Cades Cove: A Novel of Terror (Cades Cove Series #1)

by Aiden James

  Norm stopped eating for a moment, and David could almost see the spinning wheels in his warped mind.

  “Not that kind of message,” he said. “It was made of twigs and leaves arranged in a half-circle around our bed. I cleaned it up before Miriam got back so she wouldn’t panic, and everything seemed okay when we went to bed afterward. Oh, one other thing. Since Monday night our house has felt like a frigging icebox.”

  “Cold spots, huh?” said Norm. “That’s common when a house is haunted. Jesus, I’m surprised I remember so much from what auntie used to talk about.”

  “Well, last night I also had the strangest dream,” said David. “I was taken back to the very spot Miriam and I visited last Saturday in Cades Cove. It seemed so real, man, but like I was visiting a hundred years ago. There were young kids—a girl and boy dressed like they used to back in the early 1900s. The girl could hear me, and I think she saw me too. I fell into a stream and woke up, soaked to the bone in our bed.”

  “Wow,” said Norm, after taking a moment to reflect on what David told him. “So how do you plan to take care of this?”

  “I’m not sure.” He paused to drink his tea. “You don’t think I’m crazy, do you?”

  “Yeah, you’re crazy all right,” said Norm, snickering. “I’d have to see things for myself before I could tell you what I really think. That’s not to say what ya’ll have gone through lately doesn’t have its own merit.”

  “It’s just you’re a very practical, pragmatic kind of guy.” David raised his half-empty glass in a weak salute.

  “Exactly!” said Norm, tipping his beer bottle. He appeared relieved, having learned the extent of David’s troubles with very little personal expense to himself.

  ‘If only I could be like you, my friend,’ David thought to himself, wistful.

  Chapter Fourteen

  A strong breeze moved through the treetops, rustling golden aspen leaves and the fiery red foliage from several mature maples that graced the Hobbs’s front yard. Mid-afternoon, crisp and cool, the sun glimmered brightly in a cloudless sky. Janice pulled her Subaru up the driveway and parked directly in front of the steps leading to the front door.

  “You’re sure you want to go in there?” she asked Tyler, who sat next to her in the front passenger seat.

  “I don’t have a choice.” He studied the front of his house, his gaze intense as he surveyed each window, trying to see past the drawn curtains and plantation blinds. “My book report’s got to be in there. I’m pretty sure I left it in the living room after I finished working on it this past weekend.”

  “Would you like for me to come with you?”

  She sounded nervous, and from the look on her face he could tell she would’ve been just as happy to forget about his homework assignment and get the hell away from there. Even from the safety of the car the atmosphere felt charged and uneasy. She began to open her mouth, perhaps to offer to rewrite the damned thing herself.

  “No. It should just take me a minute. Well, five minutes tops,” he assured her.

  After yesterday’s meltdown he didn’t want her thinking him weak and in need of someone to hold his hand. He tossed his backpack into the backseat and got out of the car, shoving the sleeves of his new jacket up over his elbows to make him feel tougher.

  “Are you sure?” she asked again, disengaging her seat belt.

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” he said, forcing a smile. “I’ll be right back.”

  He patted the Subaru’s hood as he went by. When he reached the front steps, a chill much cooler than the usual October air in Colorado greeted him. He took out his key and drew a deep breath before unlocking the front door. The door creaked as he pushed it open, adding extra creepiness to a moment that didn’t need it. Dad insisted on leaving all of the doors leading to the outside untouched by WD-40, since he liked knowing when someone went in or out.

  Tyler left the front door ajar, stepping inside the foyer and over to the security alarm box. Once he disabled the alarm he moved into the living room, noticing it felt colder in here than it did outside. It seemed surreal hearing the heater hard at work while the air around him remained icy. He searched in earnest for his book report and stopped thinking about his weird house.

  The report wasn’t on the coffee table. He checked the shelves and storage area beneath the tabletop, but didn’t find it there either. Thinking he might’ve stashed his homework assignment in the end table between the sofa and recliner, he checked there next. While sifting through a pile of scratch sheets he used for math assignments, he glimpsed a shadow moving across the far side of the living room and into the kitchen.

  He looked up, gasping slightly, and glad that Auntie Jan wasn’t there to see him react like this. Tyler told himself it was just his heightened wariness getting the better of him. He finished sorting the papers in his hand and set them on the end table, moving on to the entertainment center. A soft rustling noise emerged from the kitchen.

  Tyler stepped back from the entertainment center, holding his breath while he listened. When the rustling continued, he tiptoed toward the kitchen. The noise stopped as he came around the corner. It sounded like it came from near the kitchen island. Even now the row of copper pots and pans hanging from the rack above the island swayed, as if someone brushed against them on their way out of the room. The hairs on his neck sprang to life as it reminded him of what happened yesterday with the kitchen curtains.

  Just let me find the stupid report and I’ll get the hell out of here!

  He moved over to the counter near the oven where his dad often left the mail. The report wasn’t there either. He checked the dining room before returning to the foyer, where he glanced at the Subaru through the open front door. The car idled softly less than twenty feet away. For the moment Janice had her head down, reading a book of folk tales his parents bought for her in Gatlinburg.

  He shifted his gaze to the staircase and then back to the car’s safe haven. Tyler debated whether or not to forget the report and take a hit on his history grade. But the nagging thought of hard work thrown away urged him on. The only logical place left to check was his bedroom upstairs.

  He took a deep breath and walked upstairs, determined to ignore the tingling sensation along his back and arms. When he reached the landing he heard more noises coming from inside his parents’ bedroom, behind their closed door. No longer tempted to investigate hidden mysteries, he hurried down the hall to his bedroom.

  Tyler opened his bedroom door and slid inside. It made little sense that the room with the broken windowpanes seemed much more comfortable than anywhere else in the house. But it was. Wasting no time, he searched his desk and nightstand for the report.

  The search proved fruitless. The report confirmed lost, he decided to bolt. His grade would suffer, but he figured his parents would go easy, considering. As he reached his doorway the front door creaked and swung open.

  “Auntie Jan?” he called out, ashamed by the edge in his voice.

  No response, and then the door slammed shut. Maybe the wind did it. He recalled a pretty fierce gust when he got out of the car. But then he looked down the hallway. His parents’ bedroom door stood wide open.

  Oh, shit!

  Something rustled downstairs, and now Janice rang the doorbell and pounded on the front door, frantic to reach him.

  Auntie Jan can’t get in? …She must be locked out of the house!!

  The rustling grew louder, as if the back door had opened and the wind flowed freely inside. The wind moved from the living room into the foyer and rose up the stairs, lifting the row of family portraits that hung upon the stairway’s wall. Terrified, he listened to the progress of the draft, the wooden picture frames tapping against the wall as they settled back into their original spaces.

  Too late to run downstairs and get out. He stepped inside the safety of his bedroom. As he did, the weird voice from yesterday called to him from atop the stairs.

  “For so-o-o long I’ve waited, my love.... My dearest
Zachariah-h-h-h!”

  The floorboards on his side of the hallway began to creak.

  “And now I’ll have my vengeance....”

  He couldn’t see anyone, but the menacing voice drew nearer. The closer proximity of the last phrase accompanied more creaking floorboards next to Christopher’s bedroom. Tyler slammed his door shut and locked it. He then picked up his prized baseball bat that bore the signatures of his favorite Rockies’ players from the trophy shelf above his nightstand. He wielded the bat in front of him, ready if needed.

  The footsteps stopped just outside his door. An unnerving silence followed, seizing the entire second floor, while Janice’s muted cries for him grew more and more frantic. The wait for what would come next excruciating, without warning something heavy crashed into the door, the force strong enough to bend the door’s hinges inward. He backed up, bumping into his desk while desperate to find anything else that could serve as a better weapon. Finding nothing, he became aware of a light tapping sound against the glass panes of his window behind him.

  Tyler almost lost his balance as he whirled around, glancing warily over his shoulder at his bedroom door that remained closed. With his heart pounding, he looked over at the Hallo-ween spider he’d created to hide the football accident. For a moment, he half expected the orange-eyed arachnid to come to life and leap at him from its cardboard patch. The tape had separated on one end and the wind now whistled in from outside, pushing and pulling this portion of the patch against the window frame. At least the tapping sound had a logical explanation. What happened next did not.

  A blue plastic folder arose from the small space between his desk and the window. At first he could only see the corner of the folder. As it brushed noisily against the back of the desk, he realized no wind could thrust it through that cramped space. The folder soon appeared in its entirety, the one that held his report.

  “Impossible…,” he whispered. He reached down and picked it up. Empty. Whoever messed with him wasn’t finished.

  “‘Lookin’ for this?”

  Like yesterday he couldn’t move, as if every nerve had froze. The voice that spoke now sounded softer, almost husky. Fine wisps of reddish blond hair appeared in his periphery. But unlike yesterday’s experience, he had no idea how this peculiar female crept up behind him with his door shut. She held his report in her right hand, outstretched from behind him just above his waist. Her arm and hand were bare, porcelain white except for the bluish ends of her fingertips.

  Unsure of what else to do he reached for the report, hoping her gesture friendly. But as soon as he touched the papers, brushing his hand against the pale cold wrist of the girl, she tightened her grip on the report. He turned to look at her, but before he saw her face he felt a powerful push against his back, launching him across the desk and sending him crashing through his bedroom window.

  “TIME TO DIE-E-E-!!!” the voice shrieked.

  Glass shards and splintered pieces of the window frame sliced through his skin, and he tumbled down the steep gabled roof beneath his window. From there, a fifteen foot drop awaited him before he would slam into the concrete walkway surrounding the backyard’s sprinkler system. In panic, Janice ran as fast as she could to the backyard, screaming Tyler’s name while his cries filled the air.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Come on…come on!” David hissed at the pickup truck in front of him.

  Like him, the slow-moving vehicle seemed headed to Littleton Adventist Hospital. When he reached the parking lot David swerved around the truck, glaring at the old man driving the pickup who returned his irritated gaze with a similar facial expression. He pulled into the first available spot and parked his car, feeling a tad guilty when he saw the aged gentleman help a crippled elderly woman get out from the truck’s passenger side.

  “Sorry about that,” he said in haste as he ran past the couple on his way to the automatic door leading to the Emergency Room’s reception desk. Janice met him when he approached the waiting area, her eyes red from crying.

  “How is he?”

  His voice thick from worry, all he knew until now was Tyler had a bad accident at the house. Janice called his office, speaking with Nancy and then Ned before they tracked him down in a meeting with his support staff.

  “We spoke to the doctor a short while ago and Ty is going to be all right,” she informed him, pointing to where Miriam sat next to Jillian and Christopher. “Mir is a mess over this, as you can imagine.”

  Miriam sat huddled in one corner of the room with one child on either side of her. They hugged their mom and lovingly stroked her shoulders as she wept. It touched him at how mature his youngest kids seemed as they comforted her.

  “Everything’s going to be all right, babe,” said David, once he reached her. He kneeled down and took her in his arms.

  “It tried to kill him, David!” she cried in anger. “It pushed him through his bedroom window!”

  She pulled away and narrowed her puffy eyes.

  “Or, should I say SHE?!”

  “What? Who’s ‘she’??” His mind reeled. He knew exactly what Miriam meant by her words. At the same time, he pictured his son being shoved through his window.

  “Don’t play stupid or coy with me!” She took hold of his face in her hands to where she could look directly in his eyes and he couldn’t avoid it. “You know who I’m talking about!”

  Guilt forced him to close his eyes. He didn’t know what to tell her. He often found it maddening to try and gauge how much she knew about an issue as opposed to what she didn’t. She obviously had guessed the gender of the presence in their home from the whispers the afternoon before. Did that also mean she had made the same connection as he, that it was the ghost of Allie Mae?

  Until she actually said so, past experience taught him not to jump to such assumptions. Lord knew he’d be in a deeper world of shit if he asked her if she meant the young girl from Cades Cove and it turned out she didn’t.

  “Ty went into the house looking for his history report, since it wasn’t in his desk or locker at school,” said Janice, bringing them back to the more important issue of their son. “I should’ve insisted on going into the house with him….. He left the front door open while I waited in my car, and he promised to be out in five minutes. When six minutes passed I got out of the car. Immediately, the front door slammed shut. I ran up the walkway and tried to open it, but it wouldn’t budge. My house key wouldn’t even turn the lock! After that I heard a girl’s voice giggling...a really strange laugh, like it came from everywhere on the main floor.”

  She paused, noting the fascinated but frightened looks on Jillian and Christopher’s faces.

  “Maybe I should wait to finish this later, when we can talk alone.”

  “No, it’s all right, Jan,” Miriam assured her, standing and pulling Jillian and Christopher up with her. “I’ll take the kids to get something from the vending machines in the hallway. That should give you enough time to tell David the rest of what you told me earlier.”

  She dabbed at her eyes and walked toward the reception desk, her head bowed low while the children kept up with her, clinging tightly to her arms on either side. Just before reaching the desk, she turned to the left where a small row of vending machines stood. One of the receptionists glanced at her as she walked by and then cast a suspicious scowl in David’s direction.

  “So, tell me the rest of what happened,” he said to Janice, turning his attention away from the receptionist desk. He sat down in the chair next to hers.

  “Okay, David,” she sighed, briefly looking down at her feet as if collecting her thoughts. “When I heard the crash and the glass breaking upstairs, I panicked. I was about to break the dining room window and climb in through there when I heard Ty’s screams from the back of the house. I had to climb over the fence since I couldn’t remember the combination to the gate’s lock.... I found him hanging from the floodlight pole where his leather jacket had snagged. It caught him just beneath his shoulder and
kept him from falling headfirst onto the sprinkler system.”

  David shook his head sadly, forced to visualize what might’ve happened if the jacket hadn’t prevented Tyler’s fall.

  “He broke his collarbone….” Janice began to cry again. “When the ambulance arrived, he started telling me what happened, since until the paramedics got him down from the roof he was in way too much pain to speak clearly. He told me that he caught a glimpse of a girl in a light blue dress with reddish-blond hair. Then he told me she spoke to him, and that she had said something to him yesterday as well. ‘She calls me Zachariah, Auntie Jan’ he said to me. ‘Why does she call me that?’”

  Her shoulders shook and David tentatively reached over his seat to hug her, finding it hard to prevent his own tears. He looked up when Miriam returned, noticing the kids had moved to a play area nearby.

  “So, Jan’s told you about Ty’s injuries?”

  “Injuries? She told me about his collarbone, but what else happened?”

  David prepared for the worst, pulling away from Janice to face his wife.

  “His neck and hands were cut pretty bad. And one of the doctors said there’s a really bad scrape along his back....”

  Miriam started to lose it again, looking for somewhere to sit before she collapsed. David stood up and rushed to catch her, but she waved him off, taking the chair across from where Janice sat. Her anger still hovered near the surface.

  “You need to be honest with me, David,” she said, glancing briefly at Janice. “It’s the girl, isn’t it? The girl named ‘Allie’. She followed us home for some reason. I know it and you know it.”

  What else could he say? The mention of the name ‘Zachariah’ by Janice especially chilled him. The boy in his dream had so reminded him of Tyler when a few years younger. If Allie Mae’s ghost invaded their home, could she confuse the two boys as being one and the same? Could this also be the case for the name ‘Billy Ray’ he heard Sunday night, that she confused him with some other man?