Huff Bend Hell House

by Jeremy Simons

  “You could have helped,” he murmured aloud. “You could have helped!” A little louder. “You could have—”

  He heard screeching. Hope! It was the first unorthodox sound he had heard since he and John arrived here that didn’t startle or terrify him, but rather excite him. He knew the sound all too well. He recognized it, and rightfully so, because he heard similar sounds many times throughout his years, while helping people move or helping his mother rearrange the living room furniture so she could clean behind it, or “just because it was time for a change”, as she sometimes told him. The screeching, usually painful to the ears, sounded like a beautiful lullaby at this moment. It was the sound of something (he did not know exactly what just yet but from the sound of it, it was something relatively small) being scooted across the hardwood floor. His savior, perhaps.

  It never dawned on him that he did not know who or what it was because frankly, it didn’t necessarily matter. He knew it would scratch the floor badly, so whomever was pushing it or dragging it must be small or weak…probably both. He knew enough to feel comfortable and that seemed okay.

  “Oh, thank God,” he whispered but knew God deserved no gratuities for this one.

  Just then, a small table, the same table he had been rummaging through, came screeching into view. Although his concept of true irony was lacking at his age, he thought it odd that the thing—the table—that had gotten him into this little predicament in the first place would now save him.

  The table, which appeared to be moving on its own, screeched up beside Eric. It flipped over, briefly revealing two white calves and a pair of pink ballerina shoes before the top of it toppled on its side. She pushed it more, until the bottom end of the table sat flush with an unbroken piece of the banister and all four legs dangled out above the first floor (two of which were next to Eric).

  But for what? Why?

  He was not sure.

  Isabella appeared, flashing a wan smile, and tilted her head slowly towards the table in some gesture unbeknown to Eric.

  “I can’t reach it,” he said, exhausted.

  Isabella’s smile faded immediately as she nodded again to the table.

  Eric reached out with an unsure hand, terrified at the thought of dangling from the banister with only one arm. He could reach only the leg (no surprise there) which would undoubtedly crumble beneath his weight. So again, he repeated himself, “I can’t.”

  Her face, now sporting a frown, said it all. She didn’t want to speak. She lifted an unsteady hand and pointed to the table with her index finger as if he could not comprehend her head gestures.

  “Please, just pull me up,” he begged.

  Not once did he stop and think of how a puny five-year-old girl could possibly lift all 130 pounds of himself. He didn’t think about it because he already knew the answer. She was no ordinary five-year-old. She was not full of life and vigor but rather a dark hull, huge and black, full of hatred and powers from the beyond.

  He somehow sensed she was not going to pull him up, not because she could not, but because she chose not to. But it didn’t matter, though, because an answer came to him, like an unexpected sucker punch, it clobbered him. He knew what he needed to do.

  *****

  The man stared at the boy—father at son, although at this moment it would not seem that way—briefly as Raymond’s legs flailed pointlessly through the air.

  Raymond screamed and kicked, cried, begging his father “not to”.

  The “not to” part remained unclear to John. His parents spanked him enough times in his own life to know they were not that bad, not to drive a child to acting like this. A slap in the face will heal. Thrown to the couch will not hurt. Grounded would not be so bad. Forced to clean up the mess and confess to your mother what had happened would be bad, but not this bad.

  But there was something else in Jeff Cahill’s eyes; something much darker; a more sadistic punishment than any spanking or grounding or confession.

  “Shut up!” Jeff growled maniacally. “You know what happens when you do something wrong.”

  Raymond burst into a full-blown fit of hysteria. He screamed louder, kicked harder.

  Just as Jeff began moving around the arm of the couch (Raymond still in his grasp), he got too close to his son’s flailing feet. Raymond’s right foot stretched out and connected with the bulge in the front of his father’s faded basketball shorts.

  Jeff Cahill winced and let out a muffled yelp as he released his grip on Raymond and fell to one knee, grimacing in pain.

  Raymond fell, ass-first, and stopped abruptly when his buttocks crashed down hard on to the tea-soaked tabletop. The table flipped upward while Raymond bounced to the floor, and crashing down on to the boy’s back. He screamed in pain but did not dwell on it. He could see the reddened face of his father now returning somewhat to its normal color and knew it would not be long before Jeff Cahill was on his feet again.

  Raymond stood briefly, but his legs gave in to the weight He might have broken something during the fall, John thought. Raymond toppled back to the floor, resorting to crawling, frantically…desperately.

  He made it around the wrecked table to the back of the couch. His butt throbbed fiercely. His leg cramped to the point of where he could not bend it. He panted for breath, wanting to give up. Just as his arms began shaking with fatigue, he felt something hovering above him.

  “Where in the fuck do you think you’re going?” Jeff yelled as he kicked Raymond in the butt, managing to strike the same cheek and the exact spot he hit during the landing.

  Raymond fell to the floor once more, crying harder still, but did not remain there long. Just as he leveled back into a somber state, praying this horrifying incident was over, he felt a hand slide roughly down his back.

  Jeff Cahill ran his hand down into the elastic waistband of Raymond’s faded basketball shorts (like father, like son). Jeff spun his hand once, allowing the silk fabric of the shorts to tighten around his wrist. When he felt his grip was adequate, he lifted Raymond up off the floor. As he stepped forward holding his son in this manner, to John he looked more like Eric struggling to carry the duffle bags.

  Once again, Raymond hung only seconds before swinging inward, grabbing Jeff's leg, and biting down hard on the fleshy but tender meat of the inner thigh.

  Jeff hollered. Acting solely upon instinct, he swung his free hand (closed-fisted) around. It connected with Raymond’s forehead, making a small split. Raymond released his grip as he screamed. Jeff instinctively swung his son forward, spinning his wrist in a fluent and blindingly fast motion, releasing his own grip from the boy’s waistband.

  John had wisely ducked down in front of the couch at some point during the altercation. He still feared he being seen and did not try to convince himself this was impossible. He watched as Raymond flew several feet through the air before colliding into the door the chef—John no longer remembered his name—had carelessly left open. The door slammed shut upon impact, frighteningly loud, but not quite loudly enough to mask the deafening crunch of Raymond’s head.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Jeff Cahill made a beeline for the door and the downed child. “You fucking bit me!” he exclaimed as he grabbed a handful of Raymond’s red hair; hair which was a different shade now, much darker, oily and matted with blood.

  John noticed the small abrasion on Raymond’s forehead left behind by the punch had widened and elongated a bit (as a crack in a car windshield will do given time). A small trickle of blood pulsated down the length of his nose and dripped to the floor along with his tears.

  Raymond screamed in agony and pure, unadulterated fear.

  Jeff did not let up. Instead, he drug Raymond out into the hallway.

  John hopped over the back of the couch just as he had when he first found Eric unconscious on the floor. A strange sense of déjà vu ran through him as he crept into the hallway.

  Jeff drug Raymond by his hair up to the two adjacent doors. He opened the one John thought
was locked and tossed the boy in, making sure to lock it from the outside with a key after he slammed it shut. In John's limited experience, locking the door this way was not a good sign as it usually meant there was no way to unlock it from the inside.

  John watched on in horror as Jeff made his way quickly down the hallway to the other two doors, making sure the matching one remained locked as well, before disappearing into the extension beyond the hallway.

  John now lost in this flashback or whatever it was sprinted to the door. He pulled frantically at the knob, but found it locked just as before. He called out to Raymond but there was no response. He beat violently on the door but nothing happened. He even kicked it once.

  When nothing else worked, he fell to the floor, his back against the door, sobbing.

  *****

  Eric caught a glimpse of something in his mind, a scene from a movie, maybe. Or maybe a scene he imagined to be in a movie. A daring hero—probably Tom Cruise or Bruce Willis or whatever particular actor is in his prime and the budget could wrangle—dangling aimlessly from the roof of a building, pulling himself across the ledge with unsteady movements to a safer spot, a spot that would be easier to pull up at; a spot with some type of leverage.

  Eric realized he needed to do the same thing. The table was his means of survival, although he could think of a thousand different things he would rather Isabella had brought over. The braces holding up the banister were weak, but if he moved quickly and efficiently enough then maybe...just maybe...it would hold long enough to perform this life-saving deed.

  He shimmied across the floor (although he thought of it is a ledge as he channeled his inner hero).

  It was far easier than he first anticipated, that was until he encountered the first obstacle. The table had been positioned perfectly for him to use—at least Isabella had been bright enough to do that much—but the legs presented a problem. In order for this to work, he needed to be precisely in the center of the table, in between all four legs. To do this he would have to—

  *****

  Eric inhaled a deep breath of the souring, bitter air and held it in shortly. He exhaled slowly as he began letting his weight drop down; down so far (a little further than intended) that his fingernails dug crevices into the hardwood floor. He felt like an athlete of some sort doing chin-ups as he struggled to pull himself up a bit to a more comfortable level.

  Once there, he ducked below the table, being careful not to bump the table, scrape his fingers, or lose his grip.

  He popped up gracefully on the other side as quickly as possible, in between the four legs, right where he needed to be. A sense of relief and accomplishment came straying over him, but he dismissed it just as quickly as it had arrived.

  His body felt heavier than ever now, and the sweat in his palms from the adrenaline and nervous energy was not helping matters much. He was in excruciating pain and—

  But he would not let it get the best of him. He could not afford that.

  He inhaled another deep breath, more sour, more bitter as some of the sweat pouring down his face ran into his mouth as well, held it momentarily, and exhaled as he began pulling himself up, using the table to do so.

  The bend but don’t break motto came to mind as the table rocked back and forth but stayed in place. He could hear some of the wood splintering and possibly cracking. He knew his time was limited and the top half of his life’s hourglass neared empty, so he inhaled yet another breath. It now tasted as if he was sucking on a mouthful of pennies. He let the breath out quickly rather than holding it in as he slid his hands into the center of the table and continued pulling upwards.

  He pulled mightily until one knee firmly rested atop the hardwood floor and both arms bear hugged the weakening banister.

  “Thank God!” he whispered, or maybe he said it aloud. His heart was beating too loud to hear over and he could not focus on anything else.

  The rhythmic beating of his heart thudded harder, faster, and louder still as the cracking and splintering of the wood grew more frequent. Too much weight, way too much.

  He pulled himself up further putting both feet—actually just the toes of his tennis shoes—onto the hardwood floor. Both heels hovered over nothing two stories high. His first assumption was to reach out and simply push the table aside and crawl through, but it was just too risky (or at least he thought so) to remove one of his hands from the railing. Isabella could have easily pushed it aside for him, but in the midst of his triumphant moral victory, he had lost sight of her...again. He supposed he could leap over the railing, but the cracking of the wood and the perturbing numbness in his legs made him unsure of that being successful.

  So option number four it was.

  He made sure he was directly in the center of the table. Precision meant everything. In one swift move, he perched his butt out past the heels of his own shoes, scooted his feet forward until the heels rested firmly upon the hardwood floor as well, and used his arms, which were still grasping the railing, to swing himself beneath it. Eric swung perfectly into the center of the table, pushing it across the floor as he hit it. He slid on his butt, feet first, much like an ice-skater gliding across the icy rink after a tumble. The piece of railing he used to swing himself with shattered; a large chunk of it remained in his hands.

  A loud crash echoed out as the table smashed into the wall. Ironically enough, it hit in the exact spot it had stood upright at not so long ago. Eric came crashing into the table, splitting it in half down the middle. His feet dug shallowly into the drywall beyond it and stuck there.

  The mirror rattled on its nail as it might during an earthquake, leaned effortlessly to the right, and then fell. It dropped quickly, like a sack of potatoes as John would have said, and crashed to the floor, barely avoiding Eric’s outstretched legs. The glass exploded; millions of gleaming shards burst out on to the floor and Eric’s pant legs.

  He didn’t move…did not flinch. He inhaled and sighed out, heavily: once; twice; a third time.

  He ignored the footsteps creeping methodically up behind him. Better yet, he did not hear them, and if he had, he would have ignored them. Right now, only celebrating seemed appropriate, important. Nothing else mattered. He lay several seconds—minutes, maybe—basking in his own glory before examining the extent of the damages he had caused. It was bad, not quite as bad as he had expected, but still pretty bad. But he did not feel the slightest bit guilty, not like he had when John demolished the birdbath. He imagined because this had truly been a life or death situation and he had no other choice.

  The fear had escaped him, and his mind was all but clear except for an old lingering superstition that had wandered in. “Seven years bad luck,” he said aloud and laughed as he glanced down at the fragments of glass. It was only a soft, shy giggle at first but eventually turned maniacal like a startled hyena.

  It felt good to laugh.

  *****

  John had reduced himself to whimpering by this point, so loud that it drowned out the approaching steps tiptoeing up from behind, from beyond the locked door. He did not hear the creaking of the boards. Nor did he hear the lock turn over and the faint jiggling of the handle as the knob turned.

  John quit crying for a moment—still gasping for air, though—as he thought he heard something.

  A voice?

  Definitely a voice. A voice calling out to him, but it seemed distant, like in another dimension. He struggled to hear but suddenly realized the voice was calling out to someone else as well.

  Irene? Iola? Isabella?

  “Isabella?” John whispered. He had heard this name before. But where? When?

  And then it dawned on him.

  Isabella. She was one of the Cahills. Sweet, sweet Isabella. Five years old, thrown from her second story bedroom window. Not only had he heard the name, but he had seen her, at the top of the stairs.

  A strange screeching noise sounded off.

  John’s mind raced. In his vague recollection of the situation and his thoug
hts wandering towards going to investigate the sounds, the door behind him opened. It swung in.

  Why did it have to swing in?

  John, still unsuspecting of the happenings behind him, fell backwards, toppling into the previously unexplored room.

  *****

  Eric’s obscene and possibly inappropriate laughter was crudely interrupted by a sweet, angelic voice. “You must go,” the voice demanded.

  Fearing what lurked behind him although he felt he already knew, he turned slowly, catching a glimpse of blonde hair. His savior, in a sense of the word. “Isabella?” Eric whispered, once again fearing and caring that he had the wrong name, but he could not remember the other one.

  She nodded and commanded: “You must go, Eric.”

  Eric ignored the fact she somehow knew his name without him telling her, his curiosity aroused by other things. “But why?” His voice was scratchy, trembling with something other than fear, some unknown emotion that he had not felt before.

  “He knows you’re here.”

  “Who?” Eric blurted out. He already knew the answer, or at least he believed he did, but he hadn’t necessarily meant to ask. It just slipped out. Truthfully, he was not sure if he wanted to hear the answer in that sweet and shy tone. That and the fact that hearing it from her would make it the truth. Right now, it was his only opinion, and he was comfortable with that. A chill crept up his spine as he anticipated an answer.

  But she said nothing. She only giggled sincerely as she began walking—no, definitely not walking; flying maybe or hovering but not walking—up the hallway.

  *****

  John landed hard on the floor despite it being such a short fall. His head collided with the floor. He realized immediately this was different. It wasn’t hardwood at all but possibly linoleum, or maybe tile.

  The room was dark, and in the brief second before the door slammed back shut, he noticed there was no longer sunlight gleaming in, but only the darkness he had grown strangely accustomed to; the dimness he and Eric had first encountered after he flipped the light switches.