by Brian Harmon
Like with the roof, nothing here was remotely familiar. Perfect, reliable, two-days-ago Eric, who didn’t put off getting in his car and driving to Weirdness, Wisconsin just because that was an insane thing to do, never had to break into this building to get down off a roof. Two-days-ago Eric never got into situations like this. He was on time, he did everything right the first time and he was always Mom’s favorite.
And he didn’t get his ass handed to him by nine-foot-tall towers of yowling teeth and claws, either, apparently.
He tried to recall the things he’d remembered about the yards outside. Everything he’d seen had suggested that this building was empty, deserted. But it wasn’t completely rundown. It was relatively clean in here. Just a heavy layer of dust and a few small cracks in the plaster.
For the most part, the house still looked new. But as he peered into one room after another, he found them all completely empty, as if no one had ever actually moved in.
But why spend this kind of money and never even use the place? What happened here?
Still keeping pressure on his bleeding shoulder, Eric made his way along the silent hallway, peering into bedrooms as he went, searching for a stocked bathroom. But although most rooms had private baths, none of them had any towels or running water.
At the end of the long hallway, he found a stairwell that took him down to an elegant but eerily empty foyer. Ignoring the exterior doors for now, he made his way deeper into the house again, peeking into room after room, until he at last found a guest bathroom with a towel.
With no water, he was unable to clean his wounds, but he was at least able to tear the towel into strips and use it to wrap his bleeding shoulder.
He probably needed stitches, but he doubted very much that this strange journey through the fissure would include a rest stop in a hospital emergency room. Unless of course said hospital was long deserted and haunted by demonic brain surgeons.
That wouldn’t surprise him.
Finished with his shoulder, he examined his leg and decided it was fine. The creature had only grazed him with its claw. He was more upset about the pants, which were still fairly new.
He stood up and examined his reflection in the mirror. The cut on his cheek wasn’t bad either. It, too, had already quit bleeding, but not before a large portion of the left side of his face had become covered in gore.
He looked awful. He didn’t exude any of the manliness of a bloodied action hero fresh from a hard-won victory. He just looked like an out-of-shape extra in a bad horror movie.
He took the last of the towel, spit into it and began wiping at the blood. It was now, as he leaned close to the mirror, trying to see through the gloom, that he glimpsed someone standing in the doorway, watching him.
Simultaneously jumping, shouting, cursing and flailing, he reeled around to see who was there.
But he was alone.
He ran from the bathroom and looked around, but there was no one there.
“Hello?”
The house remained silent. Perfectly silent, now that he was listening to it. Not a sound reached his ears but the thumping of his own heart.
A shiver raced through him.
Had he only imagined the figure in the doorway? He hadn’t seen it very clearly. There were no lights. The bathroom was dark. And it was only there for a split second.
Standing there, wondering if it was even possible to imagine something so startlingly realistic, he remembered what Grant told him about using the memories from his dream as a guide. If he couldn’t remember it, it wasn’t somewhere he visited in the dream. If he didn’t go there in his dream, then it was presumably not somewhere he would have gone on the first day. In other words, it was not somewhere he should be.
Having somehow managed to escape the foggy man’s second trap, he had assumed it was safe to linger. But he’d already determined that he never entered this house in his dream. Therefore, he was off the map.
Here there be monsters, he thought, and another violent shiver raced through him.
He was still holding the last strip from the torn towel in his hand. He glanced down at it, considering what to do with it, and decided to stuff it into his back pocket. It was no substitution for a fully stocked first-aid kit, but it was better than nothing.
Now he returned to the foyer and quickly made his way past the staircase to the front door, only to find it locked tight.
Heart sinking, he turned and pressed his back to the door, his eyes wide open.
The house was no longer silent. A low, rumbling groan now swelled through the room, as if rising from the very floor beneath his feet.
Monsters, he thought. Here there be monsters…
Chapter Twelve
This sucked.
It wasn’t even fair. He survived the foggy man’s trap. He beat the monster. All he’d wanted was to patch up his wounds and move on.
The whole room reverberated with that strange groaning. It seemed to pass right through him, shaking him all the way to his core. Suddenly, he was convinced that something very bad was going to happen if he remained here.
Where the hell was he? What was this place?
The door at his back was sealed shut. He was unable to escape that way. With no other choice left to him, he bolted back across the foyer from where he’d come, down the hallway and through the dining room into the kitchen.
Behind him, the groan swelled into an angry roar.
Spotting another door in the kitchen, Eric ran for it, jerked at the handle, but like the doors in the foyer, it wouldn’t open.
He turned and scanned the kitchen. Like the rest of the house, it was bare. There wasn’t even a carving knife he could pretend was an adequate weapon.
Now he realized that the groaning noise had changed. It no longer seemed to be rising from the floor. Now it seemed to be specifically coming from the foyer, as if the source of the noise was collecting itself into a singular location. In his mind, he could almost see something forming there, a vague shape slowly drawing itself together, materializing from thin air.
But this was merely his imagination. He’d always had a good imagination. Until now, he’d always considered it an asset. Now, he could do without the horror movie that was stubbornly playing in his mind, adding to his overwhelming fear.
He didn’t need his imagination to realize that it was getting closer. He could hear it moving toward him. He could almost feel it.
Another hallway led away from the kitchen, toward the back of the house. He took it.
Behind him, the groaning tightened into something like a voice. It became a moaning, and then a wailing. The sound chilled his blood.
Another set of stairs waited at the end of the hallway. Remembering the window by which he’d entered the house, he climbed three flights of steps two at a time, hoping he’d find himself back in the same part of the house.
By the time he remembered that there was no way down from the roof (the whole purpose of actually entering the house in the first place), he’d already found himself in another hallway, making his way past numerous spacious bedrooms.
He paused at an intersection between two corridors and considered his choices.
Something about the layout of the house confounded him. It was less like a house than a hotel, but not nearly as convenient.
Behind him, the wailing began to fade into something more like a murmur. Somehow this struck him as even more unsettling.
He turned left and ran to the end of the hallway. There he found yet another staircase, which he took down one flight to a large, spacious room that might have been either a banquet room or a ballroom.
This didn’t feel right. He had the strangest sensation that he wasn’t traveling through this house in any logical way. As odd as it sounded, it seemed like he was jumping from one side of the house to the other.
He stood in the middle of this room and turned slowly in a circle, listening.
Suddenly he wasn’t sure where the murmuring was coming
from. It seemed to be moving, originating from one door, then another on the other side of the room, then back again, then to the far corner.
What the hell was going on?
He considered breaking a window and fleeing the house the way he entered, but there was nothing to break the glass with. There was nothing in the house that wasn’t built in. And the windows in this room were too high to kick out with his foot.
He chose a door at random and fled, hoping desperately that he didn’t run headlong into something horrible. He found himself in yet another hallway.
Now the murmuring was behind him. And it was transforming again, growing, swelling into something even more disturbing, something he could almost comprehend.
Somehow, he was sure that he never wanted to know what this horrible voice was saying.
Desperate, terrified out of his mind, he ran to the end of the hall, descended another set of steps as quickly as he could, and rushed down yet another hallway.
He stopped. The murmuring was now a muttering. And it was coming from in front of him.
Again, he had that weird sensation of traveling through the house in weird ways. Though he’d just descended a flight of stairs, he had the strangest feeling that he had actually ended up on a higher floor.
Another hallway intersected this one at its midpoint. He hurried there and listened, but the muttering seemed to come from every direction at once.
All these choices seemed wrong.
He turned back the way he’d come and was surprised to see a young girl standing in the middle of the hallway, staring back at him.
She was perhaps thirteen, older than the little girls in The Shining, but still he managed to appreciate the similarities. She was dressed for summer in a pair of yellow shorts and a pink halter top, with long, brown hair and a pretty face. She was barefoot.
Seconds passed between them as the muttering rose, words that he desperately did not want to hear beginning to take form. His heart was racing. He couldn’t move. He didn’t know what to do.
Then the girl held a hand out to him. “Hurry,” she said. “Come with me.”
Going with the creepy little girl in the haunted house seemed like a very bad idea. But the alternative was definitely a very bad idea, so he took a leap of faith and ran to the girl.
She took his hand and led him into one of the rooms.
It appeared to be a bedroom, though there were still no furnishings. A single door stood on one wall, leading into a bathroom. She led him through this bathroom, through another door and into another bedroom, revealing both rooms to be part of one suite. Then she led him through the door of this second bedroom and out into the hall, right back where they started. Except that it was not exactly where they started. This wasn’t the same hallway.
Before he could grasp what just happened, she led him into another room, through what looked like it should be a closet but turned out to be a staircase, and then emerged into a living room of some sort, past what he was pretty sure was not the same kitchen he’d visited before, to another hallway that led them to yet another bedroom.
Every time they passed through a room, the mutterings grew fainter, until they were little more than a distant humming.
One last door carried them from a bedroom into some kind of electrical room with several massive fuse boxes mounted to concrete walls. There, the girl let go of his hand and sat down on the floor with her back against the wall and her knees drawn up in front of her.
This room was utterly silent.
“We’ll be safe here for a little while.”
“Okay,” said Eric, looking around. The walls and floor were concrete. Water lines passed from left to right overhead and thick bundles of cables ran across the ceiling and walls in every direction.
“What’s your name?”
“What? Oh. Eric.”
“Eric,” she repeated. “I like that name. I’m Isabelle.”
“That’s a pretty name,” Eric replied.
“Thanks.” She smiled sweetly and stared up at him without saying another word.
Eric stared back at her for a moment. He had no idea what he should say, where to even begin. This was already, without a doubt, the strangest day of his life. It had decisively won that title pretty well as soon as he’d finished that first enigmatic conversation with Annette, but he was repeatedly finding himself facing ever-weirder oddities as the day went on. And this mind-boggling house-hotel hybrid seemed to possess a weirdness of such profoundness that it classified as an oddity among the other things he’d seen.
“So…” he began at last, “you want to tell me what all that…stuff back there…”
“What the hell’s going on?”
“Yeah. That covers it, I think.”
Isabelle smiled. “I can’t really explain all of it. I don’t actually get most of it, honestly. Like, I don’t know why this particular room is safe. There’s no electricity, so it’s not that. But I think maybe it’s all the metal and wiring. Whatever it is, he doesn’t like to come down here.”
“Who’s ‘he?’”
“Altrusk.”
“Altrusk?”
“Used to be Isaac Altrusk. Though, I’m pretty sure that was a fake name. He was a petty con artist turned cult-leader turned creepy recluse turned…well…whatever he is now.”
Eric was surprised by the maturity of the girl’s vocabulary. Most of his high school students wouldn’t be able to come up with such a description.
“He started Gold Sunshine Resort.”
“The nudists?”
“Yeah. It was all a load of crap, though. He was a perv. It was just an excuse for him to look at little girls naked.”
“Yuck.”
“I know. But it was actually pretty smart, too, because most people didn’t care to look too hard at what went on in a nudist resort. And what he was really interested in was the fissure.”
“The fissure?” He almost asked her how she knew about the fissure, but common sense kicked in at the last moment. She was obviously pretty familiar with it, since she was currently in it.
“Yeah. I don’t know how he found it, but he did. And he built the resort on top of it to hide it while he built this place on the other side. I think he envisioned it as some kind of palace.”
“Where did he get the money for something like this?”
“Conned people out of it, mostly. But he didn’t build the whole thing. He only started it. Then, at some point, it just kind of…finished itself.”
“Wait…how does that work?”
“Like I said, I can’t explain all of it. The place has a mind of its own. You saw how it is. It takes you places you aren’t going. Doors that should go one place spit you out somewhere else. It’ll make you crazy if you’re not careful.”
“Did it make Altrusk crazy?”
“Oh yeah. Totally bugshit.”
Eric chuckled.
“The house is built right into the fissure somehow. It takes on some of its properties. That’s why it warps space and stuff. But it’s a lot more than that. Something about the world on the other side of the fissure… It’s a bad place. It distorts things. And it distorted the hell out of Altrusk. Like, at some point, he just decided he wasn’t going to furnish the house. He lived here for years without any furniture. He slept on the floor. He ate at the kitchen counters.”
“At least he kept towels in his bathroom,” Eric recalled.
“Some of the bathrooms.”
“What happened to him?”
“Eventually, the house just swallowed him. He stopped being Isaac Altrusk—or whoever he really was—at all. Now he’s just Altrusk.”
“And that was him making all that noise out there?”
“Uh huh.”
“And what would happen to me if he caught me?”
There was no humor in her expression when she replied, “You’d be swallowed too.”
“Good to know. Let’s put that on the list of things we don’t want to happen.
So is there a way out?”
Isabelle smiled up at him. “I think I can open the door for you. But it’ll be dangerous. Altrusk won’t want you to leave. And he knows you’re here, so he’ll be looking for you.”
“I see.”
“You might as well sit down. He’s going to need a little while to calm down. He’s got the house all coiled up right now. If we’re going to get to the door, we’ll need it to not be so jumpy.”
Add that to his growing list of things he never thought anyone would ever say to him.
He did as she said and sat down on the floor, his back against the wall, facing her.
Isabelle smiled at him.
Eric removed the cell phone from his pocket and saw without any surprise whatsoever that he still had no signal. Even if he wasn’t way off the path and deep inside a freaky alternate reality house with an attitude, he was sure he wouldn’t have a decent signal inside these concrete walls.
He glanced up at his young companion, suddenly concerned. “You said Altrusk was a pedophile?”
“He was a little too into little girls, yeah.”
“He didn’t… I mean you weren’t one of his...?”
“Oh. No. So yuck. He never touched me. Not sure if he ever actually touched any of them really, he was never that brave. He just...leered, mostly.” She shuddered at the memory. “And then after he changed…well, I don’t think he cared much about sex at all after that.”
“That’s good. But how did you get here, then?”
“My parents were members of his club. We vacationed at Gold Sunshine. A lot.”
“So you were one of the…?”
“Nudies. Yeah.”
“Oh. Sorry. I just didn’t know.”
“Yeah. It’s weird. When we wear clothes, nobody can tell the difference.”
Eric laughed, but he couldn’t help feeling embarrassed. “I guess so. I just never knew a naturist before.”
“We did own clothes. It was kind of an optional thing.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to offend.”
“You didn’t. I totally understand. I mean it was my parents’ choice, not mine. I didn’t even know it wasn’t something everybody did until I was about seven or eight.”
