet.”

“Oh.”

“Can we go now?”

“Are you hurt? There is blood in your hair and on your face. What happened?” He sounded genuinely concerned for her.

Shannon turned on him angrily. “They tried to rape me to death, alright? I don’t remember a fucking thing before that!”

“Are you hurt?” Ethan asked again, trying not to show shock at what this girl had just shouted at him.

“No, just sore.”

“Let’s get to a drug store and get you cleaned up. I need some shoes, also.”

“So you started all this?”

Ethan looked up and down the street, looking for some sign of a grocery or drugstore. “I’m not sure. We can talk about it over a Twinkie; I’m starved.”

Without another word, Shannon started down the street with Ethan in tow.

* * *

In a cave at the base of the Black Water Mountain, a large pool of water stirred and then eased a thin tendril of itself from the confines of its shore, gently out of the cave’s opening, infesting the forest with its wicked nature. For the first time in centuries, Black Water Mountain began to run with black water, like blood from some ancient wound.

Chapter 24

The pair walked slowly, watchfully down the street lined with ruined and burnt shops and offices. To Ethan, most of the town was like a large strip mall that stuttered. There were no high-rise buildings, at least none taller than the four-story courthouse, and all of the shops were one or two floors, some with apartments and others with offices. It was more like a concentration of suburbia in the middle of wilderness and farms than a real town.

Shannon had no particular opinion about Black Water; it was a town like many others. Because she seemed instinctively to know how to get around the place, she must have lived here at one point…and for some time. She was not the type of person to go searching every street and road near her home, but discovered them as needed and when time allowed. Shannon reasoned she must have lived here for at least a couple of years.

The road curved a bit and then sloped downward and into the parking lot of some small store. Before it stood a large neon sign slowing rotating, which read ‘Sir Speedy Convenience, the store with hours you keep…’ on both sides. The obligatory Bud and Bud Light ads were stuck to the inside windows surrounded by the fleeting, failing hopes of just about every cigarette manufacturer’s advertising budget. The rest of the building remained hidden by the structures on the side of the street.

“That’s the local drug store?” Ethan asked, pointing down the hill from inside his jumper pockets.

“Yeah.”

“And you remembered it was here but not where you live?”

“Yeah.”

“That must bug you out.”

“Yeah.”

Shannon sounded as if she were becoming annoyed, so Ethan fell quiet.

They shuffled on in silence, watching the Sir Speedy Convenience blossom into a full-fledge grocery store from behind the buildings. It had a large but mostly empty parking lot. The vehicles that were there had suffered extensive vandalism, some were even turned over. The rest had not a single solid window or tire filled with air. They were hollowed metal behemoths who had lost a battle with their creators.

Shannon looked at the somewhat lanky asylum escapee next to her. He was attractive enough—honest looking in his face and eyes—but it was a hospital after all. “So…why where you in that hospital?” she asked gently.

Ethan looked at her a moment, “I saw some things that they didn’t believe, and they think I killed my girlfriend,” he said flatly.

A bolt of fear shot through Shannon before she reasoned herself to a fragile calm. She had just blasted a nerd in the streets, like in a movie but with much more gore. “Did you?” She wished immediately she could take that back, but Ethan answered quickly enough for her.

“No. It was a monster. I tried to kill the monster.”

“I see, and…what did this monster look like?”

“Which one? There were three that I counted…well then there was Madison, so four—but others were in that cave, also.”

“Cave?”

Ethan stopped at the very edge of the parking lot, his eyes locked on a number of heads hanging from the store’s façade. Driven into the mouth of each was some enormous nail, more like a railroad spike and all of them were upside down, their hair hanging limp and scabby. “This is insane, really…”

Shannon’s eye locked on one of the faces, one that she recognized even though it was hanging inverted. She could not remember who it was. She knew only that this woman was important to her, someone who had played a major role in her life, but someone she just could not remember. Nevertheless, the sight of her head hanging on a storefront filled Shannon with a smothering sorrow. “I know her…” she said softly as she pointed on the third heard from the left.

“Who is it?” Ethan asked before considering.

“I don’t know,” Shannon replied, as a tear broke free of her eye, “but I know she was important to me.”

“Let’s just get in there and get what we need, alright?”

“Yeah,” Shannon said in a sad voice.

They walked beneath the heads and into the store. The lights still worked in many isles, and the stock was for the most part still on the shelves. The problem that faced them now was that everything seemed to be aged by years. The strange aging that had been going on outside made him wonder if the food might no longer be edible.

“Alright, I’m going to go look for food. You head over to the first aid stuff and get what you need to take care of yourself. We will meet back here in a few minutes,” Ethan offered.

“I don’t know what I need,” Shannon whispered, still fighting with the unremembered head nailed to the front of the store.

“Ah, well, where are you hurt? Is it just the face?”

“No, they raped me.”

“And you hurt…down there?”

“Yeah, a bit.”

She looked like a lost child, a puppy too brutally beaten to come when his master called. “Do you have any bleeding?”

“I don’t think so, not sure though…”

Ethan’s head swam. He had never had to deal with something like this, even as a volunteer medic. In rape cases, they regarded the groin as evidence unless the patient’s life was threatened. He knew the mechanics, though: bleeding, infection, bandaging. It would have to do.

“Do you want me to take a look?”

“No, Ethan. I got that part,” she shot at him dryly.

“Fine, you will need some panty liners and two douches, one vinegar and the other saline. Are you menstruating?”

“No.”

“Then that should do. You might want to take some Tylenol or ibuprofen for pain.”

“You need anything?”

“No, I just need something to eat. Back here in five minutes?”

“Yeah,” Shannon replied as she worked her way down an aisle.

Ethan walked towards the left side of the store were the large browsing refrigerators stood in a silent row. They were still powered and the foods within still frozen. This, to him, was a good sign. As he rounded the last fridge, he was presented with the dairy section: a collection of molded cheeses, bloated cartons of milk, and a sickening odor.

Ethan coughed back a deep belly gag and turned back toward the dried goods. Perhaps granola bars or candy had survived. He walked the length of a few isles, testing the foods with his hand, finding most in a dried ashy state. That was until he reached the processed desserts isle with the cellophane wrapped treats. There, in the middle, were his coveted Twinkies, along with Ding Dongs and Susie Q’s. They appeared to be fine, untouched by age. He tore open a box of Ding Dongs, removed the plastic, and tried it. He then collected a number of boxes and continued searching for bottled water.

“Ethan! I got what I need!” Shannon called from the front of the store.

“I’ll be right there; just looking for water!”

“There is a pallet of it up here! Didn’t you see it when we came in?”

Ethan turned back to the front, not bothering to answer such a silly question. He grabbed a wool coat from a stand he passed and a pair of work boots in his size. He carried all of this in a stack up to the registers.

“What kind of drug store sells coats and boots and fishing tackle?” he asked Shannon.

“This store has everything. Mr. Jerkins runs his store like a miniature Wal-Mart.”

“Mr. Jerkins?” Ethan asked as he sat to lace up the new boots.

“Yeah, he and his wife own this store…” Shannon trailed off as she realized that a memory had just broken through the wet velvet curtain and stumbled to a halt in front of her. She had worked here for many summers, the Jerkins had helped to send her off to college to get her degree in marketing, and that head on the front of the store was poor Mrs. Jerkins. “I worked here during the summer when I was in school…”

Ethan stopped lacing for a moment and looked at Shannon. Even with the bruise and the swollen lip, she was a lovely girl, much like Abby but just a measure more slender, more elegant than the tomboyish look Abby had worn. He reached over and put his hand on her shoulder.

She, in turn, looked at him through strands of fallen blonde hair and locked eyes. To Shannon, Ethan was an attractive, if not younger, guy. His eyes looked almost artificially green, theatrically intense, but deeply caring and intelligent. She smiled weakly at him, “I’m fine…I just knew these people, but didn’t know I knew them, you know?”

“Yeah, I understand; it’s okay. Your memory is coming back.”

“Soon, I hope. You almost done?”

“Yeah,” Ethan replied as he pulled the last boot on and began tying it.

“Hey kid, wanna see something really gross?” a gravelly voice asked. It was sinister, distant, and immediately recognizable to Ethan, even before he looked up.

He stilled his thundering heart as he brought his head up and looked past Shannon’s shoulder. There, just a few steps behind Shannon stood the obese, greasy bum, still in garbage-collected clothing, still with the stained brown fedora, still with the hideous skin affliction that made him seem as if hell spawned.

The grotesque homeless man began to chuckle deeply. “…and you thought you got rid of me with those stupid pills didn’t you?”

“Ethan?” Shannon asked, puzzlement etched around the swelling of her face.

Ethan swallowed hard, his mouth now much too dry. He knew fear, had known it since the bum first appeared, but that was over, done with, and gone. How could this thing be back, this creation of his own dark thoughts when the doctor had promised him banished? He was going mad, Ethan decided, but then again, he could still question his own sanity. Confusion swamped him for a moment, but he caught movement out of the corner of his eye, something darted between two isles at the far end of the store.

“Ethan?” Shannon asked again.

“There is something in here with us. I just saw it duck behind those shelves,” he whispered, his voice still shaking.

“We should go,” Shannon urged as she began to stand, her voice thick with fear.

“I think it was a child.” Ethan stood and began to walk toward the far side of the store.

“Ethan! Wait!” Shannon hissed.

Ethan raised his hand to her as a response and continued.

Shannon cursed softly and pulled free the pistol in her pocket as she followed him. “Ethan…” she hissed again.

“Well, hello there,” Ethan said pleasantly down one of the aisles. “No, wait, don’t run. I won’t hurt you! Shannon, it’s a little girl.”

“Where?” she asked as she began to jog toward him. “Is she hurt?”

“I can show you her insides…” the bum offered in a kind voice.

Ethan ran to the next aisle and disappeared behind the shelves. Shannon turned down the first aisle and rushed to the end. She could hear Ethan moving with her down the adjoining aisle. He was calling to the girl, coaxing her not to run away.

Shannon reached the end of the row at the same time as the little girl. She was no more than nine, wearing blue jeans, a t-shirt, and a bright pink jacket. Her face was a clay mask of fright, and she brandished a squirt bottle of some type of all-purpose cleaner like a gun. When she saw Shannon, her face twisted a bit tighter, and she released a sob of pure terror.

“Sweetie, we won’t hurt you. Ethan, slow down; you’re scaring her!” She stuffed the pistol back into her pocket, squatted down to the girl’s height, and offered her a hand. “It’s alright. Are you hurt?

“Leave me alone!” the girl screamed desperately.

“What’s your name, sweetie, huh? My name is Shannon. My friend over there is Ethan. We want to help you.”

The girl just stared at Shannon, her eyes impossibly large, her face quivering with fear.

“Please, sweetie, come here; I promise I won’t hurt you.”

The girl looked at Ethan once, then back to Shannon. She was so terribly scared, so innocence-shattered that Shannon felt a tear slip from her own eye. This poor little girl had survived a night that almost drove her insane. Shannon suddenly wondered if the brutal animals had raped the girl, raped as she was, and her heart twisted painfully. She no longer cared what was happening to her or to Ethan, what had happened to this town, or what evil had flooded into her life. All she cared about now was getting this little flower out of here and to some safe place, to wash away the horrors she must have survived last night, to ease them into those memories forgotten. She would do anything to keep this town from having her, and she began to weep softly her conviction.

The small child watched her a moment longer, unsure until the tears began to fall from the pretty woman’s eyes. The simple expression of emotion was well beyond the monstrosities she had seen and she ran to her. She fell into her arms, into her soft, warm chest, and cried in a way she had never cried before.

A second set of arms embraced her gently, but with more strength than the woman, and Kayla knew it was the man. He was there, enveloping both her and the woman in a protective way, as her father would have if he were still alive. Kayla sobbed for the relief, wept for the comfort of strangers, and cried for her lost parents.

"I can show you her liver, if ya want…"

Ethan realized that unlike before, the homeless man’s breath smelled horrible and he could feel it wash over his neck from behind.

Chapter 25

Stan climbed from the hammock and stood in the small room which he called the berthing compartment. The TV burst white static soundlessly, sparkling and jittering down the screen, a slow roll shattering the chaos of white noise. It had been less than a day, but he already felt so completely cut off, so starkly alone that he wanted to go to town and look for survivors.

He sat at the laptop, disrupted the screen saver, and called up the image from the telescope hidden on the roof. The thick bluish-gray fog still shielded his view of the town, keeping him from seeing the finer details. The orange glow was gone, so he reasoned the fires had burned themselves out or were put out by the volunteer fire department. The second was a much more comforting idea than the first.

Stan reasoned, though, that if the fire department had fought the fires, then they should be on the radio, or maybe even the cops. He lifted the small scanner and stared at its blank screen. Hope battled with loathing; Stan knew what he would hear if he turned the radio on, but he could not be sure. After many long moments, he turned the volume knob until it clicked. The numbers began to run through the preprogrammed channels without stopping. He watched this for many long moments before turning the volume up slowly. To his relief, the numbers did not stop indicating a channel.

He placed the radio on the counter next to the laptop and retrieved a pack of crackers from the cupboard. He opened them and began munching absent-mindedly, worrying over whether he should escape his self-imposed imprisonment and find out what really happened last night, see if this truly was the end of the world. The taste of mold grabbed the inside of his mouth and it squeezed his empty stomach violently. He spit the half-chewed crackers to the stainless steel counter and let the rest simply fall out of his opened mouth.

The packet of crackers was molded over, green, furry, and dark. He dropped the pack and worked the remains out of his mouth with a finger. As he did so, he opened the cabinet again and found most of the food had gone bad, either moldy or milky black. He had just stocked this food no more than a few months ago, and it should have lasted a number of years.

He opened the small refrigerator under the counter and drew out a bottle of water to rinse his mouth. Then he headed for the galley, another small room where cooking could be done as needed. In the large freezer, everything seemed covered in frost, as if frozen for years. The cupboards here proved molded and decayed as well. He began to grow angry. This food should have lasted him over a year with a bit of budgeting. Now there was nothing.

He tore open a wax-coated box of milk, which immediately proved sour even though it was irradiated so as to not contain any bacteria and should have lasted months without even refrigeration. Stan began collecting all of his food stores, searching for anything still good. It all came down to some Twinkies and hard candy. It was not nearly enough to sustain him for any length of time.

Stan had planned for this eventuality, but it was suppose to be months after the end of the world, not the day after. Something would have survived, some animals or fish or something. He had weapons and fishing gear and knew what was edible and what was not. He would just have to forage and hunt his food, only earlier than he had hoped.

This lent itself to an excuse to go into town, satisfy his curiosity about the events of last night, and bring back food. The voice on the radio had gone away, so regardless of the ominous fog, there was nothing holding him here inside his little hidey-hole.

He woofed down two packs of Twinkies, a bottle of water, and gathered an extensive number of firearms, pistols, and rifles with enough ammunition to fight a small war. He even clipped to his tactical vest a few grenades he had purchased on the black market. Once everything hung from him as it needed, he inserted the level-three ballistic plates and belted everything tight.

After checking the telescope once more, he climbed the ladder to his shelter and checked the small periscope to make sure nothing was waiting for him above. He then lifted the hatch and immediately, a stench of the dead and rotting assailed him. The odor was sweet and rancid, not unlike the milk, but more like bad bacon. It made Stan cough a bit before he climbed from the hole.

It seemed as though whatever had taken his food stores had gone to work on the corpses piled in the mantrap. The AK was gone, the sandbags turned over and torn. New corpses lay around the hole as if they had fought for the right to invade his shelter. The violence was so awesome that Stan found it all very disturbing regardless of his preparation and training.

He worked his way among the corpses, torn and battered, ripped and desiccated. Something had torn them apart in a fit of unimaginable rage. After some searching, Stan concluded whoever had torn these bodies apart also had the missing rifle. If it still lived, he could have a bit of a fight on his hands. He chambered a round in his own Vepr assault rifle in anticipation of a shootout.

He worked his way through the slippery pile of corpses in the mantrap, staining his clothing with the black ilk draining from some of the corpses. When he finally got past the pile, he vomited down the steps of his porch. Cursing himself for the waste of food, he cleaned out his mouth with water from his canteen. He quickly continued toward the town, keeping to the trees so populous near his home, escaping the stench of his house. He practiced his stealth, moving from tree to tree to rock to bush, all in rapid motion, each with a pause.

The forest was dead, not the leafless dead of late fall, but dead. The trees were dry and twisted as if in agony. The bushes were not much more than a splay of dried sticks bundled tightly by the ground. Stan’s green-based camouflage was out of place in this brown-and-black-colored forest. Desert camouflage would have been more appropriate, he decided when trying to reason what killed an entire forest was too disheartening.

He stopped to rest a bit, knowing he was close to Grove Street, the only road heading into Shady Dale, the town’s exclusive community for the few well-to-dos living in Black Water. He sat against one of the tortured trees and drew his knees up to rest his head. He sat perfectly still, listening to the deafening silence of a dead forest. Stan knew that man was about to end itself, but the emotional impact of it was almost too much for him to grapple with. He would give anything to talk to someone right now, to end this hermit solitude, even after only one night.

A rustling came from far up on the hill. Something still lived in this forest, and by the sound of its progress, it hunted still.

Stan felt a wash of relief. There was still life on this planet. This meant a few things to him: food, companionship if perhaps it were a domesticated pet, a chance that other things still lived as well. He lifted his head and looked up the hill, waiting for the thing to come into view, to see another life going about its business. It seemed small or at least not very heavy by the sound of its footsteps. Since it was obviously hunting, it could be a dog or a fox, possibly one of the small black bears seen occasionally in these parts.

When its head came into view, fear spiked through Stan’s heart like a stiletto. It was a buck, not a predator…at least by nature. This deer was dark in color and more shade than brown. Its eyes were jet-black orbs of unblinking hatred, if a deer could express such a thing. It stepped into a better view, and Stan could see that it was bloated with testosterone in preparation for the rutting season, but its flesh laid rent and clawed from its body, the muzzle laid bare to the bone by some other creature’s savage bite. Atop its head sat a large rack of antlers, bits of bloody tissue dried there like some revolting decoration.

This was not a gentle foraging creature, but an animal gone almost rabid, bent to the same murderous rampage as the people of Black Water. It lifted its head and began to rotate its ears, listening intently until it turned toward Stan, its boney mouth hanging open slightly, its eyes soulless and enraged. It released a wicked distortion of a mule deer’s call and lowered its antlers at Stan.

Stan brought his weapon up in a snap and fired a quick series of three shots. They tore into the death-like shroud of flesh, and the creature stumbled. It then began to charge, its head lowered, and its antlers gleaming with a wet red. Stan fired again, this time shooting round after round until the thing fell, skidding on its chest before coming to rest just before him. It still quivered and jerked, but the deer’s body was ruined, shattered by the many bullets.

Stan stood and left the thing jerking and kicking in the underbrush. If this were all the forest would bear, there would be very little to eat indeed. No matter what the thing looked like, it bled black liquid and smelled of rotting flesh. Something not even a fire could make edible. The idea of surviving the end of the world just to starve to death was not a pleasing thought.

He crossed the expected road and entered the forest beyond, continuing his straight-line trek to the town. He thought it should be at least visible by now, but the fog still obscured the buildings below. The ground was becoming slicker, the result of rotting plants and the dark fluid that was once their pulpy internals.

He stumbled into a parking lot before he actually saw it. He stopped once more and squatted, listening intently for sound. After many moments of hearing nothing, he continued in the direction of the grocer he knew owned this parking lot.

The building loomed at him from the dark fog, an apparition before it became a discernable structure. He skirted the entrance, not wanting to come in on the most direct route and found the handicap handrails near the ramp leading to the store. Here he stopped again to listen, and as he strained with his ears, his eyes caught sight of the heads impaled and hanging above the frame of the automatic doors. They had some type of large nail driven into their open mouths, each one staring lifelessly and inverted.

Stan had never felt so revolted in his life. This was not just the taking of a life, nor the expected trophies of some serial killer. These heads hung outside like some proof of triumph, like an ancient king who had just defeated a long-sought enemy. This was proof to any that saw it that someone had ended some six or seven lives and this act deserved some form of recognition.

The automatic doors opened suddenly, and Stan found himself pointing his rifle at a man in some state-issued orange jumpsuit and a small child held close to a woman, the woman pointing the gapping end of a Glock at him. The little girl screamed, which caused the woman to scream. Stan found himself drowning in a wash of relief and fear at the same moment. He wanted this so much, but was ready to kill them if they decided to strike up a firefight.

“Whoa, wait, hold on now. Are you a cop or something? Shannon, lower your gun,” the man said nervously.

Before she could, someone spoke to one side in a deep gravelly voice, the voice of dried vocal chords, the dark ravaged voice of one insane. “Did someone call a cop? I’m a cop!”

Shannon turned to see a large figure in torn clothing, its face and neck almost completely covered in police badges driven through the skin. Only black eyes and wicked, broken teeth showed as it began to raise a police service revolver at her.

“I remember you! You’re a great lay, bitch!” it screamed wickedly at her.

The bum leaned over Ethan’s shoulder. “Funny, you’re the only one without a gun, and you’re the only real psycho here…”

Chapter 26

“You sick son-of-a-bitch!” Shannon screamed, and then began firing at the new arrival. The small pistol she carried was extremely loud in the fog, and Kayla began screaming at each shot.

Ethan grabbed the girl and huddled back into the store with her. Another gun went off, this one firing in an impossibly quick progression. Something began to scream in many voices, a chorus of damned and tortured souls screaming for their ends. The gunfire continued for many rounds, many moments, and many deafening explosions before Shannon ducked back into the doorway crying. The automatic doors tried to close over and again, but reopened after sensing someone there.

She fumbled in her pockets for another clip, her face a mixture of unbridled rage and vengeance, sorrow, and violation. Her hands shook so violently she could not fit the new magazine into the gun before the gunfire stopped. Ethan reached over and steadied her hands. Shannon screamed and lashed out, striking Ethan along the jaw with the pistol, then screamed again, dropping the gun. She embraced Ethan quickly, almost crushing Kayla. “I’m so sorry, Ethan, I didn’t even see you, I’m sorry… Oh my God! I remembered him! I saw him! I remembered what he did to me! Fuck!”

Kayla continued to weep softly underneath her, and Ethan lifted Shannon just enough that the young girl could work herself free.

“You’re bleeding, Ethan, you’re bleeding…” Shannon sobbed.

“I’m fine, Shannon, really. Give me the gun.”

Shannon grabbed the gun and handed and handed it to him with the clip before even thinking of it, then grasped Kayla like a teddy bear.

Ethan slid the clip in and released the breach, slamming it into place. “I’ll be right back; stay here.”

Ethan rose and eased into the fog. The other man, possibly a police officer by the look of his equipment, was inspecting the bloated badge wearer with his foot.

“You hurt?” Ethan asked which spun the man around with lightening speed, the gun leveled right at Ethan’s chest. Ethan raised both hands but did not drop the gun. “I’m not your enemy. Is it dead?”

The man paused a minute before returning to the bloated pile of badges. “Yeah, it took a lot of ammunition, but it is dead. Who are you?”

“I am Ethan, the woman with me is Shannon, and the girl is Kayla.”

“You a family?” he asked, still staring at the body.

“No, we sort of found each other…”

“Like me, huh?” the man arched an eyebrow at Ethan.

“Yeah, who are you? Are you a cop?”

“No. My name is Stan. I live outside of town. Tell you the truth, I did not expect to find anyone alive down here. How did you survive?”

“I was a prisoner in a hospital, Shannon was beaten unconscious in the streets, and the girl hid in a dumpster all night.”

“Hospital? Are you nuts or something?”

“No, not really. I have problems, but I am not insane—at least I don’t think I am. You’re real, right?”

“Uh, yeah, I’m real,” Stan replied flatly.

“Then I am still sane.”

“Is it dead?” Shannon asked as she carried Kayla out of the store.

“Yeah,” Stan replied flatly. “Is there any food around?”

“Not really,” Ethan answered as he offered the gun back to Shannon.

“No, you keep it. I’ll hold onto Kayla. In fact, here…” She offered him the other clip and handful after handful of bullets.

“Do either of you know what is going on? Was there a chemical spill or something?” Stan asked with his eyebrows arched high on his forehead.

“You know the Heart House?” Ethan asked.

“Yeah, up on the top of Black Water Mountain, right?”

“Right. There was something inside the mountain. I think it’s loose now.”

“What kind of thing?” Stan asked with incredulousness.

“Well, monsters, actually…”

“Oh,” Stan replied, his face frozen in a that-is-why-you-were-in-the-hospital expression.

“You can believe me or not; up to you. I know what I saw, and this thing here is nothing like what’s up there.”

“This was just a guy, some sick-o…” Stan began, trying to shore up his own sanity.

“How many times did you shoot him before he died?” Ethan asked defensively.

Kayla broke from Shannon’s grasp and ran back into the store. “Kayla, wait!” Shannon shouted as she chased after her.

“Are you talking something like the boogie man?”

“No, more like something from a Japanese horror movie, you know, one of those anime things?” Ethan cut back at him.

“You’re serious about this, huh?”

“Yeah.” Ethan was becoming irritated at everyone asking that.

“Well, what’s your next move then, Ethan?”

“We were looking for food, and then we were going to get the hell out of here.”

“Sounds like a plan to me. Do you know how far this…I don’t know, thing…how far it has spread?” Again, he held one eyebrow higher than the other.

“Not a clue.”

“I listened to my ham radio all night, and no one was talking about it. I am thinking it is just local.”

“Well, we looked all over for a car, but every one we found was vandalized and looked like it’s been sitting for a long time. The strange thing is that there aren’t many of them about, like people did escape.”

“That would be good. Maybe they will send help,” Stan hoped aloud.

Kayla came rushing back from the store carrying a white plastic jug almost too big for her to lift. Shannon came out a short time later with a small first-aid kit.

“What do you have there, sweetie?” Ethan asked the little girl.

She unscrewed the top, pulled the small foil cap off, and spilled some on the bloated body. It immediately began to scream and buck. Kayla screamed and ran back to Shannon as a white smoke began to plume from the corpse. Ethan and Stan backed away in unison, like synchronized swimmers in gray fog-like water.

The thing bucked and screeched in agony as its flesh began to melt away, releasing the badges to surf down and into the parking lot on gore-filled waters.

“What did she pour on it? What was that, Kayla?”

“It was bleach, Mr. Ethan. He was dirty and Mom always said bleach cleans best.”

Ethan looked at Shannon a moment. “Did you know it was going to make all that smoke?” he asked the little girl.

“Uh-huh,” Kayla said while jerking her head up and down. “He was dirty.”

Stan approached the corpse slowly. “He’s pretty much gone.”

“Gone?” Shannon asked.

“Yeah, sort of a puddle now,” Stan replied.

Ethan approached and looked down at the thing. It was bits of gooey flesh and white bone in a mixture of blood and clear fluid. “It looks, you know, more human, less diseased.”

“Yeah, I noticed that. Maybe we could use the bleach as a weapon. I really thought that thing was dead.”

“The girl did not spill much bleach on it,” Ethan mused.

“Got me. What I do know is it took a mag and a half of nine millimeter ammo and whatever Shannon hit it with to kill it, at least to what we saw before the bleach.”

“We should at least carry some bleach with us I guess,” Ethan reasoned.

This decided, both men went back into the store and retrieved a number of jugs of bleach and a couple of large hiking backpacks to carry them.

Shannon was sitting with Kayla just outside the store, waiting for the men to return. “Now what?” she asked as they approached.

“I vote we just get out of here,” Stan suggested. “There are two roads leading out of town: one toward Black Water Mountain, the other towards Interstate 79.”

“I vote away from the mountain,” Ethan voiced.

“Me, too,” Kayla added.

“Either way is fine with me,” Stan said as he turned and began walking away.

“Let’s keep up with him,” Ethan whispered softly. “I don’t think he cares about much more than himself, and he could leave us behind.”

They caught up to Stan and began walking slowly, cautiously searching the buildings almost completely obscured by the smothering fog for any movement, for any threat, for the source of the sounds now echoing around the town. Somewhere, a creature was gnawing on something wet, another was dragging something, and far in the distance, a voice rose in a single heart-wrenching scream before cutting violently short.

* * *

“I don’t want to leave the house. You said I could stay for as long as I like,” Madison whined.

“Ah, my young girl… but we have found him, the escaped… and now we must collect him and make him one of us.”

“But I so love it here!” Madison exclaimed as her hands found the more sensitive parts of her body. The gown she wore gave her easy access to these parts just so she could bring herself pleasure whenever desire filled her.

“And you will return… Remember, you are the mistress of the Heart House now… That could never be taken from you…”His voice was sweet and reassuring, like it had been when he gave her communion and brought her to a place she loved so.

Her fingers found pleasure spots between her thighs and her back arched deeply. “Send me the tall one again, and I will go. You know, I don’t even like him, this escaped one, but I did want to fuck him once.”

A large black man came into the dining hall and mounted Madison on the table. She found deep, internal pleasure at the man’s thrusts, and she would have agreed to just about anything at that moment.

“So, you will go now? Or do I need take him away from you?”

“When… I… am… done…” Her breath came in short bursts as she reached her peak and exploded in an avalanche of pure pleasure. She rested a moment, feeling her desire already growing anew. “Now, I will go and bring him.”

Chapter 27

They walked for some time in silence, each taking in the dilapidation of the buildings and streets, the aged wood and mortar crumbling and threatening to collapse entirely. The air was still thick with the ash-colored fog. Random strangled screams drifted to them occasionally, the ending of some survivor by some other survivor.

One thing only Ethan seemed to noticed were the puss-colored hanging plants that had begun to grow on just about every horizontal surface, hanging and dripping moisture, engorged and sweating with a yellowish fluid. These were the same as the plants within the cave, but this time they were not as dry, not as dead.

Somehow, what was in the cave was extending, reaching down into this small town, and bringing it ruin. The filthy bum reached up, popped one of the pustule bulbs allowing it to drain into his upturned mouth. He turned and smiled at Ethan, the yellowish fluid dripping from his chin like rancid milk.

“You should give it a try; sweet as rotten baby feet!” His words formed around the stained bone collision that was the bum’s teeth, still wet with the puss of the plant.

Ethan looked away finding the tolerance for his delusional nightmare not as strong as when he was little. He had spent years dealing with this bum as a child, and some of the calluses remained. Not until the bum began to gargle with the plant’s thick juice did Ethan feel nauseated.

Kayla had begun to warm to Shannon, even with the distorted swelling along her jaw and eye. The little girl was surprisingly unharmed, and Ethan found it difficult to imagine this little girl had hidden so well or ran so fast as to escape the nightmares of the night before. She was an innocent, not a creation or influenced, mindless thing, but clearly resourceful and determined.

The bum suddenly leapt in front of Ethan, grabbed a hand full of bulbs hanging from a light pole, and squeezed them until the liquid ran freely from his hands. His face split in a wicked grin, teeth gapped and pointing in many directions at once as he began to run his slime-coated hands along his body in a mock sexual way. Ethan looked towards the ground as his imaginary friend began to pleasure himself through his stained and torn trousers. This time Ethan finally gagged.

“What’s wrong with you?” Stan asked with crinkled eyebrows.

“Nothing, I’m fine,” Ethan replied, unwilling to let this stranger know of his difficulties. Ethan knew that the bum was not real, that his existence was the product of his slightly deranged thoughts, the parts of his mind not under his control. Once the doctor had convinced him of this, the bum had vanished…well, that is, until now.

“She’s coming… Your first murder did not go well… She is coming…” the bum hissed at him as he jerked savagely at himself.

Ethan wanted to ask the bum who was coming; he knew somehow it was important, but he had not murdered anyone.

“She comes as the Lady of Mist, and fuck is she hot…” This brought on a more savage grip and a greater violence to his self-manipulations.

Ethan had slowed his pace somewhat, not wanting to make contact with the filthy man tormenting him, so Stan skirted around him and moved ahead at a quicker pace.

“I don’t know about you, but I want to get out of…” Stan suddenly stopped, as if he had struck a soft wall. “What the…?” he hissed under his breath.

“What is it?” Ethan asked as he caught up with Stan, Shannon and Kayla close behind him.”

Ethan could see that somehow the fog had congealed, clotted here into a wall of solid, roiling smog.

Stan reached up and touched it, running his hands along the misty solidity. “You can actually feel the fog—it’s like it has a skin on it or something.”

Ethan touched the wall. It felt much like the plants: a thin pliable skin and a snotty membrane with some thick something just beyond. What was most disturbing was the sensation of motion just underneath the cold moist skin, as if the smoky fog was alive and could feel their touch. Ethan withdrew his hand and wiped it absently on his leg.

“What is it?” Shannon asked, her face further contorted with disgust and wonder.

“I bet we could get through it, though,” Stan said absently.

“I don’t know what it is, but I don’t think we should try to get through it. It’s wrong, vile.”

Stan pushed a little harder on the membrane, and it gave under the pressure. A chill wetness coated his hand as it passed through the skin, but it was nothing but fog beyond. “It’s like a skin on a cold bowl of soup, you know? Just beyond feels like fog. I bet we could force our way through.” Stan reached deeper into the toiling mass of gray wetness.

“I think we should try to go around it, find another way,” Shannon added as Kayla began to whimper. The girl was clutching Shannon’s leg tightly as if she were about to fall from a cliff, her face twisted with fright.

“You guys can go whichever way you want; I’m going down Route 79,” Stan scolded as he withdrew his arm and began tearing the foggy flesh open with his hands. The internal roiling smog began to seep from the wound and spill across the ground in a semblance of fluid.

“But you can’t even see in that!” Shannon spit at him. “We should stay together!” she pleaded.

“Hey, I don’t know any of you people, the world’s gone fucking insane, and Stan is out for Stan, got me? Now you people can tag along if you like, but I am going this way.” With that, Stan stepped through the tear and into the undulating, seeping fog.

“I’m not going in there, Ethan; I don’t care where he goes, but I am not going in there,” Shannon said sternly.

“Me neither!” Kayla added.

Ethan stared back into the fog for a moment, looking deep into the rolling waves of ashen gray. He could still hear the faint foot falls of Stan working his way deeper into the fog.

“Please don’t make me go in there,” Kayla sobbed.

“We won’t, sweetie; I think I’m with you on this,” Ethan said as he stroked the girl’s back. “Stan, are you alright?” Ethan shouted into the fog. He did not particularly like Stan and his out-for-himself attitude, but they were less than a mile from 79, less than a mile until they were free.

“The smog is pretty thick—smells bad, too—but I’m fine!” Stan voice wafted through the stagnant smog. “Is that you?” Stan added.

Ethan thought for a second, “No! We are still out here!”

“You didn’t just bump into me?” Stan shouted, his voice gripped by fear.

“No, Stan. Come back out here!”

“Yeah, ah, I can’t see where I am going…”

“Just follow my voice!” Ethan shouted a bit louder.

“Keep shouting! There is something in… Oh fuck!” Stan screamed and began firing.

“Stan!” Ethan shouted, his voice almost as high as Stan’s, and then began to step through the opening into the fog, his handgun leading the way.

“Ethan! No! Stay with us!” Shannon cried.

Kayla had given herself over to outright bawling.

The smog fell over Ethan’s hands and forearms like a cold ocean spray from a dead and decaying ocean. The feeling of it made him shudder. The bum began to chuckle somewhere behind him in that maniacal, high-pitched squeal, and then Stan screamed—not the frightful scream of one simply afraid, but the scream of one fearing for the sanctity of their very soul.

“Stan! Run!” Shannon screamed which pushed Kayla into a screaming fit of her own.

Something grabbed Ethan’s cuff and pulled hard, almost yanking him into the sightless swirling. Instinctively, Ethan fired into the nothing. His shirt, suddenly released, caused him to stumble backwards and out of the fog.

A train whistle of a scream came from everywhere at once. It pierced their minds, painfully jabbing inside their ears. Kayla screamed in pain, and Shannon moved her hands from her ears to Kayla.

“Stan!” Ethan yelled. His heart raged against the confines of his ribs and his stomach clenched into an icy ball. “Stan!” His voice broke through the boundaries of multiple octaves.

A thin twig of a thing shot from the tear in the membrane and landed between Ethan and the clutching girls. It looked like an impossibly long stick, still sheathed in bark, but with a claw-like hand with too many fingers. The length of the thing segmented like some insanely long insect, and it twitched spasmodically. Shannon screamed again as it landed and she jerked Kayla away as it began to drag white lines in the cement of the sidewalk.

“Stan!” Ethan screamed, backing away from the wound in the smog wall. There was no answer.

“He’s gone, Ethan. Come on!” Shannon yelled at him as she lifted the young girl into her arms and rushing back towards the drugstore.

“Stan!” Ethan screamed once more, his throat a rasping harp of fear, before catching up with Shannon. He withdrew backwards, holding the gun before him.

Kayla continued to sob as they reached the end of the block. They stopped for a moment for the girls to cry and for Ethan to bring his breathing back under his control. He looked into Shannon’s eyes. They were wild, not the wild of being frightened, but the wild of an animal whose young were threatened, who strived against overwhelming odds to survive. Ethan wondered if perhaps she was beginning to slide into that comfortable insanity he had longed for as a child.

Ethan retuned his attention to the tear Stan had made and huffed breath towards it like venom. Whatever came from that smoke, Ethan reasoned, was not human, dead or otherwise. Something else had begun to hunt in the milky gray storm and it had gotten Stan.

Something came through the hole and plopped down on the sidewalk wetly. It quivered a bit then rested lazily on the edge of the curb. “Stay here,” Ethan said softly as he headed back towards the smog-wall.

“Ethan, no!” Shannon hissed at his back, but he continued, stalking the now motionless mass. He walked a wide berth as he got closer to the glistening red thing, but no matter how close he got to it, there was simply no sense to be made of it. When he got as close as he dared, he stopped, trying desperately to make something out of the shapeless mass. It was almost like a shiny red ceramic bowl with a mostly white marble to one side, but that made no sense either.

The bum came from behind him and walked right up to the bowl thing. He hooked the tip of his toeless shoe beneath the edge and lifted it slightly, showing Ethan the entire thing. In a sinfully wicked voice, he chuckled, “When was the last time you saw the back of someone’s eye?”

Chapter 28

Ethan bit back the surge from his stomach, the sudden need to evacuate the junk food he had eaten at the drug store. He spit the excess saliva from his mouth and turned away from the bum. Shannon and Kayla were still at the end of the block watching him, clutching each other desperately. The elegant form of Shannon’s body, the parental way she held Kayla helped ease the nausea and fortify for him a reason to continue, to seek out a way to escape this living nightmare. He began walking back to them, hoping that Shannon knew how to get to the other road that would lead them out of town.

“What was it?” Shannon asked when Ethan was close enough for her not to shout.

“Nothing. We should head to the other road, see if it is clear or not.”

“It’s going to be blocked like this one,” Shannon replied hopelessly.

“We should try at least,” Ethan said. “Let’s get there and see what’s going on. It’s coming on mid-afternoon, and I don’t want to be caught here at night again, at least walking the streets, you know?”

“And Stan?” Shannon asked, already knowing the answer.

“He’s not coming with us,” Ethan replied vaguely for Kayla’s benefit and began walking back the way they had come.

Shannon watched him a moment before following him. Kayla was still thoroughly upset and clung to her like the lost child she was. It made walking difficult, so Shannon lifted the girl into her arms and carried her along with the bottle of bleach cleaner the child did not seem to want to let go.

“Do you know what time it is?” Ethan asked. “Here, I’ll carry her.”

“No, I don’t have a watch.” Shannon replied as she handed Kayla to Ethan.

The young girl took hold of Ethan around his neck and embraced him tightly. It was the first rush of pleasure he had felt in days. The tender girl in all her fear knew only to embrace and hold tightly to an adult. This pushed at the hearts of those adults, reaffirming their need to protect the child. A small side-effect to this was the adults usually fell in love with them. Ethan, even with everything that had happened in the past week, was still capable of emotional attachment, and needed only this simple invitation. He felt this love, this caring, this overwhelming need to protect the girl, and it almost manifested itself in tears.

“I got you, Kayla. Nothing bad is going to happen to you, I promise.”

Shannon smiled weakly at the pair; she too had fallen victim to this instinctual love, this parental bond, but now it was sliding towards Ethan as well, her brother-in-arms was now becoming the male side of her parental want. She knew he had problems, but there were doctors to deal with that, and even in the orange jump suit, he was an attractive man—a bit younger than her, but close enough to not really matter. She suddenly realized how lucky she was to have found Ethan in his little hospital cell.

“It seems to be getting darker faster than I had thought,” Ethan commented as he looked across the overcast sky. “We may need to hole up in a building or something, wait the night out.”

“You think that is a good idea?” Shannon asked sincerely.

“No,” he said thoughtfully, “but I am sure it would be better than being caught out here at night.”

A sudden baying screech raced down the mountain and sliced through the fog. It was the same screeching of the night before, and it raked their ears to hear it. Like the evening before, it brought their nerves to a painful grating and their teeth to grinding.

“Let’s make it back to the drug store and see if we can find a clock or watch or something,” Ethan suggested.

“How about some ear plugs?” Shannon asked only half jokingly.

The howl ripped at them again.

“Yeah, ear plugs sound like a good idea.” Ethan smiled back.

They began walking again, this time a bit faster. Ethan was able to carry Kayla without too much difficulty, the backpack full of bleach jugs counterbalancing the weight of the child. Shannon, now unburdened, was able to keep pace with him. The drug store was many blocks away, and the light bled from the sky as if mortally wounded. They quickened their pace, rushing themselves to their supposed sanctuary. Still, the distant screams reached them from almost every direction, the nail-biting screeching continued to assail them from the mountain, and now with the sound of motion, scratching, footsteps, and dragging weight as well.

As they came down the last hill, the base of which was the large parking lot of the drug store, Ethan caught movement out of the corner of his eye. In one fluid motion, he spun himself to put his body between the motion and the child he carried, drawing the gun from one of the jumpsuit’s large pocket.

Just above the sights of his gun, he saw a large crow, or possibly a raven. It was all black, at least where it still had feathers, most of which were torn off or skinned like a branch. It was eating an orange tabby cat that was lying there—still soft with fur, still flexible with its recently lost life. The strange reversal of roles, a bird eating a cat, disturbed Ethan, made his reality shift momentarily like the smog swirling all around them. The bum came from nowhere, as he always did, and strode to the cat. Ethan turned away before the bum could show him something he did not want to see and continued into the darkening parking lot.

The tall lights that illuminated the parking lot suddenly sizzled and hummed to life as the trio past underneath them, yet another indication that the day had escaped and they were not going any further. They rushed through the automatic doors and over the large scab that had developed under the heads still hanging from the stucco. Once inside, Shannon turned back to the doors, waited for them to close, and slid a lock into place to keep them from opening.

“Is there a back way into here, a loading dock or something?”

“Yeah, I’ll go check it.”

“Be careful and meet us in the sporting goods section. There are sleeping bags there and more weapons.”

“Try to find us some food …” Shannon trailed off as she reached the end of an aisle and disappeared towards the secretive behind-the-scenes area of the store.

Kayla squirmed in his arms a bit so he let her down to walk but kept a tight hold on her little hand. She was such a precious little treasure, and Ethan did not want her to wander off alone. He took her around the store with a basket and collected some frozen meats, still not ravaged by the odd aging effect, some cellophane-wrapped dessert items, and a tub of Neapolitan ice cream, a set of disposable salt and pepper shakers, and a six pack of cold soda.

They met Shannon in the sporting goods department where she was collecting sleeping bags and other camping items. In no time at all, they had a camp set up in a large area between aisles complete with steaks in a pan on a camping stove, a radio, and bright gas-powered lanterns in case the electrical service should happen to fail.

Ethan went shopping after turning the cooking over to Shannon. He collected a complete set of clothing and a large pot to heat water in so they could wash. It had been a couple of days since his last shower, and he looked forward to getting some of this grime and rotting stink off him. He could smell the cooking meat throughout the store so he did not linger.

Shannon was just forking the meat onto a tin camping plate when he returned. He filled the large pot with water and put it on the camping stove to heat while they ate. Kayla was already on her third pack of Twinkies and second can of soda. She seemed more comfortable, more accepting of their situation—that or she had completely gone mad and did not realize their peril any longer.

The radio statically whispered some form of country music, almost indecipherable over the background noise.

Ethan looked down at the radio as he took the plate from Shannon. “That’s not a local station, is it?” he asked almost hopefully.

“No, Philadelphia. That’s why it’s so hard to hear.”

“Well, its music and proof that society continues, at least somewhere,” Ethan replied as he sat on a sleeping bag next to Shannon.

“Kayla, would you like some steak?” Ethan offered.

“No, thank you. I don’t eat meat,” she said in a very adult voice. She washed down her fifth Twinkie with a sip from her soda. She put the can down, kicked her shoes off, and worked her way into a sleeping bag decorated with a square, spongy cartoon character.

Ethan ate his steak in silence, trying to ignore the bum who was trying to explain the living conditions of cattle before they slaughtered them for his meal. Shannon had cooked it a bit overdone on the outside and not quite done on the inside, but it was far and above one of the best steaks he had ever eaten. Twinkies and soda followed the steak along with some of the chocolate ice cream.

“So, we try the other road in the morning?” Shannon asked over the soft sounds of Kayla’s snoring.

“Yeah, you know where it is, right?”

“No…but maybe Kayla does. I only know it is in the direction of Black Water Mountain.”

“I’m sure we will find it,” Ethan said as he rose and went to the gun counter. He found a couple more boxes of 40 S&W ammunition for the handgun and a pump shotgun with a couple boxes of shells for it. It took him some time to get the locking chain off the rifles, but he felt better having a weapon more powerful than the Glock.

When he returned to the makeshift camp, Shannon was washing herself with a dishtowel, squatting nude before the stove. Her body surprised Ethan, her skin so flawless with the exception of the bruising and scratches of the night before. Her back was slender and delicate, ending with a full bottom, topped with lengths of wet blonde hair. Ethan found he was becoming quickly aroused and turned his back out of respect for her as well as what she had been through the night before. He would have made a pass at her had she not been so brutalized—hell, he would have considered her bathing like this a pass at him if not for the rape.

He sat and loaded the shotgun with as much as it would take, then placed it alongside his own sleeping bag. He could hear Shannon getting dressed again, and he waited a bit before turning back. She was briskly rubbing her hair dry with a towel, and when their eyes met, she smiled broadly.

“I feel like a new person.”

“I bet. You look like a new person, too.”

“Thanks,” she replied brightly. “I don’t know if it is because I used to work here or not, but I feel safe enough to sleep, and sleep I’m gonna.”

“You should. I will watch over you two,” Ethan promised softly as he began to wash himself. He wondered if a woman could ever overcome a rape like the one she had suffered and still lead a normal life or have normal relationships. He doubted it but found himself hoping nonetheless.

“Wake me at some point so you can sleep, too; no need for you to be exhausted,” Shannon offered as she climbed into her sleeping bag.

“Sure,” Ethan answered reassuringly.

When Ethan was satisfied with his bathing, he unfolded a chair and sat with the shotgun across his lap. In moments, Shannon was breathing deeply and evenly, finally having found rest. Ethan began to prepare himself for the boredom of sitting in a chair all night and watching other people sleep. The fear was still tight in his belly, even with the sudden arousal of seeing Shannon washing, and he hoped that would be enough to prevent him from falling asleep. If it got too bad, he could find some coffee. If cellophane could keep Twinkies fresh, perhaps a can could keep coffee fresh.

He stood and stretched a bit before walking a circuit around the store, near the windows to see the swirling darkness just beyond and to make sure the doors remained closed. The hateful baying from the mountain now was easy to tolerate in the large store, barely more than a thin whistle from the outside. When his circuit took him to the campsite again, he sat heavily in the fabric and metal tube chair. His head grew heavy and his eyes ached for sleep. He decided he had better find some coffee and a percolator or he would soon be snoozing.

Before he gathered enough resolve to go and seek out some caffeine, the broken music suddenly went silent on the radio, the cracking and popping fell into dead air. The silence was shocking and unnerving at the same time.

Ethan stared at the radio for a moment, trying to decide if it had lost the signal or the batteries had died, but a soft sensual voice eased from the speakers like the warm breath of a lover just satisfied, “Ethan…”

He knew immediately that it was Madison’s voice—that sultry, exclusively female voice, which always seemed to beg for attention. His body was suddenly electrified with both desire and bald fear.

“I am coming, Ethan…” Her voice urged from him his attention. “It was you that I always wanted, Ethan… I was waiting for Abby to free you, waiting for so long… Now is our time; now is my turn…”

“She wants some Ethan meat…” The bum whispered in his sour, rotting breath from over his shoulder.

“Ethan… Come outside where I can see you…”

Ethan reached over and turned the radio off. That was enough for him. He did not even consider getting coffee now, the idea of Madison searching for him, pleading with him to come out and be with him was just too terrifying an idea for him to find sleep.

Chapter 29

Shannon found herself running headlong down a dark street, desperate to get away from the animals following her. She did not know what had happened, what had driven them insane, unless it was that screeching call from some animal on the mountain. All she knew right now was those men following her meant to kill her, rip her apart like the bodies she was skipping over in the street.

She had just finished a rather boring day at the boutique, not many customers interested in her trendy wares, when the town seemed to have gone crazy. It started with a simple fistfight, still shocking in this yawn-burg of a town. The police had come, beaten the two fighters into submission and then hauled them off to some barred room somewhere. Right after they left, another fight broke out, this time a little down the street, and this time with a knife. That is when she decided to close the shop early.

She was in the middle of locking the front door when someone threw a child against the plate glass window of her shop. He did not go through it, but slid a bit before falling onto the sidewalk. Shannon boiled with emotion, wanting to help the child, afraid to interfere with someone callous enough to heave a child like that. Before she could make up her mind, the child stood, screamed in unbridled rage, and charged the woman that had thrown him.

Shannon did not wait to see how this played out; she was terrified of what was going on, and wanted to get out of there now. She rushed down the sidewalk towards the bus stop, hoping beyond prayer that the bus was due any moment. She had sold her car recently to cover the stock that her customers never seemed to want to buy. It was her last ditch effort to stay in business, but she now wished she still had the old Nissan to get herself out of here.

Before she could make it to the small sign indicating the bus’s normal route, a large man she did not recognize grabbed her from behind. He spun her around, forced her to the ground with his weight, and began tearing her blouse off. She brought her knee up as hard as she could, and the man fell from her. She stood quickly and began running towards the parking area near the shop. If she had been thinking clearer, she would not have pinned herself in, but fear ruled her thoughts.

When she came to face the chain-link fence, she realized her mistake. Turning to flee the enclosure, she caught sight of three men standing in the drive of the parking lot. They were all beaten and bloody, their clothing torn and stained with the soil of battle. Shannon screamed louder than she thought possible.

Then she began to run, the men following after, calling to her, asking her to give them what they wanted. She leapt up onto the fence and began to scramble over. One of the men wrapped his powerful arms around her, filled his hands with her breast, and literally tore her from the fence by her nipples. Shannon screamed again, this time coming from her sleep like a threatened mouse.

She looked into Ethan’s troubled eyes and began to weep. Her memories flooded back to her in large smothering waves--the terror of the night before, along with her childhood memories, the memories of her parents’ death, now a fresh wound in her soul. She clawed her way from the sleeping bag and met Ethan moving towards her. She embraced him almost violently and began to sob in a way normally forgotten by adults.

“Shannon, it was just a dream, it’s over now,” Ethan cooed to her.

“No,” Shannon forced through her sobbing, “I remember. I remember everything.”

“Well that’s good, isn’t it?”

“They raped me. They beat me and raped me. They thought I was dead and didn’t care, so many men…”

Ethan drew her closer, held her tighter. He had hoped she would not remember the rape completely until they were free of here, but it was now too late for that. All he could do was hold her close, give her a foundation to cling too as her battered mind got a solid grasp on what had happened.

“Mommy, why are you crying?” Kayla asked as she sat up. “You’re not my mommy…” she said in a cloud of sleep driven confusion.

“No sweetie, she isn’t. She will be alright in a bit. It’s still night time, so try and go back to sleep, ’kay?”

“Why is she crying?”

“She thinks she has lost something or something was taken from her.” Ethan stumbled with a reason he could give a child her age.

“What? I can help look,” Kayla offered while stifling a yawn.

“Oh, it’s nothing. She will get by, you’ll see.”

The little girl worked herself from the sleeping bag and trotted over on tiny bare feet. “Can I give her mine?”

Shannon looked up into the innocent eyes of untroubled youth and smiled as she wept. “You’re a gem, you know that?”

Kayla knelt down beside Shannon and worked her arm between Shannon and Ethan to embrace the woman so abused. This helped Shannon cry even more, and Ethan did not try to stop her. The emotional release could only help, or he hoped it would. Either way, he held both the girls for some time before the crying jag ebbed. Even Kayla worked her way through a few sobs while holding Shannon.

When they had grown silent, Ethan continued to hold them even after Kayla and then Shannon lost themselves to an exhausted slumber. There were still a few hours until sunrise, and they could both use more sleep. Ethan lay down with them gently and stared at the woman before him. She was so lovely, so delicate, so used. He knew rape was rape, and he could not fault a woman for being raped any more than he could fault a dog for not being a horse. That he could live with, but could she ever live with it? Could she bring herself to be intimate voluntarily again?

He found himself hoping she could and that after they were free from here, she would stay with him; get to know him outside this nightmarish town. He was not sure why, probably his desire to live on, to have children, to make something of himself or be part of something else more than what he was alone. His studies in survival had taught him that these types of feelings could come up unexpectedly when given a stressful situation. However, those classes were more for plane crashes, or shipwrecks, or becoming lost while hiking, not for some lunatic distortion of a town by these torturous entities hiding in the mountain.

Then he began to wonder why it was they had assaulted the town. He did not know, but was certain that what was going on here was coming from the mountain, coming from those nightmarish forms he had escaped. They wanted something, a vengeance probably. He did not care. He would find his way out of here and continue his life with or without Shannon. He would start seeing his doctor again, get rid of this bum, and lead a normal life.

He stood, gently letting the girls find the floor and cuddle amongst themselves, and began walking a circuit around the store. He checked the stock room first to make sure nothing had worked its way past the large rolling door over the loading dock, then the front of the store to make sure those doors were locked as well.

The outside was still pitch, the fog barely perceptible as it roiled just beyond the glass. He began walking the length of the windows towards the doors when he heard the sound of flesh rubbing against glass. He spun around with the shotgun, telling himself if he fired through the glass, the store would be open to anything that wished to come in.

There, pressed against the glass was a naked Madison. She moved herself against the window like a stripper, undulating and pleading with her femininity for him to come to her. She grabbed and rubbed at the parts of her body that did not make contact with the glass, and Ethan found himself instantly aroused. She was so incredibly gorgeous that it took every ounce of fear not to rush to the doors and let her in.

Her breath fogged the glass around her mouth as she pleaded almost soundlessly for him to come out. She was working her groin with her hand and pulling roughly at her full breast. Ethan’s breath came in rapid gusts as he watched, transfixed and unable to turn away. He discovered that his hands had found himself like some teenager with a dirty magazine.

He approached the glass and gently touched it with his hand. Madison immediately tried to suckle on his fingers, her body jerking as she came closer and closer to her own orgasm. She turned slowly, allowing her body to maintain contact with the glass, and bent over far enough to continue her efforts and allow him to watch from behind. The glass was becoming an unreasonable obstacle to his desire, and the importance of keeping out the outside evil was losing the battle. He realized he was rubbing himself against the window as well, trying desperately to make contact through the thick glass.

Madison began to slide her finger in, her other hand grabbing at her crotch and opening herself for him to see. Ethan began to lose control with his thoughts, wanting nothing more than to feel her from the inside, as she was doing right now. He would stop breathing right now if he could plunge in her, seek out the deepest parts of her, and leave that little part of himself there. In a sudden decision, he started heading for the door.

“Ethan! Don’t open that door, Ethan!” Shannon called to him from behind.

He knew he should not, but he had to have Madison. Nothing mattered more than to take that petite but voluptuous girl and have his way with her. He began clawing at the rather strange locking mechanism that held the automatic doors closed, desperate to have them open.

Shannon spun him around and forced him against the door. “Ethan, you can’t open that door!” She could tell by his rapid breathing, the pulse surging beneath her grip on his arms that he was close to being lost.

“I have to! God, I have to!” he hissed, his eyes clenched shut against the battle raging within him.

Shannon stared at him for a long moment, holding him against the door with all of her strength and the last of his waning self-control. She knew that when the self-control failed, she would be helpless to stop him. He would open the door and either go out to this naked woman or allow her to come in. She did not know who she was, but if she was out there naked and doing what she was doing, then she was part of the town’s trouble and not a survivor.

The solution suddenly came to her, and with the desperation of survival and the pent up disgust with her own self-loathing, she grabbed Ethan by both the neck and his crotch and kissed him hard, searchingly, longingly. He responded immediately, his groin already stiff, his mouth more hungry than hers. Their paired desperation to survive, to continue beyond this point and the over-powering sensuality of that wonderfully sexy woman pleasuring herself beyond the glass fed the fire between them, and they embraced even harder.

Deep in Ethan’s mind, he remembered the violation Shannon had suffered and so did not attempt to find her most intimate places, but she was hungry with hand and mouth, and soon he was sated and in control once more.

Outside, when Madison saw his release, saw him fill Shannon’s mouth with what should have been hers, she began to scream the scream of a tormented soul, scream the scream of the eternally damned, then fled away deeper into the concealment of the fog.

Chapter 30

Ethan woke with a start, his heart pounding at the dream he just escaped. Madison had returned somehow…and wanted him. She was here trying desperately to make him open the door, let her in with her hidden brood of whatever. Shannon…she had saved him from himself, she had come to him and did what a woman raped not more than a day ago should never have to do. He had a sudden chilling thought that somehow this was all real.

“Morning,” Shannon said sheepishly.

Ethan rolled over and saw her, the swelling of her eye and jaw line were receding and the deep reddish color was becoming an angry mixture of purple and blue. Still, with her hair brushed out and fresh clothing, she looked radiant. “Did we…?” Ethan trailed off.

“Yeah, I hope it was okay, but it looked like you were about to open the door.”

“Yeah, I was,” he replied weakly. “I thought for a moment it was just a dream.”

“Do you know who that woman was out there?”

“Yeah. Remember what I told you about the mountain, Heart House? That was Madison.”

“She is alive?” Shannon tried to sound calm about the idea, but failed.

“No, she is dead, or something close to it.” Ethan dropped his eyes from Shannon’s. “Thank you…”

“My pleasure. Next time, let’s wait until I am done healing; can you stand it?”

Ethan looked back up at her to see a sly smile playing across her teeth. “I’ll try.” Ethan smiled back at her. “Where is Kayla?”

“Sleeping, still. Do you ever remember being able to sleep like that?”

Ethan stood and walked towards the campsite, his back stiff from sleeping on the cold floor. He found Kayla barely protruding from the top of her cartoon sleeping bag. “I don’t think I ever slept like that.” He looked at Shannon again, her face so close to his, and he kissed her, long but not with passion. “Thank you for saving me last night. I imagine it was pretty hard considering…”

“Well, it’s fine. I was just not entirely sure I was ready; we’ve only known each other for what, a day and a half now? But I am an adult.”

“Still…thank you,” Ethan said into her eyes.

She gave him a crooked smile and embraced him for a bit, longing to stay there but releasing him in the end. “The sun is just starting to come up. We should get ready to go.”

“How long did I sleep?” Ethan asked as he stole a sip of flat soda from an opened can.

“About three hours.”

“Let’s get our stuff together then, and make our way. The granola bars and trail mix and, of course, Twinkies should be edible. We could also carry a couple of bottles of water each. I don’t remember how far it is to the next town, but I remember it was pretty far.”

“It’s about thirty miles or maybe a bit more. My sister lives there. You’ll like her, she actually is crazy.” Her smile took any sting out of what she had said.

“Then let’s go visit her. There are backpacks in that aisle. A small tent might be a good idea, also.”

It took them a bit to gather as many supplies as they could then sort through the most important. Kayla finally woke and studiously rolled up her sleeping bag as if she were at a sleep over. She then started on the Twinkies and soda again.

Ethan collected a toothbrush, toothpaste, and mouthwash for the girl. “When you’re done eating, make sure you use these.”

“Thanks! Uh, where can I spit?”

Ethan took a pot down from the shelves to his right. “Here, this will do.”

“But can Mr. Jerkins sell this if I spit in it?”

“He won’t mind, honey, I promise.”

This whole exchange reminded Ethan of camping with his friend’s family. It was as if they were heading home today after a one-night stay. It almost felt normal in a way…with the exception of the florescent lights and the racks of goods stretching away in every direction. He hefted the backpack onto his shoulders and adjusted it a bit. It was rather heavy, considering the bleach and the water, but tolerable.

Shannon stood a moment later with her pack adjusted and resting on her shoulders while Kayla slung hers over one shoulder. They looked at each other for a moment before Ethan finally spoke.

“Let’s get out of here…” he trailed off as he walked to the front of the store.

He stopped before the glass doors and reminisced about the night before for a moment. He then handed the small Glock handgun to Shannon. “Here, I’ll keep the shotgun up front, you take up the rear with this, and we will simply walk out of here. Kayla, sweetie, you stay between me and Shannon, alright?”

She looked up at him and nodded vigorously. She still held the bottle of spray bleach in her hand while the other carried a can of soda. She had selected a puffy jacket as well, and to Ethan’s relief, it was an electric pink color which would be very easy to see from a distance.

Ethan looked at the locks for a second before figuring them out. A much easier task now that he had his wits about him, unlike last night. The doors whisked open, and fog rolled into the store ominously. It was no thicker than the day before, but this was their onetime sanctuary, and to have it violated by the ashy smoke seemed a trespass.

They walked slowly from the store to find the parking lot much as it was before. Ethan half-expected Madison to come flying at him from a distance but he did not see her anywhere. “Which way do we head?” he asked thoughtfully.

“Make a left around the store and follow that road straight until we get to the bridge, then we make a left and take that out to Route 27 and make a right,” Shannon instructed.

He began walking, the others shuffling along behind him. The roads looked dryer, more aged than the day before. They were cracked and pot-holed just about everywhere, and the foliage along the length, decorating the lawns of collapsing houses, lay dead and rotting. The cave plants were here as well, but now in more quantity in more places. The screams of the day before seemed to have fallen silent, which meant to Ethan there were no more survivors to seek out or return to rescue. To his greatest relief, the screeching had stopped at some point during the night, which meant he could hold on a bit longer to his sanity—that is, if he still had a grip on it.

Brook Street sloped upwards and then eased down into a valley of housing and small strip malls. Gas stations and convenience stores seemed to have found a union amongst themselves and cohabitated in many places. Where these small stores were not, housing stood in communities of cul-de-sacs and roads, small and large houses, community centers and parks. All of this now hidden under the oppressive smog, obscuring their finer details, thieving them of their normalcy and warmth. To Ethan, it was the very definition of a modern ghost town, sans the tumbleweeds.

The small bridge was barely visible, only noticeable when the light breeze pushed the fog about. Just beyond was the turn, but it was still roughly a mile away. They continued down into the suburbia valley and towards the bridge. The town had fallen into an eerie silence. The mist hissing like poured soda around them and an occasional mechanized whine were the only sounds.

The bodies lining the streets, now almost two days old, had begun to lose water to the dry air and rot under the unnatural aging that had taken to dilapidating the buildings and roads. To their relief, the corpses had quickly passed the stages of stifling stench, but their appearances were all the worst because of it: they looked much like the bog bodies of Ireland, unnaturally preserved and slightly glossy-looking.

They reached the bridge without incident, and Shannon looked over the railing at where water used to rush by. It was now still, stagnant, and shallow to the point of making scattered muddy puddles. Dead water creatures littered the shores in the same rotten way as the human corpses on the street above. All along the banks of the one-time river, the foliage and plant life had given to the death and decay saturating the water and soil, killing everything.

“This town will never be the same, Ethan,” Shannon said sadly. “It was such a nice place to live…”

“There’s a truck over there, stopped in the middle of the road. Maybe it still works. Come on,” Ethan said as he began to walk towards it.

Shannon turned to find a dirty yellow truck, rusted along the edges of the sides, those bulbous puss plants growing over most of it. She urged Kayla ahead of her with her hand while fighting the feeling something was dreadfully wrong. “Ethan, I don’t like this…”

Ethan stopped at her voice and stared at the vehicle, waiting for it to make a sign of its intent, to give away some secret danger. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. It just feels wrong—like a trap,” Shannon explained as she caught up with him.

They both watched the vehicle for a time, but the cab appeared empty. There were obvious bloodstains along the bed and a couple of corpses nearby, but nothing moved or made a threat. “Should we just walk away from it? It’s a truck; we might be able to drive out of here.”

“Just be careful; there is something wrong here. Feels like we are being watched, doesn’t it?”

Ethan led with the barrel of the shotgun, moving slowly and stealthily. He made it to the bed of the pickup and began to skirt along the sides, much too close for Shannon, but she did not want to call out to him; the silence seemed to forbid it.

Ethan jammed the barrel through the open window of the cab, and then eased it back out and turned to Shannon. “It’s empty!”

Shannon saw something rising from the bed of the truck, a small black triangle moving towards Ethan. “Look out! There is something—”

A dog leapt from the bed of the truck right into Ethan’s chest. It was a large dog, mostly coated in blood and missing large sections of its hide. Ribs and muscle showed in the windows left by the torn skin and fur. Shannon and Kayla screamed a chorus at the dog and clutched each other instinctively.

Ethan fell backwards, but back peddled enough to stay out from under the dog before falling flat on his back. The dog charged him, seeing its prey lying prone before it. Just before it pounced on Ethan, the collar holding it to the truck pulled tight, and the dog did an acrobatic flip of hind-under-head and fell on his back with a yelp. Ethan crab walked quickly away from the animal as it lunged at him again, still held at bay by the thick collar and chain leash.

Ethan scrambled to his feet and brought the shotgun up. “You son-of-a-bitch!” he screamed at the dog before blowing it into three large pieces, all of which struck the truck then fell wetly to the road’s surface. He stood there, half bent over, and panted at the decimated corpse before him.

Shannon lifted Kayla and ran to Ethan, throwing her arms around him. “We stay together from now on, right? No more going off on your own. We have to trust our bad feelings from now on, right?” She sounded close to tears.

“I’m fine, really,” Ethan assured into her shoulder.

“You’re not going to leave me here in this fucked-up place, you hear me?” she shouted at him.

“I won’t, I promise!”

Ethan brought her with him to the cab of the truck, being careful not to step close to the large pieces of dog. He opened the door, reached in, and turned the key. The engine did not even sputter. The battery was beyond dead, and Ethan screamed at it, “Fuck!”

“Come on, let’s keep walking. We don’t have much left of the day,” Shannon encouraged.

“Yeah. Shit, I thought that was it. I thought we were going to drive out of here.”

“Please don’t say bad words,” Kayla requested from under Shannon’s arm.

This simple call for morality brought both Ethan and Shannon quickly back into focus. “Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry. Those were bad words, weren’t they?” Ethan put his hand on her cheek.

“Yes,” Kayla said sheepishly.

“I promise to try and not do that ever again, alright?”

“Thank you,” she replied with a tiny smile.

They continued a few more yards down the road and made the left turn where they were supposed to, and the road vanished under a wall of the thick smog. Ethan walked a bit further, found the snotty membrane again, and backed away quickly. “It’s blocked, also,” he informed the girls.

“Well, great! Now what do we do?” Shannon’s irritation was clear in her voice.

“I don’t know. We could try skirting the wall; see if there are any breaks in it. I know I can get us through the woods, if we need to.”

“What about up there?” Kayla asked as she pointed up the foot of Black Water Mountain where a path was utterly clear in the moving fog.

Chapter 31

“Is that Black Water Mountain?” Ethan asked as he looked up the sides and along the opening in the dense smog.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Shannon replied softly.

“I’m not sure we want to go up there.”

“Maybe the fog is thinner near the top, and we can skirt around the edge of the mountain and come down the other side. Route 27 will be there, and it will take about ten miles off of our walk.” Shannon did not sound comforted by the idea.

“The problem with this town started up there…” Ethan trailed off deep in thought and worry.

“I know, Ethan, but what else can we do? We can look for another break in the fog wall, try this path, or find a place to hide until all of this is over.”

Ethan did not want to go back up that cursed mountain. It had almost killed him the last time; whatever that creature was, he did not want to encounter it again. However, he could not invent any other solution. They could not skirt the entire town in one day nor could they hold up in a building until someone realized that the whole town was missing. He took a deep breath and let it slowly slip between his lips. “We might be heading right where we shouldn’t go.”

“I know,” Shannon replied, concern dripping from her words. “Did you notice that the plants along that trail are not dead—well, at least not all of them?”

“Yeah, I noticed. It’s just… If you want to, we can go up there. It might get a little crazy, though.”

“We can head up and look for a way around. If we get too high, we can come back, right?” Shannon asked in an attempt at encouragement.

“Well, let’s get some mountain under us, then,” Ethan decided with an air of finality and started towards the trail.

Kayla began to skip after him, and Shannon rushed to keep pace.

The slope grew gradually, making the going easy but tougher as they went—not the steady incline of the other side, the first slope Ethan had climbed up Black Water Mountain, but a challenge to stamina and determination. The trees along this path still lived, as well as some of the more stout undergrowth. Just along the edges of the fog, however, dead and denuded plants bowed to their lost life and dripped rotting sap to the forest’s floor. The farther trees stood stark and still, drooping to ruin, their deaths seemingly long past.

“Shannon?” Ethan called over his shoulder.

“Yeah?”

“Do you believe in God?” he asked.

“Well, I didn’t, but with all this?” she replied with a yawning arm, indicating the ruin on either side. “This has to be evil, right?”

“Well, it was not the fire and brimstone I expected, but it is evil,” Ethan replied thoughtfully, then listened to the leaves as they scratched beneath their feet before crunching under their soles.

After a moment of thought, Shannon asked, “But this is it, right? Isn’t evil the collective extreme of a society’s distaste, the most deplorable acts imaginable by the sum of a people’s creativity?”

“That sounds right,” Ethan agreed as he navigated around a low hanging branch.

“Could we not say that for every great evil imagined, there is a greater good—a knight to fight every dragon?”

Ethan halted some three hundred yards up, high enough to see the town sprawled below still veiled in the ghostly gray smog. From here, Ethan could see the sister mountain rising from the dankness of the smog. “Look, Shannon, the infection does not reach that other mountain.”

Shannon stopped beside him, still holding Kayla’s hand, and looked to the far mountain. “Do you think, Ethan, that maybe we are the good knights sent to slay the evil serpent?” she persisted.

Ethan turned to her, finally donating enough attention to her to listen. “How do you mean?”

“What if we survived, all three of us, just to battle this evil?” Her eyes looked desperately for vindication, but did not find it. “Think about it: this town has a population of some three or four thousand, we have cops and firefighters and ambulances, a hospital a trauma center, even our own National Guard detachment. Why are we the only ones that survived? Look around, right here, look around and see the fantastical biblical evil. We are in the midst of some world-altering event, not like an earthquake or a volcano; I mean a real world-altering event. The type of event that ruins religions and spawns new ones or adds a new book to the Bible, you know?”

Ethan stared at her a moment before replying, “You have been thinking about this a bit, huh?”

“What have you been thinking about?”

“Last night and how skillful you were,” he replied with a sly smile.

Shannon chuckled back. “But seriously, couldn’t it be something like that?”

“I don’t know,” Ethan said truthfully. “Maybe. But if we are to be the heroes of this tale, we are going to look pretty silly running.”

“Maybe we are supposed to get out of here and warn the world. Maybe this is where Hell breaks through or something and we caution the world about it. We tell people, they fight back the hordes of Hell, and we are the heroes.”

“As long as it includes leaving here, I’m fine with that,” Ethan replied, hoping to close down the conversation. He did not want to think about things like this. To him, religion was a dementia, a lie, and a folly for his mind to fall into, especially one as captive to fables as his. “Let’s get going again. It’s getting close to noon and we still have a way to go here.”

Ethan turned and began stalking up the mountain again. He missed his walking stick; it always helped stabilize him when he hiked and gave him a sense of security, but that he had left inside the Heart House.

The trail led upwards without concern for terrain or tree, boulder or tripping hazard. The climbing became rough and tiring, challenging Shannon and Kayla to keep up. She did not want to slow Ethan down, but she was close to falling. Each time she felt she could no longer stand it and had made the decision to call for a break, the ground would lend itself to an easier crossing for a while before continuing its torturous incline.

Kayla made no complaints and struggled on as best she could in her little mukluk boots and pink jacket. She was a determined little girl, clearly frightened but steadfast in her desire to be free of the smog and the cursed town. Where she was going, she was unsure, most likely her grandmother’s in Little Rock, but she would make it nonetheless. She decided she could live with these two who were helping her. They were both rather nice and seemed to like her.

Ethan suddenly stopped, barred from further passage by another membrane of a wall. He turned and looked back at the girls who came to a stop before him. “That’s it; it does not go any further.”

“Oh no! You’re kidding,” Shannon squeaked.

“No, I’m not. If we hurry, I think we can make it down the mountain and back to the drug store before—”

A hissing sound, not unlike bacon frying, stopped the words in his throat as the fog closed in over the trail they had just come up. Ethan suddenly thought that this is what termites sound like while scurrying around in their wooden nests.

“Ethan!” Shannon squealed. “What do we do?”

“Don’t panic. The fog is not closing on us; we must not panic. Let’s think our way through this.” His eyes betrayed his instructions.

“We can’t just sleep here, can we? For how long?”

The questions were coming too fast for Ethan to think, and panic began to rise within him. He knew that panic meant death; that he had to control what was happening and think. “Wait, stop. Let me think for a minute; we have to stay in control. Can you hang with that?”

“Yeah.”

Shannon sounded very frightened but she held her emotions in check. Kayla was not in as much control, and began to whimper softly. Shannon held her close as Ethan began to pace.

“This doesn’t make sense. We both assume that whatever is in control of whatever is going on wanted us to come up here; that is why the fog opened and ran up in a straight line. It wanted us here, but why?”

“It wanted to kill us?” Shannon offered before considering Kayla.

“It could have done that last night. There has to be another reason,” Ethan reasoned.

The hissing sound began again, and a new trail opened before them, this time skirting the width of the mountain. It was as if the fog knew they wanted to escape and decided it was not going to hold them any longer.

“Come on, let’s take the path while we still have it,” Ethan urged as he led the way.

“Will this lead us around to the other side of the mountain?” Shannon asked hopefully.

“Well, the long way. If the fog does not close in on us again, it should.”

This picked her step up, and she helped Kayla navigate the more difficult tripping hazards by actually lifting her from the forest’s floor. The travel was easier now, no longer up hill, but the fact that one foot landed lower than the other threw them off balance a bit, and slowed them to the same speed they had used coming up. It was going to be a long trip, Shannon was sure, but Ethan did not show any sign of concern, so she did not mention hers.

The going became more and more difficult, and Shannon finally started carrying Kayla on her back. Ethan shortly relieved her of the wiggling burden as they continued. Now that they were on this different trail, one that had been under the fog for some time, the plants and trees had begun to decay. This left no trustworthy handhold and the rotting leaves where slick underfoot. When the trail turned rockier and jagged with boulders, Ethan thought of it as a relief and much easier going.

They trekked and hop-scotched their way through the rocky terrain for some time before stopping. The light was beginning to fail the sky, and they were now condemned to spend the night on the mountain. None of them liked this idea, but there was no way to go but further on or back the way they had come, both of which would be much too hazardous in the dark of night. Moreover, the night brought a chill that was simply unseasonable.

Ethan picked a spot to set up the small self-erecting tent and began to gather firewood. This was an easy task considering the amount of dead wood lying about. He made a number of large piles of wood around the clearing and stashed a small bit of fire-starter stick in each pile. He then heaped large amounts of wood within the ring of woodpiles, enough to feed all of the fires all night if he had to. He remembered the creature that hunted these woods at night, knew what he was about, and if he were to reappear, he would light these woods ablaze with fire and gunshots.

He could not help thinking that they were doing exactly as whatever controlled this nightmare wanted. Walk here, then here, then setup camp, and I will see you in the morning. This scared him more than he knew and left him with no need for sleep.

When the tent was up and the girls squirreled away inside, he zipped up the flaps and took a seat in front of the fire. If that thing came out of the trees, he would be ready. Now all he had to do was sit, sit and wait for the screeching thing to realize the night and come bent to the hunt.

Chapter 32

It was barely perceivable, but Ethan could tell in the faint firelight that the smoky fog was closing around them, congealing like some dark scab. It had filled in the space they had come from first, easing, sighing into a solid wall of swirling dread and moist membrane. The sound of its passing was a gentle whisper, like a fine rain on dry leaves. This was the only sound other than the soft crackling and random sharp retorts of the fire.

Before he had considered what this swirling closure might mean, the path they were to use in the morning was entirely consumed, their progress barred by the smog and their fear of what might lay in wait within its blinding concealment. The constant swirling motion of his surroundings was maddening, almost sickening, and he looked to the warmth of the fire. Trapped within this intent of the unknown, some evil thing with its dark desires began to rob from him his will.

The pestilent wall had constricted around them, tightening the space where their small camp sat, seeming to suck the very oxygen from the air. Ethan began to feel more than just threatened: defeated. Whatever was plaguing this mountain had taken Madison and made her its tool. This fact scared Ethan more than the evil itself. Enslavement to some force, some tangible evil, for however long it would hold him, was too much a nightmarish ideal.

The smog appeared to have stopped closing in, but the pressure it built within his head was becoming unbearable. A raging migraine had begun to develop, and small bursts of white light teased him from just beyond his vision. Sweat spread across his forehead and began to run down and along his temples as he shivered from the cold and near-blinding pain. He attempted to justify this new concession, convince himself he had tried, fought so very hard to bring himself and the two innocent girls out of here, but the thought seemed unable to find purchase.

He closed his eyes tightly, trying desperately to stop the blinding flashes and overcome the building dread caused by the tightening of the fog. He lay down in the rotting refuse of the dead forest and decided to just stay there and let whatever came have him and the doomed girls sleeping in the tent. The pungent smell of old whiskey washed across his face, drenched in the stench of the unclean.

“Giving up, fucko?” the bum asked in his hiss like voice. “Just gonna lay here and die, huh? What about me, you selfish prick-drip?”

“Leave me alone,” Ethan said, his eyes still clenched tightly against the blinding flashes.

“No, little boy, I won’t. Get the fuck up! Go screw that blonde bruise in the ass! Screw the little girl, I don’t care, but get the fuck up!

“I can’t do anything about this; just leave me alone.” With these words, Ethan suddenly felt conviction for what he was feeling, as though these words confirmed his decision, but deep in the core of his thoughts, a small spark snapped into existence and began to burn with a tiny fire.

“You can’t die yet, you no-ball wonder douche!”

“Why not?” Ethan asked, his voice growing more convinced.

“Because,” the bum said simply, “I am you, and I don’t want to die.”

For the first time, Ethan heard fear in the voice of the ragged, rotting corpse of a man that had plagued him for so long. His eyes shot open, and he found the filthy face hanging just above his, his desperation mirrored in the blood-shot, discolored eyes. Just beyond the putrid face was the night sky, a small circle of it, but still encrusted with stars like some haphazard collection of precious stones. The small flame, the sputtering tiny burn of hope, exploded through his mind with the rage of a storm. He sat up.

“You’re right; I’m not done yet.”

As another first in Ethan troubled life, the bum smiled, just a slight curling of his lips and suddenly vanished, revealing the sensually radiant Madison standing within the small clearing, just inside the wall of smog. Ethan sucked in a frightful breath and became erect at the same instant.

“Ethan, they have asked me to come talk to you,” she said longingly, desire dripping from her words. She was nude, as before, but the mist played across her body in a teasing way, tendrils first showing the promise of her intimacy, and then just barely concealing it.

Fear assaulted Ethan like an ice pick, seeking out and finding his raw need to survive. Her body, her sensuality, the captivating curves of her flesh held this in check. He slowly brought himself up to stand, never breaking eye contact with Madison. “Who, Madison? Who asked you to talk to me?”

“They did—the Culture.”

“Who is the Culture?”

Madison’s eyes sparkled with desire, with unabashed instinctual want. She absently began to trace the smog’s caress with her own hands, her eyes fluttering at the joys of her own touch. “They are the dream givers…the gift bringers…the beginnings and ends to all things…and they want you…”

“The Culture?”

“Yes, Ethan. Don’t you feel them?” She moaned under her own touch. “They were very angry with you at first; you trespassed through their home, walked right around them like you were the god and not they.”

“God?” Ethan asked, fighting violently within himself to not drop the shotgun and take Madison for his own pleasure.

“Yes…” she hissed as her hand found the place between her legs. “They told me you are special…” She moaned again.

“Madison, we just want to leave.”

“You can’t, Ethan.” Madison suddenly stopped as if to realize that her ploy was not working and dropped her hands at her side. “Listen, they want you to come and join them… They have made you this offer: if you come willingly…join the Culture without resistance…they will provide you a station of stature among them… They have also promised to give you the two with you as your toys… The fucking here is incredible, Ethan…I swear you’ll think you’re in heaven.”

“What did they promise you, Madison?” Ethan shot back.

“Oh, you should see the men I get to pick from—such beautiful men…escaped slaves from a long time ago…but they are so animal…so gorgeous to see… Ah, they know how to pound a woman, let me tell you…” She moaned again, this time at her memories. “And I can have as many as I want…in any way that I want…as often as I want.”

“I don’t want that, Madison. Tell them I refuse.”

“What? Are you nuts, Ethan? Now I know why Abby was going to leave you… You’re such a fucking nerd…”

Ethan lifted the barrel of the gun and leveled it at Madison. “It’s time for you to go.”

Madison chuckled in a breathy way. “Alright!” she shouted. “They told me to tell you that you can have me if you want…”

Ethan felt a sudden drop in his resolve, but he fought to maintain it. “What is the Culture?” he asked, finding it to difficult to say anything, more or less “no.”

“They are ancient…they are wise…and they have been here for centuries, Ethan… They tended themselves for millennia before people even began working with metal, they say… The Culture still remembers those days of transit…forcing those simple mindless creatures to serve them…to bear their fledgling society until they found Black Water Mountain… That was their turning point and moment of greatness.”

“The Culture’s?”

“Yes…” she said again, in a moaning way. “Then, the Culture was weak…almost helpless except for those they controlled… When they found the cave…the nurturing waters…the tribes of man so readily available…it was a moment of great triumph… The servants brought the Culture to the cave and hid them in the lake…. That is where they have stayed for the last five centuries…”

“What do they want from me?” Ethan asked.

“Well, I guess what they wanted from me: your undying devotion…”

“I won’t, Madison. I won’t give myself to their slavery.”

“Oh, yes you will; that is not the question… The question is: do you go to them willingly and become a prince in the Culture…or do they take you and you become my own servant? I always thought you would look good fucking me while you sucked off another man…”

Ethan felt a rush of trail mix and soda reach the back of his mouth, and he almost vomited. “Go, you sick twisted bitch!” he screamed at her.

“Ethan?” a soft voice came from the tent.

“Then you will be taken, Ethan…and I will have you in so many dreadful ways…” Madison drifted backwards and dissolved into the smog with a sighing hiss.

The tent’s zipper ran its course downward, and Shannon looked out at him. The light was low, but she could tell he was alone. “Who were you talking to, Ethan?”

“Madison.”

“She came back?” Worry filled her voice.

“Yeah.”

Shannon tried to look everywhere at once. “Where is she?

“She’s gone. I told her to leave.”

“You rejected her?”

“Yeah, she wanted me to go with her, but I refused.” Ethan turned towards Shannon. “The trails are closed off in both directions,” he said simply.

Shannon saw that Ethan was thoroughly aroused again, and it looked painful in his jeans, but the shock of no escape stopped that train of thought. “What do you mean?” she asked as she scrambled from the tent.

“Look.” He indicated the missing trails.

“Shit,” Shannon whispered lightly. “Now what?”

“We wait for the morning,” Ethan replied as he sat.

“Hurts?” Shannon asked simply as she began removing her shoes.

“Yeah, but it will pass. I can’t believe she can have such an effect on me.”

“She had the same effect on me last night. I think she is more than just a pretty girl, like she has a pheromone…” Shannon replied as she rolled her jeans down and stepped out of them.

“What’s a pheromone?” Ethan asked.

“Like a lightning bug; their glowing butts make other insects think they are trying to mate. When they get close enough, they eat them—like a sex trap,” she replied as she dropped her flannel shirt onto her jeans. Her almost nudity began to arouse her, in the open, in the forest, naked.

“It would have to be. She is pretty and all, but she never had an effect on me like that.”

“Don’t be ashamed about it; like I said, she effected me as well, and I am a girl.” She dropped her bra and panties onto the growing pile of clothes and approached Ethan next to the fire.

He looked up at her, and his breath caught a moment. The firelight played along her figure, highlighting this curve, then that, giving her skin a soft glow. His mouth ran dry instantly.

“I want to make love, Ethan, like it is going to be our last time. The way this is going, it just may be.”

The erection that had begun to subside came racing back. “What about, well, you know… Won’t it hurt?”

“God I hope so,” Shannon said as she hugged his head against his lower stomach. “Take me, Ethan; let me show you what I can do for you with my body, and not just my mouth.”

Ethan took her there, in the failing firelight, and brought her to many climaxes, each one almost loud enough to awaken the girl still sleeping in the tent, each one a standard of resolve for them both to continue, to not give in to the pressure of the evil around them.

Chapter 33

Kayla woke to the bland sunlight filtering down through the smog and the cobalt blue of the tent’s walls. She rolled herself out of her sleeping bag and noticed that Ms. Shannon was gone. She had gone to sleep next to her, but now she as missing. Fear ran a jagged course through her and she stood motionless, listening, seeking a noise that would prove to her that she was not alone. What came to her was a soft growling, almost gentle, like what she would imagine a baby lion would make when playing.

She worked up enough nerve to gently unzip the tent’s door, but found it already opened. She peeked out a small hole between the doors and saw the woman and the man, lying next to a dead fire, too near the smog. They were wrapped in each other’s arms and sleeping. The woman was snoring lightly, like that baby lion.

She went to the man and knelt next to him. He was almost completely underneath the sleeping bag, but he was the one who knew where the food was and Kayla was hungry. She shook him gently. “Mister?”

“Yeah, I’m awake,” Ethan said dreamily.

“I’m hungry.”

The memories of the past few days rushed him and crowded the forefront of his thoughts. He had allowed himself to become lost in Shannon’s lust, which allowed him to escape, if for only a little while, the horror they were now living. He sat bolt upright. “What?” he asked just a bit too loud.

Kayla took a tentative step back, “I’m hungry…and I have to pee.”

“Oh, sorry, sweetie; you scared me. You can go behind the tent to pee—you know how to in the woods, right?”

“Yeah,” she answered as she headed for the back of the tent.

“I’ll go with her,” Shannon announced as she climbed from the sleeping bag and followed the little girl.

Ethan watched her go, trying to memorize the shape of her bottom as it moved her away. When he could no longer see her, he fished some foil- and cellophane-wrapped foods from his pack. The two jugs of bleach had smashed the Twinkies somewhat, but they were still edible—just a bit difficult to handle.

When the two girls returned, Shannon was holding Kayla’s hand. She led her over to Ethan, and Kayla sat to have a quick breakfast while Shannon got dressed.

“What do we do now?” Shannon asked Ethan around a mouth full of granola bar.

“Well, we could try making it through the fog or we can wait and see if it goes away.”

“I don’t want to go in the smoke,” Kayla said flatly. “The monsters are in there.”

She sounded so adult but looked so young and helpless. It was an odd contradiction for Ethan.

“I’m with her; I say we—”

A building sound cut her short, the sound of an old man inhaling, an old man that should have given up his life to his nicotine addiction long ago. Chills ran down Ethan’s spine.

They all at once looked towards the source of the sound, and found the smog rushing away into a single focus, drawing tight into a single spot. The sound began to rise in tone as the smog cleared away from the opening of a shallow cave, and Ethan felt his stomach sink into a frozen ball of dread. It was the very cave he had escaped from, the opening not more than twenty feet away. Then the cave seemed to exhale the smog back into the clearing, washing them all with its fetid breath before the fog broke, leaving them in the same clearing, but with the cave’s mouth, squat and agape at one end.

Ethan stood, drawing the rifle up with him, leveling its killing end at the stone opening.

“Ethan, what is it?”

“This is where we came out, me and Abby. This was where we escaped.”

Shannon turned towards the hole and stared, drawing Kayla closer to her. They stood like this for what seemed an eternity before anyone spoke.

“What did Madison want from you last night?” Shannon asked, not breaking her stare on the cave.

“She wanted me to join her with something she called The Culture—some being that she claimed has been around for thousands of years.”

Shannon immediately pictured a Petri dish, a fungus-like bacteria growing across the clean pinkish gel like a video fast forwarding. She suddenly became nauseous. “I’m not going in that cave.”

“No, you won’t be going in that cave…just me,” Ethan replied thoughtfully.

“No you won’t,” Shannon commanded.

“They want me, only me.”

“You don’t know that!” Shannon shouted angrily. “How could you know that? Let’s try the fog, Ethan!”

Ethan began to walk slowly towards the cave mouth, “Just me… I can make them let you go… Just me…” His conviction of self-sacrifice became stronger with each step. If he offered to join them willingly, he hoped they would let the girls go alone.

Kayla began to cry softly.

“Ethan! No!” Shannon screamed as she began to stand.

A trail of jet-black mist began to trace its way out of the opening of the cave. The three of them froze where they were, transfixed by the seeping blackness.

It began to grow, become more substantial, stretching forth in many directions now and infecting even the rotting forest floor with its inky blackness. It did not rise, but fell to cover the ground. Then a head began to raise, a greasy, longhaired head followed by a soot-coated and torn blue uniform. Ethan knew it was Captain Black, the thing he had fled from while in the prison. The creature still wore the glowing cinders, each embedded deeply in its flesh. In its one hand, it held a rusted cutlass, in the other, a cinder stick.

It hauled itself out of the opening and stood, its head dangling to one side, the greasy hair reaching into the black mist obscuring the ground.

Another head came out, this one with the same matted hair and filthy rotting flesh. When it stood, its head fell to one side limply, its hand clutching a crosier with a single large ember smoking at the top, hidden just under his grip.

They parted sloppily, in a stumbling gait, to allow room for Ethan to continue towards the cave, but he remained frozen, transfixed by the tortured corpses before him. They waited patiently for Ethan to regain his composure as best as he could. Somewhere, back in the still-Ethan parts of his mind, he heard Shannon screaming the doom of the world.

“Let these two go!” Ethan screamed at the smoldering monstrosities. “I will come willingly, if you let these two go.”

“No…” the pair hissed together. Their voices were wet and gravelly but dry at the same time, a disembodied voice of ruined throats. It made Ethan’s skin crawl.

“Then I will not come!” Ethan shouted. His voice was becoming excited, almost too highly pitched to be the voice of a man. His hands were shaking violently, and he would have bolted right then had it not been for the oppressive gray fog surrounding them.

“Come…” they beckoned in unison.

“No!” Ethan yelled again. His mind snapped back to him like an over-stretched rubber band. Everything came into sharp focus, and he raised the shotgun again.

Father Burns leaned to one side a moment, and then began a slow, shambling walk towards Ethan. Ethan brought the gun over and fired. The retort made the girls scream again, and the flesh of the thing’s chest exploded out its back in a black sticky mass, coating the rock wall behind it. The priest did not slow.

Ethan fired again, this time joined by a couple of shots from Shannon’s pistol. It still had no effect, and Father Burns reached for Ethan’s face with one large boil-encrusted hand, the cinders in its arm trailing an oily smoke.

Kayla suddenly rushed forward and began spraying the thing with her bottle of cleaner. It reacted immediately, melting the flesh of the corpse’s face and neck, boiling down its chest where it stripped more as it went. It screamed a high-pitched, many-voiced scream. Ethan thought immediately of Hell and that this was the many voices of its victims.

Burns turned in the same sloppy fashion and tried to get away, streaming its flesh behind it in violently sizzling puddles. It screamed again, and Ethan almost lost hold of his bladder. He gently worked the bottle from Kayla’s small hand and rushed up behind the creature, spraying its back with the cleaner, like some murderous housekeeper. It screamed again and finally pitched forward to dissolve into the forest floor.

Captain Black stood stationary for a moment, and then rolled its head onto its shoulder atop the neck long shattered by a hangman’s noose. “We cannot die, we are forever…” it hissed. Raising its cutlass, the corpse began walking towards Ethan.

Ethan rolled the nozzle over to stream and began spraying the thing, its flesh reacting in the same violent manor as the priest’s, but the captain’s screams were more hideous, more voice-filled and ruined.

Ethan found himself backing away, spraying the thing repeatedly before it toppled from lack of muscle and the sinew that held them. He continued back until he met Shannon, still holding the spray bottle before him like a flamethrower.

He turned to Shannon, and then quickly looked away, seeking out his little savior. When he found her, he scooped her up in a full hug and began to sob with her on the little girl’s shoulder. Shannon embraced them both in one large hug.

“Thank you, Kayla,” Ethan whispered softly into the girl’s ear.

“Yes, thank you. You were very brave, Kayla.” Shannon sounded as if she were about to begin crying herself.

“It’s not over,” the little voice came from between them. “There is more to clean.”

“Clean?” Shannon asked as she leaned back to see the girl’s face.

“Mommy always said that dirty was bad, and that all bad things came from being dirty. There is more dirty in that cave, and we need to clean it up!” This last she said more like a girl at a carnival.

“Do you think we should go in there, Ethan?”

“It’s that, the fog, or we wait. You remember what you were saying to me yesterday, that thing about being the people who save the world from some biblical evil. I am beginning to think you might be right.”

Shannon gazed at the dark opening of the cave and then at the dissolved corpses still smoldering to either side. “Do you think we can kill the Culture, whatever it is?”

“No, I don’t think so. I do know if this spreads, if this Culture thing decides to keep expanding, the world will be unlivable.”

“Yeah, and we would get to watch it come to an end knowing we did not try to stop it.”

Chapter 34

They stripped themselves of everything they would not need. Ethan knew that this nightmare would be ending today, and either they would come out of that cave or they would be dead. Either way, most of the things they carried were useless unless they came back out of the cave. These they left stacked and wrapped inside the collapsed tent in an attempt to protect them should the smog close off the rest of the campsite.

“Ethan?” Shannon whispered softly from just behind him.

“Yeah?” Ethan replied as he handed her a gallon jug of bleach.

“What about Kayla? Should she stay out here?”

“At this point, Shannon, I think she should make her own choice.”

“She is going to want to stay with us.”

Ethan looked at Shannon for long moments before responding. “I don’t think it is going to matter either way.”

Shannon’s face drooped slightly before she nodded.

“You’re not really going to go in there, are you?” the bum asked with his fetid breath.

Ethan looked up at him for a moment but did not reply. “Ready?”

“You’re gonna die in there, ass scab.”

“Yeah, I’m ready.”

“Me, too!” Kayla chirped. She seemed happier now than she had since they found her.

“Fuck!” the bum shouted as Ethan ducked down and began working his way into the cave.

Each of them carried a flashlight, the long metal cylinder kind that could double as a club and produced very bright light. The glare played around the stone tube in maddening flashes of sight then darkness as they made their way deeper.

Ethan had to crawl, just as he had when escaping the first time. The settled calm of his suicidal decision began to crumble under the strain of fear, which grew with each waddling step. He had just recently fought so hard to be free of this place, and now he battled within himself to get back in.

Kayla was almost able to walk upright, but still had to bend at the waist. The flashlight was difficult for her to hold with one small hand, but the other was still carrying the almost full bottle of bathroom cleaner. She seemed immune to the terror she was walking towards, most likely too innocent to know her real danger.

Shannon brought up the rear, duck-walking just behind Kayla, trying to watch behind them for fear of attack by some outside smog dweller. The bleach she carried was heavy, but proved too effective to leave behind. If a spray of cleaner could dissuade those two horrors, even kill them, it might be their key to survival. She was not sure if it would ward her against everything in the cave, but she would be holding at least this bottle when she found out.

As Ethan came into the cave itself, he immediately saw the changes. The black water that had been so still, so dead when he came through the first time had now stretched and sought out the walls of the chamber. It was oozing up and over the shores and cavern walls, coming close to the ceiling. It was apparently moving, but so slow he could not see it. Except for the light of their flashlights and the gray filtered sunlight working its way through the cavern, the cave had become like glistening pitch.

The lake at the center had given itself to coating the walls with its dark ilk, and so the depth had dropped dramatically. Ethan was shocked at the number of corpses that polluted the lakes bed. There were so many skeletons, bones with flesh, shattered, denuded bones, and other bits of death’s debris in such quantity, it was impossible to identify the creatures that had fallen victim. What was certain was the violence used to bring them to their end.

“It’s stinky in here!” Kayla said loudly, and Ethan winced at the volume.

“Oh dear Christ!” Shannon hissed as she played her light over the walls. “What is that?”

“I don’t know…” Ethan trailed off.

“It’s the Culture, and it’s going to kill you and me!” the bum shouted into Ethan ear painfully. “Leave here now!”

“I think it might be the Culture,” Ethan repeated thoughtfully, as if it where his idea. At this point, he was not sure if it actually had been his idea or not. His voice echoed through the cave distortedly with the sound of dripping water.

The flashlights tried in vain to be everywhere at once, playing across the blackness creeping along the walls, sweeping frantically this way, then that. Motion seemed to be all around them but always just outside the circles of light. It was as if the place had come to some dreadful life, a life bent on their capture and its own stealth in plain sight. The oozing motion of the blackness gave Ethan a chilling, clammy feel, and he suddenly wished he had tried surviving the smog instead.

“Is it alive?” Shannon asked in a whisper, attempting some form of her own stealth.

Before Ethan could answer, there came the sound of wet motion from the center of the lake. He played his light across the surface with Shannon, and even with the utter blackness, they could both see a hole in the very center of the lake. It was difficult, the shadows of its shape swallowed almost entirely by the dark surface, but a hole it was.

“I think it is the Culture,” Ethan said, trying desperately to keep the terror from his voice.

“It’s very dirty, Mister,” Kayla commented, not attempting to speak softly.

The volume of her voice made both Ethan and Shannon cringe, but they said nothing.

“Can we please go?” the bum pleaded.

It was the first time in his cruel existence that he had asked something of Ethan, pleaded with him for anything. This frightened Ethan even more.

A deep rushing sound came from the hole as the lake began to swell near its shore. It was a long whispering sound, deep voiced and clearly inhuman. Ethan felt the fine hairs along his arms begin to stand on end. He suppressed a shudder, but Shannon did not.

“Let’s get out of here,” she whined.

“I’m not totally against that,” Ethan answered, “but what about the smog? Do you want to try and get through that?”

Shannon remembered what had become of Stan when he forced his way into the smog. “No.” She sounded close to crying.

The rushing sound stopped, and there was a short pause of silence. Then the rushing came again, followed closely by a deep bass note that warbled and sputtered loudly. A stench hurried through the cavern, the smell of the long dead and mostly rotted. The tone carried for a few moments like a large tuba, then began to change swiftly, as if the lake were trying to speak. Ethan’s light revealed that the edges of the hole vibrated rapidly as it flexed tighter.

“It's trying to speak; don’t listen to it! Run, God damn you, run!” the bum screamed.

Ethan could tell that he was scared. This figment of his own subconscious was afraid and trying to get him to flee.

“Come…” The sound exploded from the hole in the surface. Even without the control of lips and tongue, the word was unmistakable.

“Run!” the bum screamed desperately.

“Ethan?” Shannon could not seem to form a question around the terror raging through her head.

The inward rushing sound came again, this time edged with a hissing sound. Ethan’s mind screamed to be away, louder than the bum, and he felt himself begin to tremble along the back of his knees. Just a simple crawling of the flesh, but it was the first time Ethan could remember fear being his master.

“Ethan… Come…” the black water hissed in its deafening baritone voice. “We… Wait…”

“Run!” the bum screamed. His voice had become high pitched.

“I think we should get out of here, now!” Ethan declared, no longer concerned about hiding his fear.

“Yeah, let’s get the hell out of here,” Shannon agreed readily.

They turned towards the tunnel they had crawled through, but it was gone, consumed by a wall of the sludge. Ethan felt a snap in his reality and began searching frantically for the tunnel. His desperation gave his fear free reign, and his thoughts began to scatter as he rushed to where the tunnel should have been.

“Shit! Where is it? Shannon! Where is it?” he shouted.

Kayla began to sob lightly, more afraid of Ethan’s attempted flight than the horror of the lake.

“I don’t see it! It’s gone!” Shannon screamed.

“Don’t touch that black shit!” the bum cautioned.

“Don’t touch the black shit!” Ethan repeated the warning.

“How do we get out?” Shannon asked, trying to bridle the rampant fear in her own chest, if not for her, then for Kayla.

“You… Don’t…” the lake replied wetly, its consonants barely perceptible. “You… Join… Culture…”

“I want to go home,” Kayla whimpered around her sobbing.

Shannon drew her close and embraced her. “Me, too, sweetie, me, too.”

“What do we do, Ethan?” Shannon asked, her speech rapid and shallow breathed.

“I…” Ethan could not seem to put words to his overwhelming feeling of hopelessness.

“Clean the water,” Kayla said softly. She lifted her bottle of bathroom cleaner and squirted the wall. The thin stream caused a violent reaction to the black sludge, and it hissed, sputtered, and released much too much vapor as it fell from the stone to become a puddle of rapidly evaporating gray.

“No…” the black water hissed. “So… Many…”

The threesome stared flatly at the sizzling puddle of hope on the ground, unsure of what they were seeing.

Kayla suddenly ripped from Shannon’s arms with a screech cut short by her impact with the cavern wall. The black ilk splashed around her and began to coat her into oblivion.

Ethan saw the stiff black tendril extended from the lake and into Kayla’s back just before Shannon retrieved the spray bottle and began squirting the appendage. It snapped instantly and began to sputter and writhe on the ground as it released Kayla. She slid down the wall a moment then fell onto her back, her front coated thickly with the black sludge.

Ethan rushed to her as he pulled off his flannel. He began wiping the black from her face as it mixed with the reddish color of the child’s blood. When he uncovered her mouth, she sucked in a huge breath and screamed in pain, her eyes squinted shut against the invading blackness.

Shannon made a huffing sound that ended in a short scream. Ethan looked to her and saw another of the appendages extending just in front of her. Her eyes were wide in shock and her face twisted in agony. The arm thing suddenly drew itself back into the lake with a soft plopping sound, and Ethan could see her insides begin to ease out of a clean slash across her lower abdomen.

She looked at him with a grave sadness and then dropped to her knees. The impact forced her intestines out with a rush as she fell backwards, her legs bending painfully. This time, Ethan screamed, completely drowning out the crying child lying before him.

“Leave them, shit head! We have to get out of here!” the bum screamed at him.

“Come… Ethan…”

Chapter 35

Ethan lifted the child and carried her the short distance to Shannon. She lay prone, bent at the knee, and her breath ran in and out in short bursts. Her hands held back the urging tide of her innards and her eyes had rolled backwards, deep into their sockets so only the whites showed. Ethan laid Kayla down beside her and began rummaging his pack for more water.

“Leave them!” the bum shouted, becoming less hysterical but more desperate.

As Ethan began pouring water over Shannon’s draining insides, a hissing sound drew his attention back to the black lake. There, a tendril began to sprout from its darkness followed by more wispy lengths of black that sprung up randomly around the surface of the lake. The chaotic twisting lengths made the lake appear as a large weed bent to its own strangling growth, and Ethan felt like a fragile plant about to succumb to the thing’s ravenous life. The hole through which the Culture had spoken was now gone, given over to these new abominable extensions.

Even with the swamping fear, Ethan turned back to his task. He pulled the gallon jugs from his backpack to fish from it a shirt he had packed from the drug store. With this, he gently wrapped Shannon’s spilled organs and placed them on her stomach, again soaking the bundle in water.

“I really wanted to have children, Ethan. Maybe just one, a little girl…”

“Shannon, try and stay still. I will get you out of here.”

“I wanted to name her Kylie… She would have had blonde hair…”

“Shannon, don’t try to talk. I can’t give you anything to drink.”

“Behind you!” the bum’s voice called from the edge of the lake.

Ethan spun around to see the tendrils drifting towards him, searchingly. They whipped about in slow motion, twisting and overlapping each other like toiling snakes. The walls had run clean of the black coating, the Culture having pulled itself together to extend in this searching way. He instinctively tried to step back, but his heel bumped into Shannon, a corpse-like reminder of what held him.

“The tunnel! We can escape the cave now! Run!” the bum shouted as he backed away from the searching appendages.

“Kayla, can you walk?” Ethan asked as he began to gather Shannon in his arms.

“I can’t see! I want my daddy!” she sobbed, still clearly in pain. Her nose and lips had stopped bleeding, but her face had begun to swell, and Ethan was sure she was turning dark around her eyes and mouth, but it was difficult to tell with the black water still there.

“Leave them!” the bum demanded savagely.

Ethan felt something grab onto him, wrap itself tightly around his thighs. He released Shannon and grabbed at the thing. It was slimy and bone-chillingly cold, black beyond the glare of his flashlight. He began to tear at the thing as it grew taunt, ripping fists full of the ilk, when another found his ankle. He dropped his flashlight and began using both hands to tear at the thing, but it yanked his foot out from under him, and he fell hard to the stone floor.

“You stupid fuck!” the bum screamed, having gone back to his former hysterics.

The lake began to draw him in like some slow angler, Ethan securely hooked. He clawed with his hands at the rough floor, searching desperately for a handhold. His fear ran towards his instinct to survive, and his mind ran clear of thought.

The filthy man that had plagued him since childhood rushed the glistening tentacles and began tearing at them himself, trying to free his host lunatic from the depth of Black Water Lake. The surreal fact that the bum had made physical contact with Ethan’s reality disturbed him back into thought as his clawing hands found one of the jugs of bleach.

He worked the top off quickly and splashed it on the two taunt tendrils. They immediately parted, a popping and hissing reaction burning rapidly in both directions. The Culture shuddered violently and drew itself back into the lake leaving the smoldering lengths of itself on the shore. Ethan watched the other run up and around his body leaving little more than moisture behind. The effectiveness of the bleach stunned him, but he quickly recovered long enough to grab the next jug.

“Run! Now’s your chance, run!” the bum screamed frantically.

Ethan was now afraid of the filthy man—not as a child afraid to see the horrors the bum liked to show him, but as a man plagued by another who could now do violence.

“Ethan, take Kayla and go. I’m not going to make it anyway…” Shannon said as loudly as she could muster.

“Yes, go!” the bum shouted.

Ethan uncapped the second jug of bleach and turned towards the lake. If he could get this bleach in there, he might be able to kill the Culture for good. He began to work up the courage to charge the thing, run towards what he so desperately feared.

The bum understood his intent and stepped between Ethan and the lake. “Don’t even think about it! Just get the fuck out of here before we both die!”

The bum suddenly surged forward as countless fingers gripped him in their long segmented grasps. The bum’s yellowish eyes burst wide open and he screamed. He suddenly raced towards the lake and vanished beneath the surface.

Ethan felt a sharp, ripping pain race through his mind. He fell to his knees, his intent lost to the agony of having the bum forcefully torn from him.

Even with the blinding rage of pain, Ethan was able to keep his grip on the two jugs as he squeezed his eyes against the ache. He knew that the lake would take him next, and in the same violent way. He had to do something now.

He brought one leg up and heaved one of the jugs of bleach like a World War II soldier storming an enemy trench. The jug tumbled and splashed bleach as it went, but found the surface of the lake as the tendrils began to break the surface once more.

The jug broke through the surface, and the reaction started again. The lake began to boil and surge around the hole that the jug had made, and the waters pulled together tightly around it. The same acrid stench began to rise from the lake and burn his eyes and nose, but the lake drew tighter and tighter, finally forcing the jug to the surface where it bobbed and rolled in the violence of the reaction. More and more of the bleach gushed from the opening, extending the reaction further and further.

Ethan finally found hope, hope for survival, hope for freedom, hope for the destruction of this wicked Culture. It gave him the strength to rush the lake with the final jug of bleach and upend it over the surface. He had come just short of entering the lake himself, not being able to see it well without his flashlight, but caught himself at the last step. As the bleach splashed over the membrane-like surface, he was immediate assailed by the acidic steam as it rushed from the water. He closed his eyes tightly and held his breath as the jug jerked up and down from the bleach pouring out from within.

When it was empty, he quickly returned to the girls, lifted Kayla with one arm, and began to drag Shannon by the collar of her thick coat. Shannon screamed at the pain, but clenched her teeth together and held her voice. The little girl continued to sob, still rubbing at her eyes and mouth with one hand but holding onto Ethan with the other. It seemed to take forever to bring them to the cave’s opening, and the air continued to become less breathable. His own lungs burning from the acrid vapors, Ethan knew he had to get them out of the cave.

A wind was forcing its way into the cave through the opening, but to Ethan’s dismay, it was not fresh air, but the same rotted stench of the smog outside. However, it did not burn his lungs; just made it difficult to inhale deeply. He brought Kayla through the opening and leaned her against a boulder near the opening, then returned for Shannon.

“What’s happening? Ethan, is it over?” she asked weakly, her mouth dry.

“Not yet; I have to get you to a hospital first,” he replied as he worked his arms under hers. He began to pull her through the wind-swept opening, avoiding the hanging rocks and snagging surfaces. He had to stop twice and readjust the moist package resting on her stomach. She winced and sucked breath each time, but held her voice from screaming.

When he was free of the cave, he continued to drag her until she was close to the still-burning but dangerously-shallow fire. He returned and brought the sightless little girl to Shannon, then stoked the fire using wood from the other piles that remained unlit. He remoistened Shannon’s wrapped intestines and washed more thoroughly Kayla’s crying face.

“I’m so thirsty, Ethan. I need something to drink…” Shannon murmured.

“I can’t give you anything, Shannon. You’re not supposed to drink anything.”

“Something, please. I am not going to make it, anyway…”

“Yes, you will,” Ethan said with authority as he placed a moistened cloth in her mouth. “You’re just opened, Shannon; nothing looks damaged. We just have to get everything back in is all. I just have to get you to a doctor.”

“I can almost see,” Kayla said having finally stopped crying.

“That’s great, sweetie,” Ethan encouraged. “It will come back in a bit, just hang tight.”

The smog that had so entrapped them was now rushing into the cave at incredible speed. The Culture seemed to be trying to draw itself back together, perhaps make good its escape. Ethan did not care its intent any longer; he had hurt the thing. Whatever it was, it was a living thing and as apt to be wounded as each of them. He just could not yet start down the mountain to get Shannon to the doctor because visibility was nonexistent, the forest around him obscured by the rushing gray, and any attempt he made would lead to further injury. He would have to wait until the smog was clear.

“It was evil, wasn’t it?”

Ethan had returned his thoughts to the bum and the aching rip still present in his mind, the shallow burning along his scalp. “Yeah, Shannon, I think you were right. Whatever that thing is, it is evil.”

“It’s a virus or a germ, I bet. It had grown unchecked in that cave for so long, evolved beyond God’s intent. I think I might throw up,” Shannon said thoughtfully, her voice clearer now that her throat was wet.

“You won’t. It’s just the sensation, I am sure,” Ethan said without knowing. “I wonder how it became intelligent, became able to speak like it did,” he pondered as he took her hand into his.

“I don’t know… I just know it was true evil.”

“I guess you were right then, yesterday, when you said that stuff about ridding the world of an evil or whatever.” Ethan’s voice betrayed the exhaustion he was trying to conceal.

“That would make me a martyr, huh?” Shannon asked sadly.

“No, you’re not going to die. I can already see pretty far; we will start towards the road in just a bit.”

She lifted her head to look into his face. She could see not only the bone-weary exhaustion on his face but the determination he had to keep her alive. This gave her the hope she needed, and she let her head down to rest once more on the thick collar of her coat.

Chapter 36

There were no more votes, no more shared decisions among the Culture or its council but a simple and murderous fight for escape. The burning liquid that Ethan had poured onto it had eaten so quickly into the Culture, killing millions upon millions that the populace fell into hysterics. Where a common respect had been for thousands of years, there now resided self-preserving chaos, and for the first time in the Culture’s ancient memory, violence broke out amongst itself.

As factions developed around the more strong-willed and quick-thinking, it began to break apart. Each impromptu leader made their own choice and ignored the collective decisions of the elders. This unchallenged government quickly dissolved under this new threat, and the council watched in vain as millions died.

Deeper and deeper, the Culture pushed, seeking out refuge within the bedrock, seeking a place the hateful, burning fluid would not find it, but always the bleach followed, slaughtering the Culture with its burning. The eternal Culture had finally fallen to ruin, a tale told by its soothsayers for generations, and its escape flawed resulting in its own death.

* * *

Even though the smog was now completely gone, the forest was still suffering the vapor’s effects. Ethan finally found two limbs from the dead and rotting forest that were strong enough to bear Shannon. He was able to make up a skidding gurney to place her on and drag her out of the forest.

Even with the unimaginable pain, Shannon remained in positive spirits, even joking with Ethan about his preparations and their journey down to the lake. Here, he replenished their low supplies of water and remoistened the cloth holding his lover’s insides. They had to remain wet and untwisted if she was to survive this journey, and Ethan meant to see that done.

Kayla did as she could, and as Ethan asked, wanting nothing more than to help. It was difficult for her to keep up with the man as he almost jogged through the forest, dragging the woman with him. He would stop and wait if she fell too far behind, but that was not often. If she had to run to keep up, she would. She did not want to see the woman die now, not after coming this far, doing so much.

When they made Mr. Brighton’s home, they found him rocking slowly on his porch in an aged rocker, sipping at more of his lemonade. He regarded them as they tracked through his fallow fields. When they reached the gravel parking area, he stood slowly and hefted the long double-barrel shotgun he had inherited as his father had. “I see you’re back, young man.”

“We need an ambulance!”

“What did you do this time?” the old man asked sarcastically.

“Call an ambulance, God damn you!” Ethan screamed at him as he laid Shannon gently to the ground.

“Don’t say bad words!” Kayla shouted in her little girl’s voice.

“We will start with the police…” Brighton trailed off as he reached through the door to the phone hanging just inside. “I told you kids to stay out of the cellar, didn’t I?” he accused as he began dialing on the phone. He brought the handset to his ear for a moment. “The phone’s dead,” he said flatly, not a bit of concern in his voice or eyes.

“The car! Throw me the keys to the car!”

“Throw me the keys to the house,” the old man shot back.

“I don’t have them!” Ethan shouted as he began walking towards Brighton.

The old man lifted the shotgun and leveled it on Ethan’s face.

He stopped where he was. “Please! I have to get her to a hospital!”

The old man stared at him from over the length of the pitted and rusty barrel. He finally began groping again around the edge of the doorframe and tossed Abby’s keys to him. “You’re not welcome here anymore, ya hear? Don’t ever come back here,” Brighton said angrily then stepped back into his house and closed the door on them.

Ethan put Shannon in the back seat and belted Kayla in the front. He took off like a shot, rushing towards the next town some eighteen miles away. The cop who pulled them over ten minutes later brought an ambulance with his radio and tried to take statements about how Shannon came by her wound and exactly where these strange and dirty people had really come from.

Kayla, in her true innocence, tried to tell the truth and spun as much of the tale as she could in her little voice. The officer just arched his eyebrow at Ethan as she continued. In the end, the officer escorted them both to the hospital where Shannon was already in surgery.

* * *

GNS News, Your Global News Source

Town Dies under Mysterious Circumstances

Tim Lynn, AP news.

The small town of Black Water Pennsylvania is no more. The population of this small suburb is either dead or missing. Scientists from three universities have begun investigating the mysterious circumstances that took place and, as of today’s report, cost some 2,815 lives.

FEMA director Marshal Cummins has promised the full cooperation of Federal resources as well as the National Guard to keep loved ones, looters, and the curious out of the small town as the investigations continue.

The President said in his speech this morning, “This tragedy, as devastating as it is, must be investigated. The first lady as well as I wish to express our sorrow for this country’s great loss, and ask only that all those families directly affected by this disaster bear with those fine scientists and security forces as they seek out the root of this tragic event.”

The President continues by saying…

* * *

“… and the Prime Minister departed without any further statements,” the petite brightly-garbed woman finished.

“At a loss for words, was he?”

“Yes, Paul, the pie gag just took the wind right out of him,” the pretty anchor said with a grin.

“I bet it did. Now on to more sobering news. The cleanup of the town of Black Water Pennsylvania is almost complete. Scientists seem convinced that some form of virus had run through the town in just a couple of days, killing most everyone, driving others to some wild dementia.

“One scientist compared this short-lived but rampant bug to the likes of rabies or advanced stages of syphilis, driving some of the infected completely mad. Crime scene investigators have counted some two thousand murders committed along with other violent crimes as the virus reached its apex.

“Investigators have also said today that all Black Water residents are now accounted for, and the death toll stands at three thousand four hundred and sixty-three souls. The total number of survivors remains at three, which include one tourist. Their accounts of the nightmare are sorted and frankly horrifying.”

“Do you think anyone will move back there? Do we have a modern day ghost town in Black Water now?”

“Well, I know I wouldn’t move there!” the older man chuckled jokingly. “And now for sports with our own, Danny Blankenship. Danny?”

* * *

“Did you isolate it?” the gruff, field-worn general asked.

“Yeah, I got one, and it is still alive,” the young scientist said as he squeezed the syringe into a capped test tube.

“Out of all that mess, you found only one?” the general snapped.

“Listen, I know who you are and all of that, but I don’t work for you, and I am not in the service. Go snap at someone in uniform,” the young scientist shot at the older man.

“This is a military operation. Answer the question as I asked it, or I will find someone else who will,” the general replied threateningly.

The scientist knew that a microbiologist finding a new breed of organism was rare and almost unheard of at the start of one’s career, so he bit back his next retort. “Yes, General, I was able to isolate only one.”

“Very well. Keep looking,” the general replied roughly as he bit into the over-smoked cigar hanging from his mouth.

* * *

“Ethan?” Shannon asked weakly.

“I’m here, Shannon, right here,” Ethan replied from her bedside. He lifted her hand and held it in both of his.

“We did it, Ethan. We won,” she coughed around the roughness of the recently removed respirator tube.

“Yeah, we did.” Ethan felt his eyes filling with unshed tears.

“You should have left me…”

“Never.”

“Where’s Kayla?”

“She’s in the pediatric ward, in the playroom playing with other children.”

“Is she alright?”

“Fine, Shannon; don’t worry about her or me.”

Shannon rolled her head over to Ethan. The flesh around her eye had gone to a bluish-green color and the swelling was all but gone now. “What was it, Ethan?”

“They are saying it was some form of super virus or something.”

“A virus that could talk?”

“I don’t know, Shannon, that’s just what they are saying.”

She rolled back towards the ceiling, and locked eyes with a reporter spewing something on the muted television. “I don’t think I have a place to live anymore.”

“Sure you do. I dropped out of college and got a job here in town. My parents’ inheritance was enough to put a deposit on a small house.”

“How many bedrooms?” Shannon asked as she rolled her head back to Ethan.

“Three,” he said simply.

Shannon stared at him longingly, searching him for a further answer.

“One for Kayla, one as an office…”

Shannon smiled at him, squeezed his hand, and began to cry—not in a sad way, but in a deeply relieving way, in the manner of Atlas finally releasing his burden of the world. Ethan decided, then, never to tell her that while in her short lived coma, they had treated her for a venereal disease and relieved her of a pregnancy—the results of her rape. She could bear children, at least that was what the attending nurse had said, and that was enough for Ethan.

* * *

Kayla was finally comfortable again. She was with others her own age, and even though they were hurt in some way or another, she found them endlessly entertaining. They had wonderful imaginations and smiled easily, even without her having to force them.

Occasionally, she would have to convince one of them to play her game, but that was not often, especially after the first time. The little burned girl was used to being in charge and she wanted to play some board game. Kayla wanted to play dress up with the donated clothing.

“Dress up is for babies!” the little burned girl shouted.

“No it’s not!” Kayla shouted back, no longer moved by the numerous scabs on the girl’s face.

“Is to!”

“No… it’s… not!” Kayla shouted back as she reached into the burned girl’s chest with her mind and squeezed whatever was there until she passed out. The others were more than willing to play dress up with her, and she soon found herself working adult-sized sleeves over child-size arm casts. The nurses simply carried the burned girl away to her room saying something about how she was not ready to be up and playing just yet.

Kayla knew that when Black Water gets inside you, there is no cleaning that out. You cannot drink bleach, or any other cleanser for that matter, and you just had to learn to live with it. The special abilities it gave her made it easy to cope, even with the ancient voices whispering from some great distance in her mind.

* * *

The house was quickly falling into disrepair. The paint was flaking off just about everywhere, and the spiders had returned en-mass. Cobwebs filled every small space they could find and trapped the dust and other flying debris, giving the house a worn and shabby appearance.

She had read every book in the library twice and searched through every nook and cupboard in the house. What she never imagined, or the Culture for that matter, was the unending boredom of watching the Heart House finally fall to ruin. She remembered that day of agony, the day the Culture cut her off, made her sentient, and then died in a burning rage of hatred, leaving her to watch this wonderful house die.

Then on one of these endless days, there came voices from the woods. She rushed to the windows of the second floor and looked out. There were kids coming from the recovering trees, lots of them with beer, radios, and sleeping bags. Fate had finally brought her entertainment, and when done seducing them and twisting them to her grotesque acts of carnal pleasure, she would kill them. Madison would finally have company again, the Heart House could rise from its spiraling death, and the Culture would begin to grow again. This time, she would be the elder, and this time, she would be the only member of the council.

About the Author

Jon Fore was born in Marysville, Ohio in 1968, the third son of Dave and Judy Fore. After graduating Manalapan High School in 1987, Jon enlisted in the United States Navy, serving a combat role during Desert Storm. Now he lives in Florida with his beautiful wife and three wonderful children.

His first professional short story, Mid Watch published in 2004 in The Pow Wow Paper. This was to precede a number of short stories, thesis, and even poetry publishing credits over the next two years with periodicals such as The Story Teller, Events Quarterly, Crime and Suspense Magazine and Dystopia magazine.

In 2006, his short story, Undone, was nominated for a Push Cart award by Story Teller Magazine. Since then, Jon has completed seven novels, the most recent, Paradise in 2011.

www.jonfore.com

Copyright

Copyright © 2011 Jon Fore

Copyright © 2011 by Jon Fore

Published by Obscura Publishing

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book may not be reproduced in whole, or in part, by any means, without the written consent of Obscura Publishing.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination, or are fictitiously used. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Any trademarks referred to within this publication are the property of their respective trademark holders.

Obscura Publishing - www.obscurapublishing.com

ISBN: 978-1-4524-3085-0

Cover Artist: Lisa Dabbs

Content

Jon Fore
BLACK WATER

PROLOGUE

PART 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

PART 2

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

About the Author

Copyright