But Father Michael nodded. Cap waited for a moment, then realized that Sarah was looking at him with anticipation. It dawned on him that she expected him to do this.
Calling on homicidal spirits to leave their home was not something that Cap had ever considered to be a husbandly responsibility. Certainly it had never been mentioned in the wedding vows. But he couldn’t let Sarah down.
He stepped forward. She remained where she was, and her embrace fell away. He felt suddenly naked and alone, as though in her arms he had been clothed in an armor that would protect him from whatever forces might be brought to bear against him. And now….
He closed his eyes. “What do I say.”
“Whatever you want,” said Father Michael. “Just be clear. You want them to leave. Forever.”
Cap nodded. He opened his mouth to speak, not exactly sure what he was going to say. But before he could speak, he felt a hand on his arm. He thought it was Sarah for a moment, come forward to stand with him as he tried to rebuke the evil that had come to their home. But it was only Father Michael. The priest was staring at him piercingly. “But take care,” he said. “You must believe you can overcome them. If not, trying to cast out one or two of the foul demons who have come here will simply sound as a summoning call to more of them. More ghosts will come to this place, and they will fight among themselves to possess it.”
Cap gulped. “Great,” he said. “And what do we do if that happens?”
“If the owner of the home is…” Father Michael paused, as if trying to find a word that would be accurate without overly terrifying them, “… unsuccessful, then we go to the next steps. The priest tries to cast them out with repeated litany and prayers. The rosary is used. Holy water is used to inscribe the sign of the cross on the places we wish to cleanse. The priest attempts to touch the ghosts, and burn them with his faith. Sage is placed around the house.” Father Michael grinned as if amused at this last. “Ghosts hate sage,” he said with a wink. “Makes ‘em sick to death.”
Cap grimaced. “Poor choice of words.”
“And what if all that doesn’t work, either?” said Sarah from behind them.
Father Michael grew solemn again. “Then more priests will come to bring their faith to bear,” he said quietly. Then he forced a smile and clapped Cap on the shoulder. “Never fear, my boy,” he said in a chipper voice that seemed jarring and out of place. “We’ll take care of you.”
Cap thought about pointing out that being “taken care of” could also be a euphemism for killing someone, but he resisted. What good would that do?
He stepped forward. Or tried to. His body resisted for a moment, as though his muscles were self-aware and knew that he was about to attempt something dangerous. But he gritted his teeth and forced himself to move. One step. Two. And then he was at the edge of the porch. The wood flooring dropped away into a short set of steps down to the hard earth that surrounded the house. He stopped, and knew that he would not be able to force himself forward even a single step more.
The mist eddied around him, small tornadoes causing the fog to open and close at irregular intervals. The effect was more disorienting than a solid wall of haze would have been. As though a reality beyond the house was hinted at, but never quite revealed. He felt like a lab rat trying to find its way out of the most complex maze ever created. Only instead of a piece of cheese, what waited at this puzzle’s end was nothing less than survival.
Dark shapes appeared in the mist. They moved slowly, silently. Their outlines were vague but frightening in the same way that abstract night-shadows cast on a child’s wall could be frightening. Fear that was linked to something half-seen but fully felt.
Then the mist parted for a moment, like a curtain drawn aside. And the knife-wielding ghost was directly in front of him! Not ten feet away, and sliding through the mist toward him. The knife raised high, and Cap knew that he was its target. The killer grinned, and dark ichor spilled out of its slashed throat.
Cap stepped back, feeling his nerve cracking like a weakened dam, about to let floods of terror inundate everything in their wake. Then something was behind him, pushing him forward, forcing him toward the ghoulish figure of the ghost.
“You cannot fear!” said a voice in his ear. It was Father Michael. The priest was pushing him, prodding him to confront the ghost. “Cast him out!”
Cap’s tongue was thick in his mouth. He felt dehydrated, his salivary glands dry and the inside of his mouth packed with chalk. He opened his mouth and drew a shaky breath. The mist curled around his feet, tentacles of fog encircling him, drawing him into the world of the undead.
“Go,” he wheezed. The word was barely audible. He took another breath, and forced himself to speak louder. “Get out!” he said. Then shouted it. “Get out!”
Immediately, he knew he had made a mistake. Terror forced itself into his mind, blanketing his senses and blinding him to everything but the vision of the ghost as it stepped even closer. Father Michael had said that he had to speak without fear.
“Get out!” he shouted once more. He couldn’t let Sarah down. He had to do this right. “Get out now!”
The mist at his feet had thickened, and he abruptly realized that it wasn’t pulling him into the ghosts’ world. Rather, it was forcing their world into his. The two were overlapping, a juxtaposition of realities that would allow them to work their will on him without anything standing in their way.
As if it could hear his thoughts, the ghost that stood before him lurched forward, the hand with the knife held high and the other one reaching for him. Its fingers came within inches of Cap.
And then the lightning flashed again, blinding him. Tears sprang from his eyes. When he blinked them away, the ghost was gone. Elation filled him. He had done it! He looked over his shoulder. Sarah was smiling at him.
Father Michael, however, was not smiling. He looked scared. Beyond scared. He looked like he had just stared at his own death.
The lightning flashed again. Cap was looking away, so he wasn’t blinded this time. He saw clearly as Sarah’s smile disappeared, replaced by a look of abject misery. He turned around, looking back into the mist.
The killer, the ghost with the knife, was back. And he was not alone. The hanged man stood beside him, the noose still trailing from his bent neck, his protruding eyes huge in the darkness. Another specter stood on the other side of the killer, a strange thing that Cap realized was some kind of conjoined monster. It had two heads and bodies, but the waists were fused. One of the heads was of a man, short and fat and with a face as white as powdered snow. The other head belonged to a woman, her skin so black she almost disappeared against the darkness, with a long, thin torso. The conjoined man and woman lurched forward on three legs, twisted and bent horribly, mangled together in such a way that Cap could not be sure where one ended and another began.
Behind them, other figures came forward out of the mist. The boy whose head had been cratered by a gunshot wound. The man with a knife hilt emerging from the darkly oozing socket where his eye had once been.
And then, under them and around them, something came. Something hideous, leaving a trail of black blood behind it as it crawled forward. Cap knew it was the thing that he had seen from the car, but before his mind could fully take in all the details of the horrible creature’s misshapen face and body, he felt Father Michael’s thick hands on his shoulders.
“Damn,” said Father Michael. “Inside. Quick!”
The priest spun Cap around, mercifully ripping his gaze away from the legion of undead specters and from the terrible crawling thing. Father Michael propelled Cap toward the house. Sarah needed no prompting; she turned and ran inside, barely waiting for Cap and Father Michael to enter before she slammed the door.
Father Michael let go of Cap and bolted the door. He reached into the folds of his coat and drew out a prayer book. He started to read from it, speaking the words so quietly that Cap could barely hear them.
The lightning flashed once mo
re, and the now-familiar face of the killer appeared at the window by the door. The wound on the thing’s throat stretched wide as he looked up, as though searching for a gap in the window pane, some weakness that he could exploit to force entry. At another window, the horribly conjoined ghost could be seen, its two heads staring into the house with twin expressions of naked fury. The other specters’ faces appeared as well, each taking a place at one of the windows around the house. Only one window – a large bay window in the living room – was empty, but Cap could sense something there, too. Small, too small to be seen at the level of the glass. A tiny hand, bloody and strange, reaching up the wall, a diminutive form crawling like a leech up the wood.
Cap looked away. He couldn’t stand seeing that thing again.
As he looked away, something began knocking at the door. The knock started quietly, but grew steadily louder – turning into a smashing, a hard slamming that rattled the front door in its frame.
Father Michael raised his voice, as though to force back the impending attack by volume alone. “… stoop beneath the all-powerful hand of God,” he intoned, “and tremble when we invoke the Holy and terrible Name of Jesus.”
Cap heard a tinkling sound. Glass breaking.
“Something’s coming in,” said Sarah. Cap knew she was right. Their house had been entered again. And this time the things were coming in with violence, as though to signal that this time they would not be denied.
“Oh, Lord, hear my prayer,” continued the priest. “God of Heaven, of earth, of angels, of archangels….”
Cap could hear something in the kitchen, footsteps thudding and crunching across the carpet of broken dishes and silverware that littered the floor. Sarah moved closer to him. He reached for her.
The front door shattered, the wood splintering around the dead-bolt, leaving it hanging uselessly against the frame. The hanged man stood in the doorway. The noose was tight around his neck, and Cap was close enough to see that the ghost seemed to be choking, as though its breath was even now being stolen from it. Hanging for eternity, suffering the moment of its demise over and over again.
Rain blustered through the door, a sudden wind blowing the raindrops almost sideways. But the hanging man was impossibly dry. Its hair was mussed, but not by the storm. It appeared as it must have done in life.
Sarah screamed. Cap spun around to see the ghost with the knife, coming in through the kitchen door. The knife was in front of the specter, the edge seeming somehow more real than the rest of him. Cap could see murder in the thing’s eyes. Hatred for everyone and everything.
“God of patriarchs,” said Father Michael, “of prophets, of apostles, of martyrs most holy, of virgins most pure….”
The ghost with the knife seemed to pause, as though the words had given it second thoughts. Then it nodded, looking over Cap’s shoulder. Cap spun around in time to see the hanged man toss the loose end of his rope over Father Michael’s head. The thick rope writhed like a living thing, a serpent that looped itself twice around the priest’s neck in an instant.
The rope went taut, and Father Michael’s prayer ceased as his breath was cut off. The priest gagged and fell to his knees. One hand went to the noose around his neck, pulling at it frenziedly. The other hand kept a firm hold on his prayer book, as though even now he was trying to read the words of the exorcism.
“God,” rasped the priest. “God… who has power….”
The hanged man flicked his wrist and the rope pulled even tighter. Cap could hear the the fibers that comprised the cord creaking as they tightened against each other. Father Michael was completely silent, not even enough air getting into his throat to permit him to gasp.
The hanged man flicked the rope again. It seemed to elongate in his hands, suddenly long enough to reach the ceiling above the stairs. It looped itself over an exposed ceiling beam. The hanged man pulled, and Father Michael was jerked back to his feet.
Cap watched, paralyzed. Fear had stolen his ability to move, to think. Sarah was screaming, apparently rooted to where she stood as well. The hanged man was in the door, the killer with the knife sliding forward, coming toward Sarah, a dark tongue emerging from his mouth and licking his lips as though anticipating the warmth of her blood.
Father Michael gagged. Managed to work a hand between the rope and his throat. “Run!” he screamed. Then his voice choked out of him as he was yanked into the air, one hand pinned to his throat by the noose, the other still holding the prayer book. His feet no longer touched the floor. He was pulled up, foot by foot, his dark shoes twitching in the air as the life was drawn from him. The priest twisted and turned, his body jerking in different directions as he sought to escape the rope’s deadly pull, but it just seemed to make the cord even tighter. There was no way to reach him, and no way he could escape. His feet began twitching, a mad jig Cap knew must signal either the brain misfiring as it ran out of oxygen… or worse.
Cap heard a growl, and looked at Sarah. The killer pulled his knife back, clearly intending to thrust it at Sarah’s belly, to cut the baby and the life from her in one stabbing stroke. That finally broke Cap’s paralysis. Snake-quick, he darted forward and pulled Sarah back as the knife flashed out. It punctured the air where his wife had just been standing. His guts twisted as he realized just how close the blade had come to disemboweling Sarah.
A soft laugh sounded, a whispering noise as thin as a reed in a pond. Cap intuited that it was the hanged man, giggling as much as his own noose would allow as he choked the life out of the priest. But Cap couldn’t look back. He kept his eyes on the knife in the killer’s hands. The ghost lashed out with the blade, and this time it was Sarah who saved Cap, pulling him back just fast enough that the blade missed slitting his throat by centimeters. He could feel the air parting around the metal, so fast was the knife moving.
Cap realized that he and Sarah were living on borrowed time. It would not be long before the priest was dead and the hanged man refocused on them. With deadly threats both behind and in front of them, they would be doomed.
They couldn’t run out of the house. The way was blocked, and besides that Cap was sure that the only thing waiting outside would be more danger. So he went the last way he could. He grabbed Sarah and pulled her back down the hall, toward the foot of the stairs.
As they ran, the doors that lined the hall all slammed shut, then opened again. Cap didn’t have to look to know that more of the undead were in those rooms. An army of murderous spirits was coming for them.
“Cap,” said Sarah, and he knew that she was going to warn him of the new threat.
“I know,” he said. He pushed himself to move faster, pulling Sarah with him as he went. They ran up the stairs together. The steps weren’t wide enough to run up side by side, but he held tightly to her hand, pulling her with him. He wouldn’t leave her behind.
I didn’t leave her. Not in The Before, not now.
They stepped onto the second floor, but Cap knew they weren’t safe. He could hear the rasp of shoe leather on wood behind them, a measured pace that he knew belonged to the killer with two smiles. Death was coming for them.
At the same time, he heard a creaking. The sound drew his gaze to the far end of the hall. The baby’s room. The door opened, and a tiny silhouette appeared. A child’s coo came from the shadow, the innocent noise of a baby, a gurgle of happiness. But Cap knew it was a lie. The thing was no innocent child. It was a monstrosity.
Lightning flashed again, and the thing he had seen as he drove through the mist was revealed. A grotesque caricature of an infant, a miscarriage made flesh. It was naked, its skin mottled and red. It pulled itself along the floor with half-formed hands, fingers that were barely more than fleshy nubs reaching out for Cap and Sarah. A thick stump emerged from its back, almost a tail, but with a thick furrow running down its length. Cap realized that the thing was no tail, but rather partially formed legs that had been fused together, as though a fire had melted them into one another.
“Daddy,
Mommy,” it said, a gruesome mimicry of a child’s voice whispering through the air and hitting Cap like a hammer blow to the head. Sarah screamed, and the thing giggled as though delighted by the fear in her shriek.
Cap pulled Sarah away from the devilish thing, yanking her into their bedroom. The killer was at the top of the stairs, watching them. The evil child continued pulling toward them, reaching for them.
Cap slammed the door on the monstrous sight. He pushed against the door, holding it against the inevitable onslaught, knowing that it was futile but unable to stop himself from trying.
He expected the killer to attack the door, hacking at it with his knife if not simply phasing right through it. But instead he heard a horrible scratching through the door, the sound of a pet that wanted to come in.
The sound of a child, deformed and horrible, scraping bloody fingers across the door.
“Mommy, let me in,” Cap heard the thing say. Then his blood felt like it had reversed the direction of its flow through his veins when he heard it continue, “Daddy, come out. Come out and play with me.”
The child-thing laughed again, a demon mocking Cap’s longing for fatherhood, jeering at Sarah’s pregnancy. Cap knew it was prodding them where they were most vulnerable. Sarah was hardly fit for all this, and if anything brought them down, it would be her body’s inability to protect the child she carried and at the same time protect herself.
As if to confirm his thought, Sarah groaned. He could tell that a contraction was wracking her body. From the look of it, a bad one.
The gross parody on the other side of the door laughed. A throaty, airy laugh joined it, and Cap knew it was the sound of the ghost with the knife. Then more laughter joined theirs. Twin voices that were completely different tonally but whose intakes of breath were exactly the same, a laugh that could only be that of the conjoined ghost.
Then another voice joined the laughter. And another, and another, a legion of voices twisting together in horrible merriment, a carnival of the damned. Cap didn’t know how many spirits had come to this house of horrors, this spectral amusement park. It sounded like dozens of them were outside the door.
The Haunted Page 16
