Dark Halls - A Horror Novel

by Jeff Menapace

  “Ryan…” Stew said again.

  “Would you stop trying to reel me in like my fucking mother, Stew?” Calmly, Samantha said: “If Carol believed there was the possibility that she could play host to Helen Tarver’s soul, she would have found a way by now, and she would have done it happily. No—I believe Carol needs the heart to be whole. Locked away and safe from others.”

  “Is that why you keep yourself locked away here? Why you’ve refused to say a word to anyone about all of this?” Stew’s tone was accusatory.

  Samantha could only hang her head in shame. “A crazy hermit of a woman is of no threat to anyone. I trust it’s why Carol has never come for me.”

  “Why did she marry?” Karl spoke up.

  Samantha flinched and looked up as though she’d forgotten Karl was there. “She needed an ally. She needed accomplices. Her studies were laborious and time-consuming. So, she seduced my brother, gave him that first hit. My brother then came to me, and I got my first hit. You know the rest.” She looked away, her eyes glazing over, her tone now soft and distant. “We had no idea we were being courted by hell itself.”

  Ryan rolled his eyes. Splayed a cynical hand. “Okay, fine—a two-hundred-year-old devil-woman’s heart. Why not? How do we find it?”

  “The boiler room,” Stew said.

  “It’s not there,” Ryan said.

  “It must be.”

  “It’s not there, Stew! I remember everything now, and it’s not there!”

  “Of course it isn’t,” Samantha said. “It’s far too valuable to leave so far from home.”

  Ryan gaped at her. “Far from home? You saying it’s at her house?”

  “If I had to guess.”

  “But she has no problem keeping all of her other crazy crap at the school,” Ryan said.

  “Mere tools,” Samantha said. “They enable her to carry out her rituals, but her strength—her true strength—stems from the heart. It is her conduit, her direct line to Helen Tarver’s evil. Without it she has very little.”

  “So, it’s in her house,” Ryan said. “Christ, I was mere feet from it.” He looked at Stew. “If we knew then what we know now, I could have just knocked her cold and destroyed the thing that night.”

  “Hindsight will only drive you crazy, Ryan,” Stew said.

  “Crazier, you mean.”

  “My offer to kill the bitch is still on the table,” Karl said.

  62

  Rebecca must have gone over her itinerary for the following day a dozen times, and it had nothing to do with preparation. Nothing was sticking. Every time she would start, the words would begin to blur, and she would start to think about Ryan.

  She left her bedroom and noticed her mother’s door was closed. Napping, maybe. Best to leave her be. Should she risk a cigarette? She had been jonesing for one ever since her odd conversation earlier with Ryan. Was her mother napping? Screw it, she would sneak one.

  Rebecca grabbed the pack and lighter hidden in her dresser and tiptoed out onto the back deck. She got maybe two drags in when she saw her mother’s bedroom door begin to open through the deck’s sliding glass door. She quickly tossed the cigarette over the deck and ducked out of sight.

  I’m screwed, she thought. No doubt her mother was currently wondering where she was. Her bedroom light was on, after all, and her school material for the next day was laid out on her bed. With no reply coming from her daughter anywhere in the house, Carol’s next logical step would be to check the back deck.

  She quickly stuffed the pack and the lighter into her back pocket with the plan to keep her mother in front of her when she inevitably did show, lest she spot the bulge in her daughter’s back pocket. Now it was just a matter of hoping the deck didn’t stink of smoke.

  Or maybe go in and greet her first? She’d only had two puffs. The scent on her wouldn’t be strong. Just don’t get too close. Maybe say she had to use the toilet first? Hurry in and gargle and wash her hands—and pray she didn’t spot the bulge in her back pocket—and hide the pack and lighter before coming back out? Ugh—such a song and dance for a stupid habit.

  Rebecca peeked through the sliding glass door before making a move and…

  …it appeared there would be no song and dance after all; her mother did not appear to be looking for her. In fact, Rebecca wasn’t exactly sure what her mother was doing. What she did know was that her mother was carrying a shoebox and heading for the front door.

  Where the hell is she going? And with a shoebox, no less?

  Rebecca waited a solid minute after her mother had left before attempting re-entry. She put away her cigarettes and lighter and then paused. The shoebox. Her mother not saying goodbye before she left the house. All odd.

  Or is it? The shoebox is probably filled with stuff for her classroom.

  But not saying goodbye, or where she was going? And why take it to the school now? Surely it was something that could have waited until morning. She decided to snoop.

  Inside her mother’s room, a familiar smell hit her—faint but there. Wood chips? She’d had her share of hamsters as a child and knew the subtle smell of pine and cedar wood shavings well. Is that what was in the shoebox? A hamster or gerbil for someone? For her classroom maybe? A classroom mascot of sorts? That made sense, and yet it didn’t. If the shoebox did contain such a thing, why not tell her about it? Show it to her before bringing it to school? She knew her daughter’s affinity for hamsters.

  She dismissed the thought entirely as her nose playing tricks on her, that no such hamster and its wood chip bedding existed—which of course brought less light to the contents of the shoebox, but oh well—and carried on snooping about her mother’s room.

  She spotted the great porcelain urn that stood alone on the top of her mother’s mantel and quickly looked away. Her father’s ashes. Rebecca could never bring herself to look at them for very long. The idea of his remains in such a way, so close, had yet to make her feel at ease, in spite of it being so common. Maybe one day.

  But not today.

  Rebecca suddenly felt uncomfortable, as though her father himself was judging her meddling behavior from the mantel. She went to leave, stopped, and turned back around. Something had caught her eye, only registering a second after.

  The corner of a book was poking out from beneath her mother’s bed. She went towards it. Pulled it out from beneath the bed. It was an old Highland Elementary yearbook. Had her mother been reading this? Rebecca casually flipped through the pages, the unsettling notion that some of the faces of students she was flipping past might long be

  (murdered)

  dead not escaping her. It was all getting too creepy. Her mother’s odd behavior. The unnerving feeling that her father was somehow watching. The yearbook with potentially dead

  (murdered)

  faces smiling back at her. She went to close the book, but found that in her musing over all things unsettling, she had absently flipped towards the back of the yearbook. Towards one page in particular; that page displaying itself with little effort because it had clearly been tampered with. Cut, to be exact. It was the custodial staff page. Head custodian Karl Sandford’s name, and name only, leading the row. All of the other subsequent names in that row had faces. Karl Sandford’s did not. His face had been neatly excised.

  63

  “So, do we go back to the school?” Karl asked once they were all back in their car and heading west.

  “I told you, I didn’t see it in the school,” Ryan said.

  “Maybe you missed it, Ryan,” Stew said.

  “Yeah, son,” Karl said, “you weren’t exactly yourself at the time.”

  “Guys, I got a good look. I’ll admit, I remembered zilch at first, but it’s all coming back to me now. In fact, it has come back to me—all of it. I saw some pretty disturbing shit, but I didn’t see anything that resembled a heart.”

  “At the risk of sounding cynical here, how on Earth would we even know what a two-hundred-year-old heart would look like?” St
ew asked.

  Ryan frowned. It was a good point. “Samantha said it was preserved,” he said.

  “Yeah, but preserved from two hundred years ago?” Stew said. “I would venture to say that preservation methods have become somewhat more advanced since then.”

  “Well, it has to be at least partially intact,” Ryan said. “Carol’s been getting some pretty fucking good mileage out of the thing.”

  Stew took his eyes off the road for a second and gave Ryan a disapproving glance.

  Ryan knew what it meant. “Look, Stew, I’m worked up, and I’m scared shitless, all right? And when I’m worked up and scared shitless, I fucking curse. Deal with it, please.”

  Stew put both eyes back on the road and said nothing.

  “So, does that mean we can definitely say that the heart is not in the boiler room?” Karl asked.

  “All I can tell you is this: I saw every picture of every child murdered in that fucked-up ‘altar’ of hers. They lined the walls like celebrities in a teenager’s room, for Christ’s sake. I saw symbols and objects that I couldn’t even begin to explain. I saw my name. I saw Trish’s name. I saw John’s picture. They’re hazy sometimes, but I saw them. I saw crazy, crazy shit. Maybe I saw the heart, and maybe I didn’t. But my gut tells me it isn’t there. I think Samantha was probably right: The thing’s too valuable to her not to keep it close. Maybe she carries it around with her somehow.” Ryan gave an incredulous snort and chuckle. “I can’t believe three grown men are having a rational discussion about the location of some two-hundred-year-old voodoo heart.”

  “Nevertheless…” Stew said.

  “My guess is her home,” Karl said.

  “If it is in her home, how do we get it?” Stew asked. “I mean, do we break in and tie her up like criminals? Tear the place apart?”

  “Screw it,” Ryan said. “I’m calling Rebecca again.”

  “Why?” Stew asked.

  “Maybe she’ll let us in.”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know—” He gave the incredulous snort and chuckle again. “Start looking for a two-hundred-year-old fucking voodoo heart, I guess.”

  “And if Carol’s there?” Stew asked.

  “I’m good with the tying-her-up-like-criminals thing if you guys are.”

  Stew tightened his grip on the wheel and shocked both Ryan and Karl with: “Fuck it. Call Rebecca.”

  64

  “Hello?”

  “Rebecca, it’s me again,” Ryan said.

  “I tried calling you back,” she said. “You turned your phone off, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “I was upset, I guess.”

  “I’m sorry. It just felt like the right thing to…I don’t know. Did you understand where I was coming from?”

  “I did. But I want you to listen to me for a minute, okay? I totally understand why you did what you did. If I was in your shoes, I probably would have done the same thing. Some pretty fucked-up things have been happening to me these past few weeks, and I’ve been trying to make sense of them all. Obviously it’s been making me act like a whacko, no question, and I’m not even sure what to believe lately. But I am certain of two things. One is that I care for you very much. Very much. Of all the crazy shit that I’ve been experiencing these past few weeks, you are definitely not one of them. If anything, our time together has kept me sane.”

  “Ryan—”

  “Two—and this is not me being a whacko here; please take my word on this, for whatever that means to you anymore—I have this incredibly strong belief that something very bad is going to happen soon.”

  “Bad?”

  “At the school. Something very bad is going to happen again at the school.”

  “Like what? Another suicide?”

  “Maybe. Maybe worse.”

  Ryan heard a deep sigh of frustration on her end.

  “I know…there I go again, talking all crazy, but I need you to try to believe me on this. Please, Rebecca.”

  “Why were you asking me all those questions about my dad?”

  How to play this?

  “Curiosity, I guess. We never really talked about him much, and I noticed there weren’t many pictures of him around the house. If we were heading towards something special, then I wanted to know everything about you.”

  Weak.

  “But you only started asking all those questions after I told you I wanted to end it.”

  Shit.

  “Maybe I thought there was still a chance for us.”

  “That’s a lie. It was something else.”

  Shit, shit.

  “Okay, fine—maybe I had other reasons.” And then Ryan saw an opportunity. Quickly, he added: “Maybe we shouldn’t discuss this with your mother in the house. I don’t want her to hear our conversation. It might upset her.” And make the crazy bitch kill me sooner than later, he added privately.

  “She’s not here.”

  Yes.

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She didn’t say?”

  “No. In fact she was acting pretty weird before she left.”

  Ryan felt his pulse quicken, blood thumping in his ears. “Weird how? What do you mean?”

  “I was out on the deck sneaking a smoke. She had been in her room with the door closed awhile, so I figured she was napping or talking to my dad or something and that it was safe…”

  Talking to her dad?

  “…but then her door opened, and I kinda ducked out of sight so she wouldn’t see me, you know? She left the house without telling me where she was going. Left without even saying goodbye. She was carrying a shoebox. She had this…look on her face. She seemed very preoccupied with something.”

  “What was in the shoebox?”

  “No idea. I went into her room after and found an old yearbook under her bed. It was kinda half-sticking out like she had just been reading it and tossed it under there after. At least that’s what I thought.”

  “Yearbook?”

  “Yeah. An old Highland yearbook. I was curious and started flipping through it. Your buddy Karl the janitor’s picture had been cut out of it. I thought that was kind of odd.”

  Ryan’s pulse quickened further still, thudding in his ears like tom-toms. “What did you mean when you said you thought your mom was talking to your dad? I don’t get that.”

  Rebecca’s voice grew softer. “You know my mom doesn’t like to keep pictures of my dad in the house.”

  “Yeah?”

  “But she does have his remains in a big urn on the mantel in her bedroom. She acts as though they aren’t even there and hardly ever discusses them with me, but sometimes at night I can hear her whispering, and I just know she’s talking to him. I guess it’s her own little coping mechanism. Her secret. So, I show her that respect and leave it alone. I never mention it.”

  Jesus, it’s in the urn. The fucking heart is in her dead father’s urn.

  “Rebecca, I need to see you.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “I need to see you, Rebecca. Please. Can I come over?”

  A pause.

  “Rebecca?”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Rebecca, please.”

  “I’m sorry.” She hung up.

  Ryan immediately called her back. Straight to voicemail. Now it was apparently she who’d turned off her phone.

  “Fuck!” Ryan screamed.

  “What?” Stew said.

  Ryan ignored him. Tried calling back again. Straight to voicemail again. “God dammit!”

  “What?!” Stew yelled.

  Ryan sighed, dropping the phone into his lap. “It is at her house. She keeps it in a big urn that supposedly holds her dead husband’s ashes.”

  “Rebecca told you that?”

  “Of course not. But she did tell me that she hears her mother whispering to the damn thing in the middle
of the night. Rebecca thinks her mother is whispering to her dead father, talking to him out of grief. But why the hell would she be whispering to the husband she killed?”

  “Guilt?” Karl offered.

  Ryan frowned back at him. “It’s not guilt, Karl. It’s not even the poor guy’s ashes; I’d bet the house on it. She’s whispering—chanting, praying, I don’t fucking know—to Helen Tarver’s heart.”

  “But to keep it in an urn that’s supposed to hold her husband’s ashes? Isn’t that risky?”

  “No. Much as it pains me to say, it’s freaking brilliant. Who peeks in on the ashes of a loved one? The damn thing is literally hiding in plain sight.”

  “My God,” Karl murmured in back.

  “Then we go to her place right now and grab it,” Stew said. “I heard you say the mother wasn’t home, so we go now.”

  “Hang on a sec,” Ryan said. “Rebecca said her mother left the house in a hurry, without saying goodbye. Apparently she was carrying a shoebox filled with God knows what. Guarantee you she’s heading to the school, to her altar.”

  “Why?”

  “Because along with God knows what in that shoebox, there is one thing I’m certain it contains. A photo of Karl.”

  “Me?”

  Ryan told them about the yearbook Rebecca found. Karl moaned.

  Ryan said: “We need to split up.”

  65

  Carol Lawrence knelt before her altar, her incantations finished, the photo of Karl (drying blood of the rat smeared onto Karl’s face in a precise pattern that would ensure he would suffer a brain aneurysm in the very near future) at her side.

  Carol carefully lifted the photo by the edges and pinned it on the wall next to Barbara’s. She turned to a small mirror on the opposite wall and caught a glimpse of her reflection. The flickering candlelight in the chamber cast shadows around the hollow contours of her cheekbones and eyes, making her face—she believed—resemble a skull. Death. The joy she felt was exquisite.

  66

  “Me?” Karl said again. “How the hell does she know about me?”