Sick House

by Jeff Strand

  Then it jabbed the bone into Boyd's shoulder, all the way to the second knuckle. Boyd screamed and twisted away.

  "Hurts, huh? Hurts me, too. Worth it, though."

  "What the fuck do you want?" Boyd asked.

  "Do you kiss your daughters with that mouth?"

  "I asked you a question!"

  The ghost smiled. The index finger bone curled back into its fist. "Trying to be a tough guy? I respect that. Respect the hell out of that. If I were as deeply screwed as you, I'd probably be sobbing and begging for my life."

  Boyd didn't want to admit to himself how close he was to reaching that point. He didn't see a way out of this.

  "You still haven't answered," he said, trying to sound a million times braver than he actually felt.

  The ghost held up its other fist. An index finger broke through, and it jabbed it deep into Boyd's other shoulder, giving him identical flowing wounds.

  "We're taking your energy," said the ghost. "Guess how we do that?"

  "I don't know."

  "Guess."

  "Killing us?"

  "Yes indeed. Slowly and horribly. We sucked away energy to cross over, and now we're going to drain your energy to stay over. You picked the wrong house."

  "What does it mean to take our energy? Why did Paige cut herself?"

  "I'm not here to answer your questions. I'm happy for you to die confused."

  A bone broke through its arm.

  "How many holes do you think I can poke in you before you die? Twenty? Fifty? A hundred? I hope it's a hundred."

  "Just kill me," said Boyd. "Leave my family alone."

  "Ooooh, we would if we could. Do you think we want to murder innocent little girls? I also hate the idea of killing that hot piece of ass who's out of your league. What a waste. But you've gotta do what you've gotta do. If we had another option, we'd take it. Unfortunately for you and your precious family, we don't."

  Boyd wondered how long it would take him to bleed out. He had deep puncture wounds in one arm, one leg, and each shoulder, plus slashes all over both legs and his stomach, and what felt like a nasty gash on his chin. He might be okay. He'd watched action movie heroes walk away from worse.

  Of course, he wasn't an action hero, and he wasn't in a movie, and he was just trying to distract himself from the knowledge that he might very well be dying, and that Adeline, Paige, and Naomi might not survive to nightfall. They could be dead already. Adeline could be watching their children die while Boyd lay on the stairs, bleeding.

  He felt like he could summon a burst of strength, but what good would that do? Get him to the top of the stairs in time to be dragged back down again?

  How could he get the upper hand against a ghost he couldn't touch? What could he do? Appeal to its sense of decency?

  "You should probably try to think of a happy memory, since you aren't going to make any more of them," said the ghost. "It's nothing but suffering for you until everything goes black."

  Boyd wanted to punch the ghost, even though it would have no impact, just to prove that his spirit wasn't broken. But he also wanted to be smart, so he didn't.

  He wiped his chin off on his sleeve. There was even more blood than he'd expected. "At least tell me your name. I like to know who's killing me."

  "Maddox."

  "Decent name."

  "Let's get back to the holes. I'm going to fill you with holes, Boyd. Lots of tiny little holes until you wouldn't recognize yourself in a mirror. If I had a needle, I bet I could keep you alive for days. Fortunately for you, I have to be a little sloppier."

  The ghost held up its fist again. This time all five of the finger bones burst out of the skin.

  "Where should we start?"

  * * *

  "Go to Paige!" Adeline shouted. "Hurry! As fast as you can!"

  Naomi picked up her pace as the wooden floor of the attic continued to fill with splotches of black and dark green. The rotting smell was sickening.

  A can of paint broke through the wood and plummeted below, landing with a crash.

  Adeline wanted to crawl over to Paige as well, but the wood was decomposing so quickly that she didn't think she'd make it in time. Better to fall here, where she might be able to grab the ladder on the way down, than to drop to the center of the living room.

  Paige extended her hand toward Naomi, who was still about ten feet away. "Hurry, Naomi, please!"

  Naomi's hand broke through the beam and she froze.

  Adeline looked up. If the roof were rotting, it could give them some sort of escape route, but no, of course the roof was fine and they were still trapped.

  Paige started to crawl toward her sister. Her hand sunk into the beam as if it were thick oatmeal.

  "Naomi, stand up!" said Adeline. "Grab the roof beams!"

  Though Naomi could be forgiven if she'd stayed in place, frozen with terror, she immediately stood up and grabbed one of the wooden beams attached to the attic roof. Naomi was good on the jungle gym. Maybe she could hang on long enough for them to move the couch underneath her.

  The wood beneath Adeline began to transform.

  Naomi, demonstrating an eight-year-old girl's gift for gymnastics, pulled herself all the way up onto the beam and draped her legs over it. As long as that wood didn't rot away, she wasn't going to fall.

  The floor beneath Paige collapsed. She disappeared with a shriek.

  There was no thump or crunch or any sound to indicate that Paige had missed the couch. She was okay. She had to be.

  The attic floor was almost completely rotten now, a pool of black and green and mildew-gray. "We'll get you down," Adeline promised Naomi.

  Instead of waiting to break through, Adeline decided that she should just open the trap door and climb down. She tugged on the metal handle and it popped right off. She could, in theory, lift it by the sides, but touching the liquefying wood didn't seem like a good idea.

  She was sinking through. She positioned herself directly over the ladder and waited.

  The entire ceiling collapsed.

  It all came down in a thick shower of rotted wood, plaster, insulation, and electrical wiring. Adeline hit the ladder, bashing her knees hard but keeping her from falling all the way to the floor. She grabbed the top rung as debris rained upon her.

  Then she realized that she was inside of the choking ghost. She felt faint and slipped off the ladder, landing in a pile of rubble.

  * * *

  Boyd and the bruised ghost both looked up at the enormous crash.

  What the hell was that?

  The distraction didn't last long. The ghost jabbed another broken bone into his back.

  * * *

  "Mom!" shouted Paige.

  Adeline lifted her head. Paige had indeed landed on the couch, thank God.

  The choking ghost was climbing down the ladder toward Adeline.

  The dismembered ghost was walking toward Paige. But maneuvering around the rubble was apparently as difficult for a ghost as it would be for a human.

  Adeline checked to see that Naomi was still safely perched up in the attic. Unfortunately, moving her head was all she could manage. The rest of her body remained devoid of strength.

  Paige got up off the couch. She'd dropped the washcloth, revealing caked blood over her eye. She scrambled over the wreckage of the ceiling toward Adeline. The dismembered ghost reached for her.

  The choking ghost skipped the last couple of rungs and jumped down, its feet landing on each side of Adeline's prone body. This would be the perfect opportunity for her to punch the ghost in the balls, if her hand wouldn't pass harmlessly through them.

  The dismembered ghost's arm stretched out and it grabbed Paige by the hair. She frantically tried to pull away but its grip was too tight. It began to drag her toward it.

  The choking ghost crouched down over Adeline, grabbed her by the hair as well, and slammed her head into the floor.

  "Mommy!" Naomi screamed.

  The doorbell rang.

  CHA
PTER TWENTY

  "What took you so long?" Donna asked the police officer as he got out of his car. "They've been screamin' in there like crazy."

  "I was dispatched as soon as your call was received," said the officer.

  "Well, there was just a crash like the whole damn house caved in. I don't know if he's beatin' on her or if it's a meth lab or what they've got goin' on, but these new neighbors are out of control."

  "Thank you for alerting us. You can return to your home now."

  "No way. I want to see what's going on."

  The police officer walked up to the front door, then turned back to look at Donna. "How old is this house?"

  "The door wasn't like that before. I'm tellin' you, these new folks are maniacs. They haven't even been here a week and the place looks like it's been abandoned for years. And it reeks. You smell that?"

  "I certainly do."

  "You're gonna kick 'em out, right?"

  "I'm going to find out why they were screaming and deal with it appropriately."

  The police officer rang the doorbell.

  * * *

  Adeline had no idea who was at the door, but she suddenly realized that they were in danger even if they didn't come inside.

  "Don't touch the door!" she shouted. The ghost bashed her head into the floor again. "Paige, tell them not to touch the door!"

  * * *

  Officer Peter Farlind stepped away from the door as a woman, and then a girl shouted for him not to touch it. If they hadn't sounded so frantic, he might have thought they were warning him not to touch wet paint. But something was obviously deeply wrong at this house.

  "This is the police," he announced. "We received a call about a disturbance."

  "Yes!" the girl inside said. "There's a disturbance! But don't touch the door!"

  Somebody else said something that Peter couldn't quite make out.

  "That's right, there's contamination!" said the girl. "Don't touch the door!"

  Contamination? There was no green glow, but the house sure looked like something that had been too close to a nuclear power plant.

  He pulled his walkie-talkie off his belt and called for backup. Even if this whole thing was a weird prank, he wanted somebody else to see it.

  "You need to get us out of here!" the girl shouted. "Please help us!"

  Peter glanced back at the middle-aged woman who'd called the cops. "Ma'am, I'm going to need you to clear the area. I don't think it's safe here."

  The woman took several steps back but didn't leave.

  The window next to the front door was completely fogged up. Well, no, not fogged; it was filled with so many tiny bubbles that he couldn't see through it. Strange.

  Under normal circumstances, "contamination" would have meant "leave it alone and contact the experts." But if people, including a child, were in imminent danger, he had to try and get them out before it was too late.

  He quickly took off his shirt while the woman stared at him. He wrapped it over his nose and mouth, figuring it was better than nothing if a cloud of gas bellowed out of the window, and then kicked the glass.

  His foot bounced back and he almost toppled over.

  He kicked again. Nothing. It was less like glass than really thick rubber.

  Peter took his gun out of its holster. "Ma'am, I'm not going to tell you again to leave. If this bullet ricochets, you don't want to be here."

  "Please help us!" the girl inside screamed.

  The woman turned and ran.

  "Make sure nobody is near the window," said Peter. "I'm going to shoot through the glass. Do you understand?"

  "Yes, yes! Shoot the glass!"

  Peter waited for the woman to get out of possible harm's way. He stepped to the side so that a ricochet wouldn't fly back at him, aimed his gun, and squeezed the trigger.

  The bullet left a small round hole.

  Then the glass oozed over the hole, sealing it off.

  In his seventeen years as a cop, Peter had never encountered anything like this. He should wait for backup.

  "Please!" the girl screamed.

  Or he should take more drastic measures.

  "Stay clear of this wall," he said. "Do you hear me? Make sure you're nowhere near this wall!"

  "Okay!" said the girl.

  Again, under normal circumstances, Peter would never consider driving his car through the wall of a house. And if the people inside were messing with him, he'd be the laughingstock of the entire department. But they certainly didn't sound like they were kidding around, and you had to really be invested in a practical joke to let it continue past the point where a police officer told you to stay away from your wall.

  He got into his car, started the engine, backed up a few feet, then turned the vehicle so that it was facing the front of the house. He buckled his seatbelt, took a deep breath, and floored the gas pedal.

  A second before impact, he wondered if he was behaving in too impulsive a manner.

  The police car broke through the front of the house. Peter slammed on the brakes as half of the vehicle passed through the wall. That worked better than he'd expected. Now he just needed to put the car in reverse and...

  Jesus Christ. What had happened in here?

  The entire ceiling had collapsed. A little girl, seven or eight years old, was hanging up in the rafters. A teenaged girl was pressed against the far wall. A woman was on the floor.

  Also there were...no, Peter was hallucinating. You didn't perceive the world correctly in the seconds immediately after driving your car through the front of somebody's home.

  A few drops of liquid landed on the top of his head.

  He looked up. The top of his car was leaking. There was no actual crack in the roof of the vehicle, but thick black liquid was dripping from it. Oil? Could he just not see how it was getting in?

  The leak abruptly switched from a drip to a waterfall.

  Peter was completely drenched. For a moment, he was too shocked to realize that it was beginning to burn.

  The smell was noxious beyond belief, like an outhouse that had been storing food waste in triple-degree heat.

  He reached for the gearshift, then screamed at the sight of muscles and tendons. He only saw them for a moment; then it was just bone.

  The teenaged girl gaped at him in horror.

  Peter's skeletal fingers fell off as he tried and failed to put the car into reverse. His right leg separated from the rest of his body and slid off the seat onto the floor of the car. His left leg followed. His torso flopped over.

  He continued to scream until his tongue dropped out of his mouth.

  * * *

  "We got him killed!" Paige wailed. "We got him killed!"

  The black waterfall had frozen, completely blocking off their view of the outside. The police car was still halfway inside the house. Nothing remained of the officer, at least nothing that they could see through the windshield.

  Adeline knew that her conscience was going to give her many sleepless nights over this. For now, the officer's sacrifice had done one important thing for them: the ghosts seemed as gobsmacked by what had just happened as the humans were.

  She made a run for it. Paige did the same thing. They rushed into Naomi's room and pulled the door shut behind them.

  "He's dead!" said Paige, sobbing. "I killed him!"

  "We'll make it right," Adeline promised, though there didn't seem to be much they could do to counteract a man being dissolved as if submerged in battery acid.

  She'd left Boyd behind, and now she'd left Naomi behind, but at the moment Naomi was the safest of them all. As long as the wood she was sitting on didn't rot, she'd be okay.

  Paige pressed herself against the door. "It's my fault. I begged him to come help us."

  "We didn't know what would happen."

  "We knew it might be bad!"

  "Honey, it's a horrible thing that happened, but there's nothing we can do about it right now. We have to focus on surviving. We'll work through our grief an
d our guilt when we're all safe, I promise."

  "We're not going to be safe."

  "Yes, we are."

  "A cop drove his car right through our house and got killed! How the hell are we going to be saved?"

  "Watch your language," said Adeline. It was completely a reflexive mother response; she didn't care if Paige cursed right now. An avalanche of profanity, including the f-word and c-word, was totally appropriate.

  "Sorry," said Paige.

  "I know it seems bad. But we're going to get out of this. All four of us."

  "How?"

  "I don't know. There has to be a way."

  "Why? Why does there have to be a way?"

  "Because there just does." Adeline had offered far better arguments in her life, but she wasn't simply trying to fake a sunshiny outlook. She genuinely believed that there was a way out of this. She had no fucking clue what it was, but there was a solution to their problem. There had to be. They couldn't be killed by ghosts in a rotting house. That was ridiculous.

  "Is Dad dead?" asked Paige.

  Adeline violently shook her head. "No."

  "Then where is he?"

  "He's in the basement."

  "With a ghost?"

  "Yes."

  "So then he's dead."

  "No! Goddamn it, Paige, stop acting like this! Your father is not dead, and we're going to find a way to beat them. Let's make them less scary. Let's give them nicknames."

  "What?"

  "Nicknames," said Adeline. "The one with the bones? He's Boney now. Only think of him as Boney."

  "You've gone insane," said Paige.

  "So what? Sanity hasn't worked out for us so far, so why not try something different? Boney. The one who can't breathe—what's his new name?"

  "I don't know."

  "Think of something. You're creative."

  "Chokey?"

  "Chokey! Perfect! Boney and Chokey. You can't be afraid of ghosts named Boney and Chokey, right?"

  "I guess not."

  "What about the last one? The one whose body parts aren't completely attached. What's a good name for him?"