He took another step, and now he thought of Janet. How strangely she was acting. How it seemed like some other entity was animating her. Like she was just an empty shell. Just like a suit of armor.
There was a noise behind him, like a sword sliding out of a sheath.
Trevor turned around.
The eight suits of armor stood still, staring across the room at each other, each of them holding their weapons up at the ready, ready to strike.
Had they been like that before? Trevor could have sworn that their arms were down, holding their weapons at their sides when he walked in. But he knew the cramped space was making him go crazy. He shook off the thought and continued toward the briefcase, feeling a thin sweat break out over his forehead.
Trevor reached the desk and he clutched the briefcase like it would make all his fears go away. He popped up the clasps on the front, but a lock with a simple number combination secured it.
Damn it, he thought. But he didn't come this far to be stopped now. Will seemed awfully protective of whatever was in this briefcase, and Trevor wanted to know what it was. He also seemed to be unusually interested in people snooping around the bay. The man knew more than he was letting on, and if Trevor only had two days left in the mansion before the construction crew got in his hair, he wasn't going to let a little lock on a briefcase stop him.
He glanced around the desk, looking for something heavy. There was a paperweight shaped like a telescope sitting at one corner. He picked it up, feeling the heft of it in his hand, then he aimed it at the lock.
Another sound echoed in the room behind him, like the creak of old hinges, or a metal suit shifting.
Trevor glanced over his shoulder and saw nothing out of the ordinary. Other than all the heads of the suits of armor that were turned, staring at him.
His heart jumped and it took a minute for it to settle. He stared at each one of them. And hadn't they been like that before? Yes, they had. He was sure of it. Their heads were always faced in that direction. He must have imagined they were pointing straight ahead as he crossed them, thinking that they had been watching him. But their heads had always been turned to the side: he knew that now.
He turned his attention back to the briefcase. Raising the paperweight again, he brought it down hard on the lock. It bounced off as the suitcase let out a hollow rattle. He swung it again. The lock loosened, but still held on.
Trevor paused and thought about glancing over his shoulder once more, but decided better of it. If he had, he would have noticed that the suits of armor were standing in the middle of the room now, closer than he remembered.
He held the briefcase firmly and he touched it with the edge of the paperweight to get the arc right.
If he turned his head now, he would have seen that one of the suits of armor was standing right behind him, just like it had since he entered the room.
As he raised the paperweight in the air, so did the suit of armor raise its big, hefty axe with a really sharp blade. The one that the light of the room glinted off of, as if it was crying to be sated with blood. As Trevor would bring the paperweight down onto the lock for the final time to bust it open, so too would the suit of armor swing down the axe and cleave it into the nape of his neck.
Trevor heard metal clinking behind him, but he ignored it. And then he swung the weight down.
A loud whack echoed.
Bridgette, Dawson, Billy and Karen rushed into the room after throwing the door open. They were all shocked. "Trevor!" Billy cried.
Trevor spun around with a smile bigger than the Cheshire Cat's. "I found it!" he said.
Billy was about to say something, but Trevor's sentence startled him out of his train of thought. "I... You what?"
"I found the other piece of the map!" Trevor said. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out the piece they had found in the ornate box sitting next to Jasper's bed. Trevor turned back for the desk and laid them both flat on the table to match them up.
The suits of armor were all lined up on either side of the room against the walls, their weapons held impotently by their sides, just like they had always been.
The four of them gathered around Trevor as he matched up the pieces, and to their surprise and delight, they were a perfect match. The entire reason why they came into the room to warn Trevor seemed to be lost from their minds, at least for the moment.
With the map complete, Trevor pored over the entire thing, and then his face fell. "There's no 'X'," he said.
The others looked at it and saw that he was right. In the full grid depicting the bay that the map made up, there was no 'X' at all.
A heat of anger began to rise in Trevor, who was just about ready to crumple up the pieces of paper or tear them apart, but then Bridgette pointed something out.
"Look," she said. The incomplete phrase that she'd noticed on the first half of the map was completed with the second piece. "'The treasure lies beyond the yellow brick road'," she read.
"There is no 'X'," Billy said. "It's a code."
Sparks Fly
"We have to leave," Dawson said.
"I heard you the first time," Trevor replied.
"He's right, Trev," Billy added. "The slaughter happens every hundred years. I don't know why, but you can't ignore the coincidence."
"You said it yourself," Trevor said. "Coincidence."
Billy sighed. "That's not what I meant."
Trevor had his arms folded into each other. "I'll put it to you real plainly. I ain't leaving. And you would be stupid to leave now, too."
Billy sighed and paced around the room. "I don't know, man."
"We have to do something about Janet, too," Dawson said. "We can't leave with her still like that. Isn't that what you said, Billy?"
Bridgette walked into the room and in on their conversation. "She's a lot better," she said. "She's not like she was before. I was talking to her a bit, and she seems like her old self again."
Billy tried to caution her. "Hold on a second, Bridgette, I wouldn't be so quick to think things are back to normal."
"I'm not," she said, "but I at least untied her from the chair."
"You what?" Trevor said. "Oh, that's just great!"
"She's fine right now!" Bridgette shot back. "Karen's sitting with her."
"And if that little freak show attacks Karen? Runs around in the night cutting our throats? What then?"
"Don't be so dramatic."
"So we leave, then," Dawson said, looking from Billy to Bridgette.
Bridgette seemed on the fence, and so did Billy. "I don't know," he said. "I mean, if we really did find the full map, we could potentially be losing out on the opportunity of a lifetime if we leave. Plus we called that Simon over here. He's driving down right now. We can't just leave him in the lurch."
"It sounds like you're going to get a whole hell of a lot more than that if you stay," Dawson muttered.
"We stay," Trevor said. He tried to put his foot down, and when the others weren't fully convinced, he offered them a compromise. "Okay, look, if we stay, let's sort out some particulars. Let's pretend all this garbage you're spouting is real—which it ain't, and even if it is I'm not going to care because in less than two days we're going to be out of here with more wealth than you could ever dream of. In the meantime, we all stay together. No more wandering off from each other. We keep the doors and windows locked up real tight, just like the job description says. If we get into something funny, we'll all know right quick, and we'll respond accordingly. Besides, who the hell do you think is going to come in here and kill all of us? Do you see anyone around?" He looked around for exaggerated effect. "Seems to me there's just us here. And that loon we tied up in the other room, but I hardly think she's fit to take down all five of us. That's if we keep her tied up," he said with a sharp look at Bridgette.
"What if there's something more than that here?" Bridgette asked.
"Like what?"
"Ghosts," she said.
Trevor shook h
is head and paced around the room.
Bridgette was torn. She could see both sides, but the danger seemed real. None of the bloggers of the mansion gave any sort of clue as to who perpetrated each massacre or why. She couldn't wrap her head around the fact that they had been a hundred years apart each time, and yet they still happened. But if there was anyone who knew more about it, it was Boomer. She had to go talk to him.
"Why? Where are you going?" Billy asked as he reluctantly handed his van keys to her.
"I'm just going to see Boomer. I'll be back in a little bit." She turned and walked off.
"Hey, we just said we weren't going to run off from each other!"
"Let her go," Dawson said bitterly.
Bridgette left the mansion as evening fell over the landscape. She drove to Boomer's shabby house, but didn't see him on his porch tonight. She crossed the sagging wood and went to knock on the door. It was already open a crack.
She poked her head in. "Hello?" she called out.
A strange smell filled the air, one that wasn't familiar to her. It didn't smell right, and the house sounded too empty.
"Hello?" She pushed the door open and it groaned terribly on its old hinges. She stepped into the house, and the floorboards inside didn't fare much better than the ones on the porch. The house was a mess. It was tidy, but everything was very old and worn. There was mold in the corners of the rooms. The carpet was all creased and chewed up. The paint was peeling off the walls in flecks. The ceilings were stained yellow, and old light fixtures were caked in grime and dust. There was a TV flashing in the corner like it had a bad wire hooked up to it.
Bridgette ventured into the living room. The smell was coming from the kitchen. The light was on, but she didn't see anyone. She stepped around a short wall onto the greasy linoleum.
"What are you doing in here?"
Bridgette jumped and spun around. Boomer was coming down the hallway, wiping his hands with a towel.
"Jeez, you scared me. What's that smell?"
"Cajun redfish and grits," he said. "Old family recipe." He pointed to a pot boiling on the stove. "Want some?"
She hesitated. "Uh, no thanks. I'm not staying for dinner. And I'm sorry for barging in, but the door..." She pointed at it, as if that would suffice as an apology.
"Old habit," he said. "I like to hear what's, uh... going on outside."
He left it at that, but Bridgette thought he was alluding to the Jasper Estate. That seemed to be all he did most of the time was sit on the porch and stare up at it, as if he was waiting for something, like an old security guard eternally on night watch.
"I wanted to talk to you about the mansion," Bridgette said.
He pointed out some old furniture in the living room and he took a seat in a decrepit armchair. Bridgette paused at the couch, afraid that it would be flea-bitten or something, but she sat down, tucking her hands tightly into her lap. "We found out some things about the place," she said.
"Like?"
"About the murders there. It wasn't just the time with you. There were more, and they all happened a hundred years apart. It's been a hundred years since the last one." She couldn't hide the fear in her voice.
Boomer eased into his chair. "I know," he said.
"You do? About the others, too?"
He nodded.
"Why didn't you say anything before?"
"You ever heard that old saying, 'You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink?' Sometimes you got to let someone touch the stove themselves to know it's hot."
"There's something you're not telling me," she said. "You know who killed everyone up there, don't you?"
Boomer stayed quiet. His tired face looked at her with the wisdom of ages.
"Don't you?" she implored.
Finally he let out a quiet "ahuh." He adjusted himself in his seat, then he picked off a pipe from the table next to him, lighting it and stuffing it in his mouth. He sucked on the sweet smoke.
"They weren't human, were they?" she said. "They were... ghosts."
He let the blue smoke slide out of his thin lips. "And if I told you all that, would you believe me?"
Bridgette thought about this.
"No, of course you wouldn't," he said. "You young folks would get all high and mighty and defiant, like you gotta make it a point to prove an old man wrong. But this old man know a thing or two, believe it or not."
"That's why you told us to get away," she said. "You knew what was coming."
He nodded dryly. "Like I said, Jasper's waking up. You have maybe a few days at most. Don't get roped in or fooled by nothin' else. Yous are playing with your lives. And a life is a precious thing."
"What did you see when it happened a hundred years ago? Do you remember?"
"Yeah, I remember. When I was hiding under the table in the parlor, I saw a big man with a fuzzy black beard. His face was dirty. He looked like the kind of man who would smell real bad, but there was no odor. His clothes were strange. I never saw nothing like that before. And he held this weird sword. Had no idea what I was looking at at the time, but he looked just like a pirate, something you'd read about in an old book. But the thing I remember the most is those eyes. Like a flash of fire burning in the night. Never seen anything so scary in all my years.
"Someone ran into the parlor and the pirate cut her down. But she didn't die. Not right away. I watched her bleed on the cold floor, and then I saw the man standing over her, looking around for more victims. And when he left, he didn't walk through the doorway; he walked through the wall, like it wasn't even there."
A cold chill ran through Bridgette as she listened to the tale.
"You need to leave," he reiterated. "It's not going to be pretty if you stay. You still got that snake charm I gave you?"
Bridgette reached into her pocket and retrieved it. She felt the cool silver and the snakeskin wrapped around it.
"I hope you leave," he said, "but I figure your friends are probably more stubborn than you are. If you don't get away, you need to be hanging on to that."
Bridgette's brow furrowed. "I used it," she said. "Just before you rescued us in the bayou, some snakes fell onto the boat. They started to crawl on me, but I took this out, and they all slithered away, like they didn't like it." She turned it over in her hands. "But how will this protect me from anything else?"
Boomer smiled, showing her his old, worn teeth. "Satan was the first snake."
Bridgette didn't understand.
But before he explained further, his nose turned up and he gave a big sniff. "Supper's ready," he said, getting up. "I gotta tend to it, so if you're not staying, you best be leaving. And I hope for good." He walked over to her and she stood up. He took her hand in his and planted a kiss on the back of it. "Not that it wasn't a pleasure to meet you, miss, but don't let me ever see you again." He flashed a smile at her and she squeezed his hand back.
"I will," she said. "I'll leave." She nodded as if to affirm to herself her own sentiment. She didn't want to play with her life, as he said. With any of their lives. When she got back to the mansion, she would do her best to convince the others. She didn't know what would happen with Janet, but maybe just getting away from the place and away from whatever influence was around them would make her better.
Just as she started to pull away, Boomer held onto her and yanked her back a little. "Because I don't want to have to come up there to find what's left of you," he said.
When Bridgette got back to the mansion, she ran into Dawson who was looking out a window.
She told him she was leaving. "And I'm going to bring Janet with me. I can't force anyone to do anything, but the rest of you should leave too." And after a moment, she added, "You were right."
He made a quiet, indignant sound, but he didn't look at her or say anything. His eyes narrowed and he stared at the dark water, barely visible in the moonlight.
Feeling awkward, Bridgette turned down the hallway and headed for the sound of voices coming from the dining
room. The lights were on and the fireplace was going.
Billy and Karen were sitting at the table with the map pieces in front of them, bickering back and forth about it. Trevor paced around the room, stealing glances at the map as he went, then losing himself in thought. Janet sat at the corner of the table, off to herself. She seemed to be staring in a trance, but she didn't have that same blank look as she did before. As soon as Bridgette entered the room, Janet looked up at her and smiled. Bridgette was relieved, knowing that her friend was back. If they left now, she knew they would be okay. She opened her mouth to speak.
"Bridgette, we figured out half the code!" Billy said excitedly.
"You think you did!" Karen chimed in, an annoyed look on her face.
"'The treasure lies beyond the yellow brick road'," Billy repeated, reading from the map. Look at the 'L' here!" he said, pointing to the map. "Doesn't it look a bit bigger than the other letters? Like it's capitalized? The treasure must be in the 'L' row!" His finger traced down the side of the map along the letter code ranging from 'A' to 'L'. His finger shifted along the bottom row and made a rough circle far away from the museum. "We just can't figure out what the number is. There's gotta be a clue to this we're not seeing."
"No, you dummy," Karen said. "You think 'lies' is capitalized because that's what you're doing to yourself! It's not a clue."
Trevor continued to pace, tuning out both of them. He had his own theories, and he was keeping them close to the vest until he figured it out.
"Guys," Bridgette started, "I want you to know that—"
The lights in the room flickered.
None of them noticed this except for Bridgette, and she looked up and watched the light from the bulbs wax and wane. And then they exploded.
Glass rained on them as they screamed and shouted. Furniture moved around in the darkness, filling the room with loud grating sounds. Their dim silhouettes were highlighted by the crackling fire.
The Box Set of Hauntings and Horrors Page 51
