John interpreted it immediately as a great sign and allowed a feeling of reassurance to settle in. He even found himself giggling carelessly as he helped Eric to his feet.
They exited the room together.
CHAPTER 13
Eric sat on the base of the fountain, dazed at how comfortable and relieved he felt despite everything, and fished two of the lukewarm cokes from one of the duffle bags. He tossed one to John and kept the other for himself. He sipped casually from the can, wanting to avoid the potential stomachache he knew would undoubtedly result from gulping. It was tempting, though. He rubbed his finger gently over the gash, grimacing at each new sliver of pain as it ran over another tender spot, and tried once more to remember what happened. He imagines now since he felt slightly refreshed, he could think better, and so he began replaying the entire scenario in his head yet again.
John waited patiently. He saw and recognized all too well the look of bewilderment and concentration on Eric’s face and knew he was in deep thought. And truth be told, John needed to hear the explanation just as much as Eric needed to recall it (if not more).
The most unsettling aspect of it all was definitely the blood. John still pictured the puddle of blood behind the television at the forefront of his mind and knew the cut was much worse than Eric let on. But what could he do? Eric was as stubborn as a mule.
Eric went right on thinking, not noticing the pair of hazel eyes watching his every move. If he had noticed, he would not have cared. He was too far-gone, envisioning too many useless things: his trip up the hallway, the staircase, the two doors, the howls, the portraits…everything up until blacking out (or being knocked unconscious) anyways. He thought harder and now remembered bending over the VCR...finding the DVD...and—
“The TV,” Eric muttered aloud, popping up from his seat like a Jack from its box and knocking over the nearly empty coke can that had been sitting between his legs.
“What?”
“The TV,” Eric repeated louder.
“Yeah! You turned it on. So what?”
“No, I didn’t,” Eric blurted out inadvertently. He threw his hand quickly up to his mouth like a child who had cursed in front of their parents for the first time. It was a belated gesture. What he said couldn’t be revoked now. He had not meant to say it. He hadn't wanted John to know, at least not yet. He had not wanted to freak John out over a little...accident. That was not the exact word he was looking for because what happened was no accident, but it would have to do for now.
“You didn’t?” John asked hesitantly. Despite the lukewarm Coca-Cola he sipped on, he found it hard to swallow.
“No.”
“But the remotes were on the couch. Someone turned it on. Someone was...was…” he swallows hard… “—was watching it.”
“What?” Eric questioned and as if answering his own inquiry, he added, “that's impossible.”
“What’s really going on, E?”
“I don’t even know, man. I never went to the couch.” He plopped back down on the side of the fountain, suddenly not feeling so refreshed anymore. “I was looking on the entertainment center, going through some DVDs and VHS’s and saw something shiny on the floor. It turned out to be a loose DVD, but I didn’t know that then. So I bent to pick it up.”
John sat down next to Eric, feeling lightheaded all of a sudden.
“And when I was bent over,” Eric continued, “the TV turned on by itself. It spooked me. I guess I screamed. I fell backwards and must have…” he reached up to the gash in the back of his head once more as if confirming what he intended to say next “…hit my head.”
John buried his face into the palms of his hands. He wanted to…not necessarily cry, although he probably would welcome the outpouring of emotion right about now. He wanted to scream. Yeah. That’s it. SCREAM! All of this was just too weird for his liking.
“What’s wrong?” Eric asked as he rested an unsure hand atop John’s shoulder.
“Uh...nothing, man,” he replied with a distinct hesitation Eric recognized all too well. “I’m good.” He did not dare look at Eric.
“I know you, John.” Eric slipped his hand from John’s shoulder down to his bicep in a swift, unpreventable manner and gave it a violent squeeze, forcing John to look in his direction. When their eyes finally met, he added, “I know when you’re lying. You saw something, didn’t you?”
“It’s nothing. Seriously.”
“You keep telling yourself that,” Eric said somewhat sarcastically.
“Were you upstairs?” It wasn’t exactly what he wanted to ask, but it was one of the many ideas plaguing his thoughts right now; so therefore he could ask it truthfully, and Eric would not suspect him of lying again. And if it managed to change the subject a bit and divert Eric’s attention away from the fact he had been lying, then that was just an added bonus.
“No. Why?”
“I thought I heard something up there is all. Just a board creaking. Nothing big.”
“Oh, okay,” Eric replied with a frown. He sensed something in John’s voice. Maybe John wasn’t lying, but he was definitely up to something. Eric could not quite put his finger on what it might be, but he planned to leave it alone for the time being. After all, he had his own vital information he was withholding from John as well. He granted John’s wish and changed the subject himself. “Hey! Did you hear those howls?”
John struggled swallowing the lump that had formed almost instantaneously in his throat. He hoped those howls had not been real; that he had dreamed them up and Eric hadn’t heard; that this conversation would never have to take place. But here it was. He could easily avoid it and just say "no", but he refused to do that. He lied already and been called out for doing it. He didn’t want to go through it again. “Yeah. Three of them."
“Weird, huh?”
“Yeah,” John agreed. “Something weird was definitely going on here.” He needed some comforting, or at the least, something that might divert his mind from it. And what was better to take his mind off of what was happening now than what had actually happened all those years ago? “So tell me a story, E?”
“What story?”
“I want—” John began but quickly stopped. Want did not describe this feeling properly. “I need to know what happened here.”
“You sure?” Eric asked in a shocked tone.
“Yeah, man.” Of course, he was not sure, but he went beyond the point of caring. “Something is going on, E. Maybe an explanation will fill in some gaps and clear some things up.”
“Alright, John. Here goes.”
*****
“Have you ever heard the story about this place?” Eric asked as he began pacing back and forth over the short distance in front of the fountain. His voice had changed somehow, and unfortunately, not for the better. He sounded excited—happy, even—to be telling the story, and John did not much care for this newfound tone.
John nodded.
“Of course you have.” He suddenly felt like a teacher; like a professor at a university giving an important lecture with unmatched passion, and he embraced it. “We’ve all heard the stories, but I doubt you’ve heard the real story. Up until the other day, I hadn’t. I had only heard those unbelievable stories people have made up over the years, and I believed ’em. Believed ’em until—”
“I’m not a kid, man. Get on with it.”
Eric smiled humbly as he changed direction and got down to business. “I looked this place up online. Jeff Cahill, the father, was a wealthy business owner. I’m not sure what kind of business he had, and I guess it doesn’t really matter. He married Jennifer Harris; she was a poor farm girl from somewhere down south. I can’t remember exactly where.
“Jeff had money beyond his years, obviously, mostly from an inheritance, but partly from his own businesses also. A majority of his money was divided between six independent trust funds, one for each of their six children: four girls and two boys—Gregory, Jeff, Jr., Tiffany, Deanna, and twin girls, Isabe
lla and Annabella.
“On a beautiful fall day, nine years ago I believe, Halloween night to be exact, it happened. As day turned to night, and the frigid weather took a frightening turn to downright cold, the ordinary Jeff Cahill snapped.”
John slid gracelessly to the edge of the fountain and began rubbing his hands up and down the outskirts of the stone that constructed the fountain. It was merely a nervous habit where his palms sweated and itched, an itch he could never seem to scratch properly; a habit in which he usually used a much softer surface, but he must work with what he had. To make matters worse, the fear coursing through his body forced him to rub harder and faster than what he normally did. The skin peeled away in small, white flakes and it hurt like hell, but oddly soothing in the same instance.
Eric rambled on. “He used a kitchen knife. One from a rack of knives that apparently sat out on display on one of the counters in the kitchen. One of the knives that the cooks—and possibly Jennifer and Jeff himself—used nearly everyday.”
John could not help but to wonder what happened to the knife, and as he did, his hands moved much faster up and down the coarse, stone surface. Surely, the police had confiscated it. Surely, it now rested inside an evidence room in either the Caldwell or Ouachita Parish Sheriff’s Department amongst all the other pieces of evidence that accumulated over the years. But what if it hadn’t been taken? What if the police hadn’t found it? These were big what ifs but possible. Sure, Eric said they found it, but if they hadn’t, they would not have let the press know, would they? Probably not. Which led him to think, What if it isn’t in an evidence room at all? What if it is still here? Still in the kitchen? He had been only a few feet away from the entrance to the kitchen. A strange sense of realization and curiosity came rushing over him as he drifted listlessly back into the one-sided conversation.
“He went into the oldest boy’s—Gregory’s—room first. Jeff had taken a guest pillow from the upstairs linen closet and used it to cover Gregory’s face and mask the potential screams. It must have worked. Gregory’s screams—if he screamed at all—must have went unheard because Jeff stabbed him twenty-two times over the chest and stomach.
“The two older girls were next. A simple slice across their throats took care of them.”
John’s hands continued to move faster up and down the stone as the story continued and Eric’s tone intensified. On top of the anxiety he had been feeling, nausea crept in as well. He could feel the nachos and funnel cake he had eaten at Witch Way to Main Street preparing to make a second appearance.
“The other boy went next,” Eric said. “Jeff, Jr.’s throat had been pierced a single time directly through the Adam’s apple. Forensics said Jeff must have twisted the knife while it was in Junior’s throat because the wound was much larger than the others were.
“And finally, the two youngest: Isabella and Annabella. Two beautiful twin girls only five years old.” He teared up as he continued retelling the horrendous story he had read online.
John, now on the verge of having a mental breakdown and quite possibly crying himself, rose quickly to his feet. The little girls, he thought repeatedly. The little girls. He remembered the figure at the top of the staircase and knew it had to be one of the twins. But which one? He supposes it didn’t really matter. The thought of it being a rather surreal hallucination brought upon by unadulterated fear crept back in, but he pushed it away immediately. It—no, she—had been real.
“Something wrong?” Eric asked, anticipating a lie.
“Nah. My butt went numb,” John answered with a giggle. It was the truth just not in its entirety. His butt had went numb and on to the point of tingling painfully and uncomfortably, but that wasn’t the only reason he had stood. “That stone ain’t no joke.”
“Oh, ok,” Eric said with some uncertainty. “So where was I?”
“The twins,” John blurted. He had become far too interested in the story now for Eric to just quit or possibly leave some valuable piece of information out.
“Oh yeah. They found one of the girls still lying in her bed—Annabella. Fingerprints were discovered on each side of her mouth indicating Jeff must have used his hand to cover her mouth instead of a pillow as he had used with Gregory. I’m not sure why.”
“Okay. So what about the other one?”
“They found Isabella outside on the concrete. Forensics said she must have woken up while he was offing Annabella. They said Isabella must have heard her sister’s muffled screaming and got out of bed. She probably screamed herself when she saw what Jeff was doing. Jeff probably acted on instinct alone and threw Isabella from her second story bedroom window. She died instantly. Of course, all of that is just speculation, but they believe it to be accurate.
“And the wife—Jennifer—was found out in the hallway.” Eric began again after pausing briefly to regain his composure and wipe a few freshly fallen tears away. “She must’ve gotten up when the window broke, or maybe she heard a scream—I guess it really don’t matter. The point is she was up and walked in on Jeff. She tried to run but didn’t make it far. Two stab entries were found on her back - one in the center of her back that just barely pierced a lung. The second—the apparent death blow—was found just below the neck. It supposedly severed her spinal column.”
Eric switched on his flashlight—when he had pulled it out was a mystery to John because he had been too engrossed in the story to pay close enough attention—and shined up to the second story. Eric’s curiosity rose; all of the bedrooms are on the second floor. He wanted to go up there so badly but—
“So what happened to Jeff?”
“Do what?” He had been thinking too hard for basic comprehension.
“Jeff? I heard he killed himself.”
“Oh, Jeff. The cops found Jeff sitting on the living room couch with an old home movie still playing on the TV. The knife he had used to butcher his entire family was lying on the cushion next to where he sat. The twelve-gauge shotgun he used to take his own life was still in his hands.”
“Do they know why he done it?”
“Nope,” Eric said convincingly. “The site I read it from said they performed a postmortem autopsy—I hope that’s right—on him to see if they could find out whether or not he was crazy but found nothing. They said his face had been blown beyond recognition and that there wasn’t enough brain matter left intact to deduce any fundamentally-sound, psychological state.”
John stared back with his mouth agape. “I have no idea what that last part means.”
Eric smiled wanly. “Me either. That come straight off the website, though.” They both laughed briefly before Eric remembered something else from the article. “There is one thing that no one could figure out about this case.”
“What’s that?”
“There were no marks on Jeff’s hands.”
“And?”
“Well...” Eric paused to gather himself and ensure he was going to say it right “…forensics said that with first-time or inexperienced killers, they usually manage to cut themselves up pretty badly when stabbing someone. Something about the pressure of the knife beginning to enter the flesh being so forceful that it often causes the killer’s hand to slide up on to the blade, cutting himself—or herself—in the process. There were no wounds on either of Jeff’s hands.”
“So he didn’t do it?”
“I didn’t say that,” Eric said. “No one knows for sure, though. The cops said there were no signs of forced entry, so it had to be someone with access to the house and that was a very short list of people. Plus, the knife and gun were there with Jeff. His fingerprints were all over the knife, and he had gunshot resin on his hands. All signs pointed to Jeff Cahill...still do.”
“So how did he not cut himself while murdering seven people?”
“People think that maybe it wasn’t his first time killing.”
Both boys fell eerily silent. A pin dropping to the floor could have made an echo. A strange tension, a different type from both
Eric and John, befell the hallway.
They remained quiet, contemplating their next move.
CHAPTER 14
The boys each enjoyed another soft drink while they waited; this time they shared, not wanting to demolish their entire supply in one sitting. Both agreed it would be for the best if they did not split up anymore. They talked briefly, mostly about the house in general. Each gave a brief summary of what they had seen and/or heard. Both left out the most useful and interesting information.
Eric, being the extremely thorough person he had grown to be, fought his most basic urges to trundle upstairs and instead suggested they finish exploring the downstairs first...together. John agreed wholeheartedly, not caring where they went as long as they did not have to separate to get there.
They started their journey together by making their way down the hall to the left of the front door; the one John had originally taken. Eric stopped abruptly at the two doors on opposite sides of the hall. He noticed they were identical to the ones he discovered on his end of the hall and imagined the door to the right locked as well. He tried it anyways. What did he have to lose? A few seconds?
He was correct. From here, he imagined it, too, was incapable of a break-in (at least by Eric Richardson) but tried to do so anyways. Correct again.
Eric gave up much quicker on trying to get this one open, mostly because he noticed the way John gawked at him with little (if any) amusement. He explained to John that an identical door at the opposite end of the house on the same side of the hallway had been locked as well.
John appeared uninterested with this revelation. He merely shrugged his shoulders, not bothering with attempting to derive a logical explanation to please Eric.
They kept moving.
They came to the end of the hallway in no time flat and burst through the door there and into the adjoining hallway. John explained the door to the right led into the dining room and that he had already been in there. They scurried through the silver door standing straight in front of them instead. What lay beyond was exactly what John assumed. The kitchen.
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