Hollow House

by Greg Chapman

  “We used to get a lot of visitors coming to look at the house,” Belle added quickly.

  “Really? I didn’t think anyone lived here.”

  Henry put his hand on Ben’s shoulder. “Would you like a tour?”

  ~

  The deeper Ben was taken into the house, the stranger Henry and Belle became.

  The way they walked the hallways, showing him the bedrooms with their matching vintage floral print bedspreads, and speaking in low, droll tones, put Ben on edge. Still, he observed and took mental notes, occasionally chiming in with questions about the house’s origins. Another aspect he found odd, was that Cindy and the boy were nowhere to be found. Ben assumed they’d locked themselves away in another bedroom somewhere.

  “Do you actually know how old this house is?” Ben asked.

  Henry and Belle turned to look at him, their faces expressionless.

  Ben smirked and shrugged. “I know you said it was ancient Henry, but looking at it, it must have been built in the early 1900s or something.”

  “1886,” Belle said.

  “Who was the builder?”

  Henry’s lips looked parched. “The Kemper House was built by Eric Kemper.”

  “He was an immigrant from Prague, right?”

  Henry blinked. “The house was built by Eric Kemper in 1886. He was an extremely intelligent man with an eye for detail.”

  “Was this the only house he built?”

  “Mr. Kemper designed and built many others in the city,” Belle said. “The old hospital for instance.”

  Ben scanned the wallpaper and high ceilings. The sunlight barely managed to find its way into the house. “He certainly preferred the dark, didn’t he?”

  Henry and Belle frowned. It was the first genuine reaction from either of them. Strange that they should react to a remark about someone who’d been dead for more than one hundred and fifty years.

  “How long have you two lived here?”

  “Oh, a long time,” Belle said, and this time she was smiling, but there was no sheen to her teeth.

  “I thought this house was unoccupied since the last owners left? The um… the Mortons, they claimed the house was haunted—”

  A twinge of recognition hit Ben in the gut as he regarded the couple. Cold sweat prickled at the back of his neck. He swallowed hard, trying not to let his guard down. “Look, I really appreciate the tour, but I’m going to have to get back on down the road.” He rifled in his bag and retrieved the day’s Gazette. He handed it to Henry. “Here’s a complimentary edition of the paper. You’ll find a number in there for the subscription office, if you’re interested.”

  Henry Morton took the paper, but stood there holding it like he didn’t understand its purpose. Belle—Annabelle Morton—put a hand on her husband’s shoulder. “Oh, please stay. We’d love for you to see the attic.”

  Ben backed away, while attempting to calculate how many steps it was to the staircase. His heart had already started running, and he desperately wanted his feet to get the message. The Mortons appeared perplexed, then frustrated, their faces suddenly animated by the prospect of his leaving. He turned to run, and found Mitchell Cross’s dead wife Cindy—and her son Nathan—blocking the stairs.

  “Where are you going?” Nathan said.

  “He’s leaving. What do you think he’s doing, you stupid boy?” Cindy said through gritted teeth.

  Ben held his hands up. “Okay, look, I don’t know what the hell is going on here, but I need to go right now.”

  Cindy’s lips trembled with sadness and rage. “You see, Nathan? He’s leaving—just like your good for nothing father.”

  Ben looked down at the boy whose cheeks ran with tears.

  “Where are you going?” the boy said.

  “You have to let me go…” Ben’s heart pounded a drum beat that urged him to flee, to shove the dead boy and his mother aside and run. But how could he push them aside when they shouldn’t even be standing before him? They were not real. They couldn’t be. He must still be in his car outside, staring at the house. Why would he be stupid enough to go inside? The words of Mitchell Cross, Cindy’s tormented husband suddenly rang true.

  The house will kill you.

  Ben made to run, but a hand gripped his arm. He whirled to see Henry’s face, contorted in a silent scream, his mouth so wide that Ben could see darkness at the bottom of his throat. Annabelle stood behind her husband smiling, but her teeth were rotten with decay.

  “Come up to the attic,” she said. “Come and read his message.”

  Henry Morton’s grip made Ben cry out. He thrashed and railed, but it only brought more pain. His knees gave out from under him. Henry began to drag him back up the hallway. Annabelle clapped her hands like a child about to receive a birthday present. The Cross family, Cindy and Nathan, simply followed them; mournful worshippers on a pilgrimage of retribution.

  “You have to let me go!” Ben said as he was pulled along the carpet. “People will look for me! My wife! You have to let me leave!”

  Henry trudged on, dragging Ben to the end of the hall. “We could never leave; neither can you.”

  Belle bent down to look directly into Ben’s terrified face. “We tried to leave, but there’s no escaping his house.”

  Henry hefted Ben to his feet. The ungainly man’s strength was impossible. “There’s no escaping the void once the door is open.”

  Ben squirmed, but Henry’s grip was as strong as steel. “No, please! Stop!” He looked around the room for a weapon, anything. He reached out and grabbed the doorframe, desperate to prevent Henry from moving him any farther. From the corner of his eye he saw Cindy, holding the edge of a kitchen knife to Nathan’s throat. The boy sobbed uncontrollably.

  Belle reached up to open a hatch in the ceiling. An ornate wooden staircase slid down on a rail to the floor. Ben was dragged up into the attic. He kicked his legs, screaming for someone—anyone—to help him.

  “No one is coming,” Cindy said from the bottom of the stairs. “Nobody helps those in need.”

  Nathan swallowed. His tiny Adam’s apple pushed against the knife. “There’s no sanctuary except the temple.”

  In the cool of the attic, Ben felt the heat of tears on his face. The room was octagonal and wide. Bare wooden walls were covered in scrawl, painted crudely with fingers dipped in blood. Despite his terror, he made sense of them. He’d seen them before on the walls of the other Kemper House on Willow Street.

  Oh, God, the madness is here, too.

  Henry dropped Ben hard on the floor and straddled his chest. His wife began lighting the sconces on the walls. The candles came alive at her touch. She started to sing, a lullaby, or hymn, Ben didn’t know, but it seemed to drop the temperature in the room by another five degrees.

  He slipped his hands free of Henry’s grip and swung a punch, hard into his face. It didn’t faze the man in the slightest. “Jesus Christ! Help me!”

  “There are no gods, but those that reside in the void,” Belle said, chastising him.

  “And you must not utter the name of a false god in the temple,” added Cindy who had ascended the stairs with her little boy, her knife still hovering at his tender neck.

  Ben winced as Henry tied a leather strap around his wrists. He stared at all four of them, begging himself to wake up from the nightmare, begging for one last chance to be with his wife. “You’re all dead. None of you should be here.”

  “You’re right,” Henry said. “We are trapped unless we make an offering, as Eric Kemper did, in order to ascend.”

  Cindy withdrew the knife from her son’s throat and handed it to Belle, who passed it to her husband.

  “No!” Ben cried.

  The air went still, while above them, at the point where the spire met the apex of the attic roof, a chasm opened. The entire attic became translucent, like water, and beyond lay a night sky comprised of a billion stars. The view rushed forward, traversing millions of light years in an instant, and focused on the darkness
between the constellations.

  “The endless black,” Henry said, as he raised the knife. “Listen to their voices!”

  Ben’s ears rang. They filled with a burst of white noise. The noise became voices; songs and shouts and utterances, one on top of the other. A babble of indecipherable words from the end of time. It was so loud that Ben wished Henry would plunge the knife into his chest just to end it.

  Amidst the cacophony he heard Megan’s voice; words of devotion she’d uttered to him on a lone stretch of beach fifteen years before—and the connection was broken.

  Ben snapped out of his reverie and grabbed Henry’s hands. He shifted his weight and toppled the old man over, but still he refused to release the knife. Ben felt Belle on his back. She clawed at his head and pulled his hair. The reporter lashed out and pushed her away. She slammed against the wall. One of the candles fell and landed in her hair, igniting it with a spark of flame. With an audible whoosh, coils of fire engulfed her body.

  “Annabelle!” Henry shoved Ben aside as if he were a doll.

  Ben watched as the man went to his wife’s aid, only to be swallowed by the same column of flame. Cindy and her son cowered together, screaming as their flaming companions thrashed about the room. The great tongue of fire swept up everything in its path, the dry wood of the attic was the perfect fuel. Ben got to his feet and ran for the stairs. He threw himself down the steps, with the heat of the fire on his back.

  Chapter Fifteen

  When Detective Baltzer arrived on the scene at 1201 Mayne Avenue, the dwelling was completely ablaze. Firemen ran in all directions, securing hoses and dousing the house with water, but the veteran detective could see the building was already destroyed. From the other side of the street, where neighbours looked on, he could feel the heat. A great cloud of grey smoke spewed into the air, so thick it made him want to spit.

  Nearby, he saw the reporter, Traynor, sitting in the back of an ambulance, gasping for breath. He looked at the fire and the soot on Ben Traynor’s face. “You were in that house, weren’t you?”

  Baltzer’s remark widened Ben’s eyes, and the mask over his face filled over and over with condensation.

  “We have to take him to hospital,” one of the paramedics said.

  “Give us a minute.” Baltzer crouched down to get in Ben’s face. “What the fuck were you doing in that house?”

  The sheer panic on the reporter’s face said it all, but Baltzer saw something else beneath the veneer of sweat and smoke, something in his eyes.

  “It was… Mitchell Cross’… house.” Ben wheezed.

  Baltzer frowned and looked at the house, just as a large section of the roof caved in. Thousands of embers filled the air, sending the firefighters into a frenzy. The detective remembered Ben mentioning the name Cross, back at the station. “Is this about the Willow Street case?”

  Traynor nodded, his breathing becoming shallow.

  “Didn’t I tell you to leave it alone?” Baltzer said. “What the fuck happened? Did you torch the place to get another fucking front page?” He watched Traynor shake his head.

  “They…. were… still in… the house.”

  Baltzer gritted his teeth and reached out to shake Ben’s singed coat. “Who, goddamn it?”

  “Cross’ wife… and… son.”

  The reporter fell backwards.

  The paramedics grabbed him by the arms and laid him down on a stretcher. One of them pushed Baltzer aside to close the doors of the ambulance. “We need to get him to the hospital, now.”

  “You should be taking him to the fucking psych ward.”

  The paramedic slammed the doors, and the ambulance pulled away in a hail of sirens and lights. Baltzer’s thoughts were as thick as the smoke surrounding Mayne Avenue. He didn’t know if Traynor had committed arson, but something had scared the life out of him, and after seeing the sights of the other Kemper House in Willow Street, the detective wondered if it was time to start believing in the impossible.

  ~

  The Cowley girl’s face seemed to be etched permanently on Megan Traynor’s vision.

  In the quiet loneliness of her house, the events of the girl’s death played over and over in Megan’s mind, pushing the torturous thoughts of her husband’s neglect aside. Her living room was beginning to look like the Cowley’s, and when she stared at the carpet, it was if she saw Amy lying there, motionless, her eyes cold. Why a girl of fourteen would choose to take her own life, Megan had no clue.

  She was just a child, innocent and naïve. To do such a thing to her mother, to put her through such hell. How could she?

  Megan bit her bottom lip. She was being insensitive. Who was she to judge when she didn’t know what it was like to have a child of her own? Sadness swelled inside, and she was drawn back to how empty she felt, in love, in life. She shook her head in a bid to shake off these thoughts, but she knew it wouldn’t be enough.

  She broke into a flurry of exertion, vacuuming the living room, as if she could remove the girl’s ghost from the floor, then pulling out the treadmill. Cold sweat oozed from her skin, as she ran mile after mile, attempting to cleanse her thoughts. She watched the electronic counter tick over, anything to avoid the sadness she felt for the Cowley family, the murdered man in the house across the street, the resentment towards Ben. Tears flooded into the sweat on her cheeks and she squeezed her eyes shut, only opening them when it began to hurt too much.

  She glanced out the window into the back yard, and saw another face staring back at her.

  It was a man, who immediately ducked out of view as soon as she’d seen him. Megan turned off the treadmill and stopped running. Now, fear fuelled the beating of her heart. It was definitely a man she’d seen, bald with old fashioned glasses.

  Gingerly, Megan stepped to the window, and seeing no one she ran to the back door and then the front, locking them both, the image of the dead Cowley girl now superseded by a peeping tom, a new torment for her to bear.

  The fact she was alone gripped her like the cold. Instinct told her to call Ben, to get him to come and make her feel safe, but she didn’t want that anymore. Instead she found her cell phone on the kitchen bench and began to call 9-1-1.

  The phone rang in her hand before she could make the call. She let out a scream.

  “H-hello?”

  “Is this Mrs. Traynor?”

  “Yes, who is this?”

  “This is Sergeant McKinney at West Plains 2nd Precinct. I’m calling about your husband.”

  Megan’s mouth turned dry. “Is he okay?”

  “He’s at the hospital Mrs. Traynor. There was a fire and he suffered smoke inhalation.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “We just wanted to inform you ma’am. You should probably head over there.”

  Megan ended the call and ran for the door.

  ~

  Ben floated in the void, between the world of the living and the dead. All he could see was darkness, while the inside of his skull rang with a chorus of screams.

  Although blind, he sensed that he was moving forward, a satellite of flesh soaring toward doom. As he ascended, the screams increased in intensity, pressing through the skin of his head, reverberating through the bone. His brain frantically sought to block out the cries, but it couldn’t shake the need to understand. The screams weren’t screams at all, but rather a single chain of words chanted over and over.

  When he thought the darkness would finally claim his sanity, Ben saw a spark of light and willed himself toward it. The light swelled as Ben travelled millions of miles with each beat of his heart, and he hoped it was the proverbial tunnel, described by so many who’d crossed over and returned. If he was going to die, he wanted to die in the light.

  The light was not from a star, but a shifting mass. Ben cried out at the sight of it, a behemoth made from billions and billions of writhing shapes. He wanted to turn his head or cover his eyes, but he was frozen in the void and the gigantic shape drew him in like a magnet.

 
The mass of contorted light was a construction of human souls, trapped and twisted to become the torso and limbs of a colossal creature. Ben’s soul raced towards it, faster and faster. The thing opened its mouth to accept him, while human souls toppled from its jaws, falling through space only to be caught in its impossible hands and re-devoured.

  It reached out to pluck Ben from nowhere. He looked down at its man-made flesh and felt thousands of hands pulling on him, begging him to become one with them. And when he looked up at the creature’s ever-shifting face, its eyes were windows and its mouth was a door—the door to the Kemper House.

  ~

  Ben awoke to the taste of smoke on his tongue and terror in his heart. He sat up in bed and tried to disconnect himself from the nightmare. His surroundings were alien, the wide room with multiple beds not making any sense, even his breathing was unnatural. Feeling suffocated, he reached up and pulled the oxygen mask from his face. He felt cold fingertips on his arm and cried out.

  “Ben, Ben, it’s okay.” His wife squeezed his arm. “You’re in the hospital.”

  “Megan?”

  His view of the other hospital beds sharpened. The ping of a heart rate monitor made him jump.

  “Calm down,” Megan said. “You’re making yourself anxious.”

  The events at Mayne Avenue rushed into his head: the ghosts of the Mortons and the Crosses trying to murder him. He wanted to tell his wife what happened, hell, he wanted to tell everyone, but he doubted anyone would think him sane once he did. Ben took a long breath and concentrated on his wife’s face. She appeared genuinely worried. “I… I’m glad you’re here,” he said.

  Megan took a half-step back from the bed. “I didn’t know what to think when the police called,” she said, sitting down in a nearby chair. “What were you doing at that house?”

  Ben laid his head back on the pillows. “It wasn’t just any house. It was the same house as the one we live across the road from.”

  Megan raised an eyebrow. “What are you talking about?”

  “The house across the street where that man was murdered. There’s another one, identical, in Mayne Avenue, built by the same architect.”