“What are you going to do?” Steven asked.
“Well, I know we’re not going back in that house,” Brett said. “We’ll stay here until I can find an apartment or something. I’ll send a truck to get the furniture. We didn’t pack much more than a few clothes and we were out the door. I can drive to work, I don’t have to live there. I don’t want to live there.”
“I think there’s a reason the man with the ax appeared,” Steven said. “You were seeing a ghost from the past. He was reenacting something, and you saw it. Somehow he wrapped you up in it, which is a little odd, but I’ve seen it happen before.”
“We’d like to go back to your house,” Roy said to Brett. “See what we can find out. Can we have your permission to do that?”
“I don’t care,” Brett said, “so long as I don’t have to set foot in it again.” He pulled his key ring from his pocket and began removing a key. “Here,” he said, handing it to Steven. “I don’t suppose I could get you to bring back a few things for us?”
Steven looked at Roy, who just shrugged his shoulders. “Sure,” he said. “Make me a list, we’ll bring you what I can fit in my trunk.”
“Will the neighbors notice that we’re there?” Roy asked Brett.
“Of course,” Brett said, “they notice everything. They may not say anything to you, but they will notice. If one of them stops you, just tell them I asked you to bring some things for me.”
“Maybe you should write something up,” Roy said, “when you make your list of what you want us to bring. Write a note giving us permission to stay in your house, in case someone gets nosy and calls the cops.”
“Sure, I’ll do that,” Brett said. “Are you sure you want to go in there? I’ve never been more scared in my life than when I pulled that trigger. It’s like I had no control.”
“We’ve got some experience with it,” Steven said. “We’ll be fine.”
Chapter Four
“How do you want to approach this?” Steven asked Roy as they walked up to the house. Jason began picking up the clothes that were still lying on the ground in the front yard.
“Based on Brett’s descriptions,” Roy said, “I think it’s a ghost following a pattern, like most ghosts. He may have been here the whole time, ever since the events that he’s reenacting originally occurred, but undetectable to the residents. If it’s true that the Agimat he was wearing recharges during this time of year, it likely intensified him in a way that made him detectable by Brett.”
“So we don’t know how long ago he was in the house?” Jason asked.
“Could have been any time since the house was built,” Roy replied.
“That’s not important now,” Steven said. “Our goal here is to recover the Agimat and get back to Seattle. We don’t have to figure out who he was, or what happened.”
Roy walked into the house, Steven following closely. The first room was a combination living and dining area, with a kitchen in the back. A hallway ran down the rest of the house, with bedrooms coming off either side. Roy walked down the hallway, poking his head into each room as they passed. First on the right was a bedroom. Across from it was a utility closet, holding laundry machines and a hot water heater. Next on the left was a bathroom. Across from it on the right, another bedroom. Finally, on the left, a master bedroom, with separate access to the bathroom. The house was small, compact, and a little dreary, with windows set high in each room, allowing in a limited amount of light.
Jason finished picking up the front yard and brought the clothes into the living room. One of the sliding windows was open, and a drape was fluttering out of it. He pulled in the drape and shut the window.
Roy and Steven joined Jason in the living room. “You can tell they raced out of here,” Roy said. “Each room is a little trashed.”
“Are we staying here tonight?” Jason asked.
“We’re staying only as long as we have to,” Steven said. “You want to trance, Roy?”
“Might as well, now that we know what we’re dealing with,” Roy said, pulling a chair from under the dining table and sitting on it. He removed his blindfold and handed it to Steven. “You want to join me, Jason?”
Jason lit up. “Sure!” he said, grabbing his own chair.
“Don’t form your own trance,” Roy said. “Once mine is ready, I’ll open it to you and you can join me.”
“Alright,” Jason said, sitting on the chair and closing his eyes.
“Guess I’ll just stay here,” Steven said. He knew Roy expected at least one of them to stand guard over their bodies while the trance was occurring. He guessed Jason might be a little too young for Roy to trust with the task.
Steven walked to a sofa in the living room, not more than ten feet away from his father and son. He sat and watched them. He checked his phone – it was two-thirty.
Soon it was three, and then three-thirty. Steven began to become concerned. It was a long trance, longer than he’d remembered Roy ever being gone in one. That Jason was with him in the trance made him a little nervous.
At four p.m. he decided to drop into the River and see what was going on, make sure things were OK. I’ll only jump in for a second, he thought. Just to see if there’s trouble.
He entered the flow, feeling the room shift around him, some things becoming brighter while other things became darker. Roy and Jason weren’t there. He drifted into the first bedroom, afraid that Roy or Jason might have been attacked, but he remembered Brett’s story, and assumed the blood he saw splattered on the beds and walls was from someone else. Roy or Jason wouldn’t have bled like this in the River, anyway, he thought. This is from the past.
The house was quiet and still. Each room he checked showed signs of a brutal attack, with blood-soaked bed sheets and pillows. Steven expected a ghost to emerge from the shadows, like Brett’s story, but there was nothing. He felt more and more creeped out as he went from room to room, the silence accentuating the brutality of what he imagined had happened.
Where are they? He wondered. Then he noticed blood streaks on the floor. The bodies were removed. He took them somewhere. Maybe that’s where Roy and Jason are now.
Steven left the River and opened his eyes. Jason and Roy were still seated in front of him, calm. Let’s just be patient, Steven thought.
After another half an hour, he was relieved when Jason opened his eyes, and then Roy did the same, reaching up to take off the blindfold. He took a deep breath as though he’d been holding it, waiting for them to come back.
“You guys were gone a long time,” Steven said.
Jason rubbed his eyes. Roy stood up.
“He took his time,” Roy said. “Brutal.”
“So tell me what happened,” Steven said.
Roy sighed. “It’s what I thought. Ghost with a pattern. But he’s a lot more powerful because of the Agimat.”
“What’s with all the blood?”
“His handiwork,” Roy began. “So, here’s how it goes. He’s up pacing. He’s got the Agimat; it’s hanging around his neck. He’s talking to himself, walking around in circles in the living room. I can only understand what he’s saying half the time.”
“The other half is Filipino,” Jason said. “I recognize it from the girl I dated.”
“So he’s going on and on about his faith,” Roy continued, “about his faith being strong, that his faith will overcome anything, on and on. It’s like he’s working himself up to do something he knows he has to do.”
“My girlfriend told me,” Jason said, “that some Filipinos believe so strongly in the power of the Agimat, they sometimes test it.”
“Test it?” Steven asked.
“Yes, harm themselves,” Jason answered, “believing the Agimat will cure them. It’s a demonstration of faith.”
“So, right now the Agimat is at its most powerful,” Roy said, “because it’s recharging. He decides to test it. It’s a big demonstration of his faith, some kind of proof. He goes out to the garage and comes back with an a
x. He walks into the first bedroom on the right. There are children sleeping in there, his kids, three girls. He raises the ax over one of them, then he seems to have second thoughts, and cowers back into a corner of the room, muttering.”
“He was saying he had to believe strong enough,” Jason said, “for the Agimat to work, to heal them. And that if he didn’t go through with it, god would know his faith was weak.”
“So he rises up out of the corner,” Roy said, “and walks back over to the bed. He swings the ax, severing the girl’s leg. The girl wakes up, but before she can scream he brings the ax back down in her chest.”
“Exactly where Brett saw the ax hit his girl,” Steven said.
“He pulls the ax from her chest, and brings it down once again, into her skull,” Roy said. “Then he lifts it, looks at the body for a moment, and moves to the next bed. This time he goes straight for the chest. He doesn’t want them to wake up during the attack and rouse the others. He slaughters the two other girls in this room, then he leaves and walks to the next bedroom.”
“Can I lay down for a minute?” Jason asked. “I’m having a hard time keeping my eyes open.”
“Sure,” Steven said. “Take one of the beds down the hallway. You feel OK?”
“He’s just wiped out,” Roy said. “That was a long time in the River for a novice.”
Jason walked away from them, down the hallway and into one of the bedrooms. They heard him flop onto a bed.
“And you’re fine, old man?” Steven asked.
“Never felt better!” Roy said back, smiling. “He’ll be OK.”
“So he kills his family?”
“The next bedroom is the boys’ room. Two brothers. Kills them the same way; massive blow to the chest with the ax. Then he leaves that room and goes to the master bedroom, where he does the same to his wife. She puts up a fight, but he keeps swinging, screaming that god will save her, telling her to stop fighting.”
“Christ!” Steven said, shaking his head. “These deluded people!”
“Worst of all, there’s a baby in their room, in a crib. It’s woken up by the mother’s screaming and the father’s yelling. Once he finished with his wife, he went over to the infant and placed the blade up against its neck, then he pressed it down slowly with both hands until he’d decapitated it.”
“Jesus Christ!” Steven said. “What a sick fuck!”
“So then, he sits there on his bed. He’s covered in blood, his dead wife right next to him. He closes his eyes and waits, as though something is going to come along and fix everything. He’s grasping the Agimat around his neck, praying. Nothing ever happens. He gets up and wanders into the other bedrooms, seeing his butchered children. He starts to become upset, angry that something isn’t happening. He isn’t getting the miracle he’s expecting. He starts crying, walking from room to room, praying. You can tell that he’s slowly starting to realize that they aren’t coming back. And that he’s the reason they’re gone.
“It takes him a while to figure out what he’s done, but once he does, he starts hauling the bodies out. The girls he carries out to his truck; the boys and his wife he drags out. Then he gets in his truck and leaves.”
“That must have been when I jumped in,” Steven said. “I saw the blood everywhere, but no one was here. Did you follow him?”
“You bet we did!” Roy said. “He drives back down Highway 20 about a mile, then turns off onto a side road for a ways. Eventually he stops, pulling his truck off the road. He carries each of the bodies to a pit, and throws them in. Then he leaves his ax there and drives the truck back to the house. Then – get this – he walks back to the pit! He’s walking along the side of the highway, crying. No cars came along; it was dead quiet the entire time. When he reached the pit, he picked up the ax and threw himself in. You could faintly hear him crying if you stood at the top.”
“Unbelievable!” Steven said, trying to take in the whole story. Its brutality was horrifying. “So, people find the house empty, and the blood, and assume something happened.”
“Yeah, I don’t know about all of that,” Roy said. “Wasn’t part of the trance of course. But I can tell you they didn’t find the bodies. They’re still down that pit.”
“Then the Agimat is down there, too?”
“I’m not sure of that. I was observing it, while he was killing his family. It’s a strange object, with unusual powers. Obviously not the powers he thought it had. But I couldn’t detect it in the pit, standing above it.”
“Someone must have scavenged it from the pit,” Steven said. “It wound up at Eximere somehow. When I removed it last night, it reverted to this man who killed his family, thinking he was the owner. It’s a physical object, so it must have returned to the ax man’s body down in that pit.”
“But it’s more than a physical object,” Roy said. “The reason that ghost suddenly became so active, scaring Brett and his family, might have been because the object reverted to the ghost in the house, not the body in the pit. Brett said he saw the ghost wearing it. So did I.”
“I just assumed that was because he was wearing it when he committed the murders,” Steven said.
“I’m telling you, there’s something different about this object. I don’t think it’s down in the pit at all. He’s wearing it as he reenacts things, and we’ve got to find a way to get it off him.”
“OK. Let’s say you’re right. What do we do?”
“The cycle will start again. You come with me this time, into the trance. Let’s concentrate on the Agimat, see if there’s some way we can take it from him.”
“What about Jason?”
“Let him sleep. We won’t be long, we’ll only stay in the River during the house part. We don’t need to follow him to the pit again.”
“Alright,” Steven said. “Let me check on him first.”
Steven walked down the hallway to the last room on the right, and pushed the door open as silently as he could. Jason was sleeping on a bed in the corner. He walked over to him, listened for his breathing. He was out, sound asleep. Steven turned and left the room.
Roy resumed his seat on the dining room chair, and Steven walked around him to tie the blindfold. Then Steven sat next to Roy in the chair Jason had used.
Steven waited in the River for Roy’s trance to materialize. After a few minutes, it had completely formed, and Roy opened it to Steven, who joined him.
Follow me, Roy said, leading Steven to the master bedroom.
There was the man, pacing by the side of his bed. He was holding the Agimat in his right hand, tugging on the leather strap that held it around his neck.
How are we supposed to take it from him? Steven thought.
It’s an immaterial object right now, Roy thought. And we’re in a similar state. He’s able to lift an ax; we should be able to lift the object from him.
Steven moved toward the man, reaching out to his neck, but the man was moving too quickly, pacing back and forth. The man turned and walked right through Steven’s hand. He felt something hit his palm, but he wasn’t fast enough to grab hold of it.
Maybe when he stops moving? Steven thought.
They watched as the man moved into the living room, continuing his pacing. He was speaking to himself in Filipino and English, rambling on about faith and a test. He sat on a chair in the living room for a moment, closing his eyes, and Steven thought he saw his chance. He moved forward to the man, extending his hand and trying to wrap his fingers around the Agimat. He could feel the object in his hand. It didn’t feel normal, like an object in the real world, but something was there, there was resistance when he touched it. He grabbed it and lifted, and it rose from the man’s chest. The man’s eyes flew open, and seeing the Agimat floating a couple of inches off his chest, immediately grabbed it and held it tightly in his fist, looking around the room. He stood up and marched out a side door, toward the garage.
I think you probably accelerated things, Roy said. I’ll bet he took that as a sign.
The man came back into the room with the ax, walking with confident steps toward the first bedroom. Steven and Roy followed him. The scene played out as Roy had described earlier. Steven tried not to watch the horrific display, concentrating solely on the Agimat, but the man was highly animated and never still enough for Steven to attempt another removal. The fact that he was swinging an ax didn’t help.
This isn’t going to work, Steven thought. We need him still.
You’re right, Roy thought. Drop out.
They found themselves back in the living room, sitting in the dining chairs. Roy removed his blindfold.
“We’ll never get it from him like this,” Steven said, standing up. “If we could immobilize him somehow, we might be able to remove it. Maybe something in your book?” Steven was referring to his father’s journals, which contained the writings of several generations of Halls. The book was hand-bound with different sections added by each son to receive it. Although it was written in English, Steven found it hard to understand. The words didn’t make sense until he had an experience that gave him context for what he was reading – then the passages within the book became clear and he was able to comprehend what they were saying. Roy was familiar with much more of the book than Steven.
“Maybe,” Roy said. “Never heard of anything like that, but there might be something in there I haven’t come across.”
“Wait a minute – what about Winn’s gun?”
“The EM gun? I haven’t tried it. We don’t know if it even works on ghosts up here.”
“Well, it didn’t destroy ghosts downwind, either. But it did stop them long enough so you could get away from them. That’s all we need here – something to stop the ax man long enough that we can get the Agimat off him.”
The Diablo Horror (The River Book 7) Page 4
