The Haunted

by Michaelbrent Collings

  His leg was burnt in the shape of the hand that had been pulling at him. Sarah remembered the hand prints that had appeared on their door earlier, and wondered what kind of being could burn things by its merest touch. She had heard of hell as being a place of fire and brimstone, but had always assumed that was just a metaphor. She had never imagined demons cloaked in actual flame as a reality. But she had to admit that was the only explanation that seemed to make any kind of sense. Demonic forces belched up from an underworld of flame and terror, come to drag her and Cap and her unborn child screaming to a place of eternal damnation.

  “The window,” Cap gasped. He remained curled on the floor, still clearly in agony, but he managed to point at the window. “Close it.”

  Sarah nodded. She turned and closed the window, latching it shut. She didn’t know what good that would do, or whether it would be effective in keeping incendiary demons out of the attic, but she certainly felt better sliding the latch home.

  She went back to Cap. “Help me up,” he said.

  “No, don’t try –” she began, but Cap cut her off.

  “We have to get out of here,” he said. He got to his hands and knees, his nose dripping sweat and his face a mask of pain. “We’re… sitting… ducks,” he said as he slowly pushed himself to his feet.

  Sarah ached to let Cap sit down and gather up his strength again. But she knew he was right. They couldn’t afford to just sit down and wait. They had to move. To keep searching for a way out, an escape route that they might have missed before.

  She took Cap’s hand and put it over her neck, letting him lean on her as he limped his way over to the stairs. Once there, he pulled away from her. He leaned on the handrail that had been nailed on one side of the wall beside the stairs, clearly intending to go down first, but she squeezed past him.

  “Honey, let me go,” he said. Pain still colored his voice, though she also heard the dark tones of fatigue tinting its edges. “Let me go first.”

  Sarah shook her head. “You’re limping,” she said. “You can’t move as fast as I can.”

  “But the baby –” Cap began.

  “‘But the baby’ nothing,” she interrupted. “What are you going to do if we have to move in a hurry? You’ll slow us down and we’ll get killed. Or worse.”

  Cap stared at her a moment, and she could see his inherent sense of chivalry and a desire to protect her and the baby fighting with his common sense. Finally he nodded. “I’m right behind you, though,” he said, as though it was a condition to his participation.

  She turned and walked as lightly as she could down the stairs. She seemed to remember hearing or reading somewhere that stairs were most likely to creak when they were walked on in the center, so she hugged the edges of the wooden treads. Two of them creaked lightly as she passed over them. She knew she was being paranoid, but the twin squeals of the wood sounded like cars screaming to a halt in order to avoid a crash. She was irrationally sure that the sound had reverberated through the house and beyond, probably scaring small animals and putting birds to flight as far away as a mile into the woods.

  Behind her, Cap walked slowly. The steps didn’t squeal when he passed over them, but his limp made every other footstep land hard. Pad-thud… pad-thud… pad-thud.

  She felt like she might as well have strapped a pair of cymbals to her knees and blown on a tuba as they walked down. They were announcing their intention with every step. But she couldn’t think of any alternatives. They had to see if they could find another way out of this cursed house.

  She reached the bottom of the stairs. The closed attic door stared at her blankly. She knew it was brown, but in the almost complete darkness of the house, it appeared black, a rectangular entrance to some other, darker world.

  Sarah put her ear to the door, trying to listen for any telltale noises that might suggest whether or not the intruders to their home were near. She couldn’t hear anything. But she didn’t feel at all encouraged by that. The door felt solid. Not a hollow panel door, but a thick piece of wood that would allow little through it. Cap had acted like he didn’t hear much when she told him about the radio turning on and blaring on that first night. So chances of her hearing footsteps or even the hard pad of something running through the thick door were probably slight.

  Even so, she kept her ear to the door for a long time, and eventually realized that she wasn’t really listening any more. She was stalling. Avoiding the inevitable moment when she would have to open the door and leave the momentary sanctuary they had found in the attic.

  “Honey?” said Cap behind her.

  He didn’t sound like he was in a hurry, just concerned. But the sound of his voice energized her, moved her to put her hand on the pale glint where the doorknob had to be. She felt it, cool and round in her hand, and again hesitated.

  What are we going to do, stay forever in the attic? she wondered. And had to admit that the idea held some appeal. At least nothing had come in here yet. The one room that didn’t appear to have been soiled by the insidious presence of either the specters or the other, darker creatures that had destroyed Father Michael so completely that she suspected his body would never be found.

  She jerked as she felt something curl around her hand.

  “Just me,” Cap whispered. She realized that he was holding the knob with her. “Together,” he said.

  Sarah didn’t want to turn the knob. She wanted to stay here. Just stay here with Cap. Forever, if necessary.

  She felt Cap’s hand tighten on hers. Felt him begin to turn the doorknob, pushing her hand with it. She thought about fighting him, resisting him. But she knew that a different, slower doom was all that lay down that path. In this madness, in this blackest of nights, all she had was him. She had to go with him, to follow him as he followed her. That was what a marriage was: walking hand in hand wherever the future led, even if that future led to darkness.

  So she turned the knob, too. They moved in sync, but slowly. So slowly. Every millimeter of the doorknob’s rotation seemed to take a year or more. But in spite of the slow pace they set, eventually the doorknob turned as far as it was going to. It clicked softly as the latch pulled away from the striker plate, and the door loosened slightly in its frame, as though it had been holding its breath for an eternity and could now suddenly relax.

  Sarah felt Cap’s hand start to pull the knob to open the door, but this time she did resist, pushing against him and keeping the door shut. She glanced back at him and sensed his confusion. “We go together. So we’re both ready,” she said.

  He nodded, and again the movement was just a hint in the darkness. Was that what was going to happen? she wondered. Were they just going to fade away, eaten alive by this house until there was nothing left, not even the barest outline of reality remaining of what had once been two people in love?

  She rejected that. They would fight. Together. They would get away. Together. They would survive.

  Together.

  “One,” she whispered. “Two. Three.” And on three they opened the door. Together.

  20

  The Third Day

  4:01 am

  ***

  To Cap, it seemed like the door took forever to open. Entire worlds could have been created in less time than it took for the door to pull backward. But pull backward it did. No real light came in, but he saw a line of what could only be described as less-dark along the side of the door opposite the hinges. The strip of less-dark widened slowly as the door swung toward them. Sarah stepped back to let it pass. Cap tried to step back with her, but there wasn’t much room in the bottom landing of the attic stairwell and his right foot tangled in her left.

  He didn’t fall, but he looked down for a moment. He couldn’t see anything at his feet, but his eyes acted faster than his brain could supply that fact. So he glanced down in order to “see” better and hopefully avoid falling.

  That was why Sarah saw what was in the hallway beyond the attic door first. His arm was around her, his
hand on hers as they pulled the door open together, and he felt her entire body clench. One moment she was tense but loose, a half-coiled spring ready to leap forward if the situation warranted. The next she was completely immobile. She felt like granite under him. He looked up immediately, but already knew that whatever she was seeing, it wasn’t good.

  Looking from the darkness at his feet to the point at which the door ended and a thin view of the hall began seemed to take a lifetime. A lifetime to feel the terror that had contracted all Sarah’s muscles to a tight ball. A lifetime to consider a thousand thousand options, and discard them all as untenable. A lifetime to realize that they were at best prolonging the inevitable doom that had come for them in their own home.

  A lifetime to realize that even a lifetime with Sarah was not enough.

  His eyes rose…

  … rose…

  … rose….

  And he saw the face. Pale, thin. Gaunt lines, sunken cheeks. A wide grin with white teeth that did not match the thin gray lips that framed them. A bony chin. A throat that dripped a viscous fluid into the high-collared shirt below it.

  The ghost of the killer. He was standing directly outside the door. Waiting for them.

  Sarah froze, and Cap felt himself go rigid as well. The ghost was somehow more frightening now than he had been when running after them with a knife. The reality of its dead face looking them in the eyes.

  “The burning,” it whispered.

  The words seemed to crawl into Cap’s mind and fester there. Rotting him from the inside out. He had no idea what they meant –

  (or do I know?)

  – but they frightened him, completely and utterly paralyzing him for the space of a heartbeat. The only things that he could move were his eyes. They shifted from the killer to the space behind the ghoulish spirit. The hanged man was there, standing behind him. Also motionless. Its mouth moved, but barely any sound escaped. Even in death, the spirit was being choked, its breath stolen from it. Still, it finally managed a whisper.

  “The burning.”

  Behind the hanged man, Cap could see another pair of faces. One black, one startlingly white. Their mouths opened in unison, their voices an eerie harmony. “The burning.”

  Cap felt Sarah shiver. But she didn’t move. Neither did he. Their feet were motionless, as though the house had been built on and around them. As if they were a part of it.

  More voices called out, an otherworldly chorus singing a hellish tune. Cap suspected that the boy with the skull that had been destroyed by the supersonic passage of a high caliber bullet was out there. Along with others that they hadn’t seen, perhaps many others, all a part of the dark story that was this house’s only lasting legacy. They sang the same words. They said the same thing, and Cap’s mind reeled, battered by the sound of specters in the night.

  “The burning!”

  And still he did not move. Could not move. Still he was riveted to place, just as he suspected Sarah was.

  Then something called his eyes back down. His gaze followed the less-dark edging of the attic door. Lower, lower.

  And lower still.

  Inches above the floor.

  To a small, misshapen hand that curled around the edge of the door. A voice whispered forth from the darkness. The voice of despair.

  “Daddy. Mommy. Come and play.”

  The house was eating them up. Eating them up and they would stay forever inside it, inside with the horrors that haunted it. The demons that wanted to kill them and make them a part of the evil that resided here. Walking the halls with a knife-wielding maniac, a fiend whose voice was stolen by a hangman’s noose, a lurching thing of madness that was somehow two bodies in one. A strange family of specters, bound together by ties he could not comprehend.

  And under them all, a child desperate to find parents that would be with him. Forever. Frolicking in this small circle of hell.

  “Come and playyyyyy….”

  The singsong sound of the damned child finally jolted Cap to action. He pulled Sarah away, spinning around her with a fluidity he was not aware he possessed, and ramming the door shut, cutting off the last drawn-out syllable of the malformed abomination masquerading as a toddler.

  “Come playyyy –”

  The door slammed shut. But he could still hear the muted whine of the child-thing’s voice. It scraped across his skull like a chainsaw, rasping away parts of his mind and almost leaving him breathless with fear. He had heard of people dying of fright, but only now realized that it could be more than a figure of speech. It could really happen, and might really happen to him.

  The doorknob clicked, and he realized he had neglected to try to lock it or even hold the doorknob fast in his hands. Too late now. It was unlatched.

  The door started to push against him. There was no rage behind it, no pounding to get it open as they had suffered before. Just a solid, steady push. He planted his feet against the floor and pushed back, trying to keep the door shut, trying to keep out the things that wanted him and Sarah. But the door kept opening. One inch at a time, but it was opening.

  Cap half-turned, placing his back flat against the door and pushing with his whole body. He wedged his feet against the lowest step on the attic stairs and bore down with his entire body weight. He was no longer touching the floor, his entire body suspended by the pressure on his feet and back. He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes and screamed with the exertion, feeling the muscles in their body press harder than they ever had before.

  And still the door inched open.

  “Daddy, playyyyy….”

  He screamed even louder, as much to drown out the sickening voice of the mockery of a child beyond the door as to force himself to push harder.

  The door opened another inch. Dark fingers curled around it, the hand of a ghost with a silver blade.

  Cap almost stopped pushing in startlement when something bumped into him. It was Sarah. He hadn’t realized she had gone anywhere, but she must have; must have run up the attic stairs for some reason. But now she was back, and she joined her body weight and strength to his, pushing the attic door with him.

  They both groaned with effort.

  The door slowly began to swing shut again.

  The ghosts outside the door screamed. They shrieked in what must have been frustration, but sounded more like pain.

  The door touched the frame. Cap dug deep down inside himself. He screamed, an animal roar that bounced off the close confines of the attic stairwell and made it seem like there were two or more of him, shrieking like madmen howling at the full moon in the night. He found a small reserve, the tiniest extra bit of power, a few muscle fibers that were not already taut as harp strings. He pushed, and Sarah pushed beside him.

  The door shut. The latch slipped into the hole in the striker plate with a click.

  Cap immediately turned and grabbed the knob, feeling for a lock. It had been locked, it had locked him in that first night, so there must be a lock! But he couldn’t find it. The orb of the knob was smooth and unblemished by a lock button or any other mechanism for securing the door. He realized that the lock button must be on the other side of the door.

  The knob started to turn.

  He switched his grip, no longer feeling in the dark for a way to bolt the door shut but rather just trying to keep the knob from turning. But his muscles, already strained to the breaking point by his efforts to shut the door earlier, would not respond well anymore. He felt shaky, weak. The knob started to turn.

  “Move!”

  Cap heard Sarah shouting at him and realized that she had been shouting at him for several seconds now: “Move-move-move-move!”

  He did what she said without thinking, letting go of the knob so that he could get out of her way. He didn’t know what she was planning, but then felt something thud into the door. As with everything else, it was no more than a darker patch in the overall darkness of the attic, and he didn’t have time to figure out what it was before he heard the latch cli
ck loose again.

  There was nothing holding them back now.

  But to his surprise, the door didn’t open. It shimmied in and out, but it only sounded like it was moving a quarter of an inch or so, not far enough for the door to even clear the jamb. He felt for the knob in the darkness, and realized why the door wasn’t opening. A chair was wedged under the doorknob, its rear legs posted in the seam where the first step joined with the floor.

  “You’re a genius!” he shouted to Sarah as soon as he realized what was keeping the intruders at bay. She must have run up to the attic and grabbed it from the junk that was up there while he was trying to hold the door shut.

  Again, in the dark he couldn’t make out her features, but it felt like she was grinning at him. “Men always think with their muscles,” she said.

  He almost grinned back, but at that moment the door rattled in its frame again and he realized that they had bought themselves a temporary reprieve at best.

  “Why aren’t they coming in?” Sarah said.

  “You were the one who put the chair in the way,” he said.

  “I know,” she said, sounding frustrated. “But Father Michael….” Her voice drifted off for a moment, and he knew she was reliving the priest’s demise, the moment he fell into the clutches of the dark knot of monsters outside the house. Then she cleared her throat and continued speaking. “Father Michael said they were ghosts.”

  “So?”

  “So why do they even care that the doors are locked and closed? Why not just…” she went silent again, as though unsure of how to finish her sentence. “… poof through them?”

  Cap was silent. He had no answer for her.

  “Cap?” she said, prodding him for a response.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know why any of this is happening. I don’t know what the rules are.” Or how we’re going to get out of here, he added gloomily in his mind. He looked at the black rectangle of the closed door. It jiggled again, rattling against the chair. “And why aren’t they trying harder to get in here?” he asked.