by Guy Riessen
Howard looked at Derrick in the dim light of their reflected flashlights, “If these bodies at the cardinal points have no bones or organs, then why’s the guy in the middle have bones, but no arms and legs?”
Derrick shrugged and said, “I’m just going to toss out a hunch here, but maybe the answer to that question is upstairs?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE STAIRWAY TO THE second floor was as old and rotten as the rest of the house, and despite their best efforts, the risers creaked and groaned as they climbed the steps. The hallway at the top was short and narrow, with three doors. The two doors on the left side opened to a small empty bathroom and a bedroom with no furniture, only six sleeping bags on the floor.
As they moved past the empty bedroom, Derrick put a hand on Howard’s shoulder. The last door was on the right, at the end of the hallway, and Derrick wanted to check his gear before they moved up to the closed door.
Overhead, the ceiling plaster was sagging where it hadn’t already fallen in thick white clumps to sit like pale cow dung on the floor. Water dripped from the ceiling’s wood slats.
Looking up through the slats, Derrick could see the roof of the attic was torn open here, revealing the dim light from the cloud-choked sky outside. Lightning flashed, painting the hallway in stark black and white stripes from the shadows of the laths overhead. The hiss of rain turned to the low roar of hail.
“I got a bad feeling about this, H,” Derrick whispered to Howard.
Black furry growths of mold, and streaks of orange and brown water damage covered the hallway carpet and walls. Derrick could practically feel himself inhaling thick clouds of spores and who knew what else.
“Yeah?” Howard whispered back, the light on his rifle starkly illuminating Derrick in the dim hallway. “One of your bad feelings with a capital B.F.?” Howard gave his assault rifle a final once-over then looked back up at Derrick.
“Yeah. I mean, uhm ... no. Hmm, Not exactly?” Derrick was looking down at the two metal devices in his hands, trying to decide which he wanted more. His own rifle hung at an awkward angle across his back from the sling over his skinny shoulders. He was pretty sure bullets weren’t going to do much good.
Adjusting his own sling, Howard tucked his rifle between his side and elbow.
“Meaning?” he asked, frowning at the GoPro camera perched atop Derrick’s head.
Derrick used his forearm to awkwardly push his hair back from his eyes, saying, “I mean, yeah my gut is telling me we’ve got something bigger here than just a possible poltergeist looking to shake things up.” Derrick held first one metal box up toward his nose, peering at the device, then he did the same with the other one. Then he lifted his eyes up toward Howard.
“Mythos-related? You think we got a Veil Tear here?” Howard knew Derrick often had strong gut feelings when it came to ruptures in the Veil between Human reality and the universe of the Old Ones.
“Nope. Doesn't feel exactly like a V.T.” Derrick shook his head and the GoPro camera bobbled around. “I think it's something else. It’s similar, but different ... I know that doesn’t help, but I’ve never felt this kind of disturbance before,” Derrick paused. “Except ...”
“Except what, dude?”
Derrick’s eyes defocused and he leaned a hand against the wall. He was getting dizzy and his breath was coming too fast.
Howard put a hand on Derrick’s shoulder, drawing his eyes up to meet his own. “Focus, buddy. What kind of feeling?”
“Closest thing I can place is the Boogeyman manifestations.”
“Aw shit, D. It can’t be that though, yeah? I mean no kids. Not out here in the middle of bumfuck, anyway. Plus, we’re on the second floor, right? Boogeyman always gated in at ground level, right? He had to see in from the outside, remember?”
Derrick shuddered when Howard mentioned the Boogeyman’s gate. He shook his head and wiped beads of sweat from his forehead. “This is different, I guess.”
Howard’s eyes tracked the bobbing camera and he tried to get Derrick away from the memories. “Goddamn camera is ridiculous. Makes it real hard to stay on tactical,” Howard said, pointing at the wiggling box.
The distraction was painfully obvious, but Derrick reached for it himself, like a life preserver. His smile was forced, and meager. “Dunno what you’re talking about, H. This thing’s rad, man. All the YouTubers are doing it. Anyway, the whole team’ll thank me when we have full HD video to analyze in the debrief.” Derrick could feel his anxiety wash away, and he reached up and patted the small black box strapped to his head, “And with this, no poor teaching assistant has to hold a video camera instead of a weapon on these bug hunts.”
“Uh-huh. That’s what grad students are for,” Howard said.
“That explains the red-shirt dress code for your T.A.s,” Derrick said. “Anyway ... here take this.” He held out one of the two metal boxes.
Giving Derrick’s shoulder a final slap, Howard nodded and took the metal box Derrick held out to him. It had guide-slots on one side, matching the accessory-rails on their M4A1s. He turned it over, revealing a small black screen. With a fingernail, he tapped the black tape along the side. “Hmm ... gear’s held together by duct tape?” Howard said, tossing Derrick a skeptical look.
“Ran out of those little computer-box screws I use to hold the cases together.” Derrick shrugged. “So uhm, don’t let me forget, we need to run by RadioShack when we get a chance.”
“When don’t we need to run by RadioShack for you? But, duct tape?”
“Mil Spec duct tape!” Derrick said, holding up both thumbs.
“Uh-huh. And, what’s this gizmo do?”
“That ‘gizmo’ is a Quantum Quadro-Thermosonic Vector sensor.” Derrick grinned, nodding. “Tha’s right,” he added.
Howard stared hard at Derrick.
Derrick rolled his eyes and huffed out a sigh. “OK. Here’s the deal. Flick your thumb across the sensor on top, and you activate it for electric field, subsonic audio, thermal, and airflow vectors. A non-corporeal apparition will show up blue on the thermal display, because ghosts are colder than ambient temperatures. So, expect a temp drop right before the ghost materializes, then outward airflow vectors from the center point until it fully appears.”
Howard rolled the small box around in his hand, and looked at the touch sensor on the top, then the screen.
“Oh, one more thing,” Derrick said, holding up his index finger.
Howard looked up from the sensor box.
“Don’t drop it.”
“I thought it was Mil Spec?” Howard whispered in a dramatic stage whisper.
“It is.”
Howard arched an eyebrow, saying nothing.
“You know how it is.” Derrick shifted slightly. “More or less,” he said. “I may have, you know, run out of those little screws that hold the actual circuit board down on the inside too. It’s all cool, so long as you don’t drop it.”
Howard grunted. Derrick couldn’t tell if it was simple assent or if it was annoyance.
“What’s your gear?” Howard nodded his head toward the other titanium case in Derrick’s hand.
“I call it the Pulsar. Threw it together just before we left. Figure I’ll use this, so you can shoot stuff. After Watkins briefed us on the verified apparition data he’d collected, I came up with the idea we might use an electromagnetic pulse to try to disrupt a non-corporeal entity. It’s built around a charged capacitor and feedback-amplification loop.”
Derrick held up the box, so Howard could get a closer look. It had a big red button on the top and on one side, a short half-inch tube jutted out with a gold screen covering the opening. “Pulled the big capacitor from one of the old CRT monitors in the Computer Lab. And, uhm. Don’t tell Professor Hillman.”
“You pulled that from the monitor on her desk, didn’t you?”
“Maybe.” Derrick drew the word out, and wouldn’t meet Howard’s gaze. “I’ll just say she should be using a wide-gamut display and
not some old CRT anyway.” Running one finger along the edge of the box, Derrick said, “Think of it like a laser that’s using the feedback loop to amplify and focus an electromagnetic pulse instead of light. If Watkins’ theory is correct, and ghosts manifest through an electromagnetic charge which keeps them cohesive in our prime material universe, this will quite literally dissolve them.”
“Got it,” Howard said, then sighed, “At least I don’t have to tape it to my rifle.” Howard slid the QQTV box onto his rifle and locked it to the rails. Rolling his shoulders, he flicked the sensor to the thermal setting with his thumb, adjusted his rifle under his arm and said, “Ready to rock-n-roll?”
Pushing down a memory of Howard bursting through a bedroom door, of staring at the gibbering lipless tooth-filled mouth of Boogeyman, Derrick dragged a hand down his face. Despite the bloody visions of their friend and teammate clutched by the sinewy claws, dragged inexorably toward the black howling gate in the closet, he swallowed hard and said, through gritted teeth, “Always.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
THEY TURNED AND MOVED down the hallway, stopping when they reached the last wooden door. It slumped in its water-bloated uneven frame in the dim hallway. The paint was peeling off in curled strips like a week-old sunburn, exposing the mildew-rotten wood underneath.
Howard rocked his weight onto his back foot and kicked his heavy combat boot against the lock plate in the old door.
With a shattering thud, the frame burst, and the door slammed open, breaking free of its hinges, and flying into the room beyond.
Howard leaped past the threshold, dropping to one knee, the light on his rifle swept the decrepit bedroom. He glanced at the readout on the QQTV scanner. The screen stayed black.
With one hand hovering over the big red button on the Pulsar, Derrick followed Howard into the room.
Moving the rifle and sensor around the room, Howard growled, “Shit. Nothing on scanner.”
Clouds of dust roiled through Howard’s flashlight beam. The broken door leaned against a four-poster bed, the headboard pushed up against the north wall. At one time, there had been a canopy over the bed, but now the wooden planks, which once suspended the canopy from the tall bedposts, lay in a jumbled heap on the bed’s sunken mattress. Some of the rotten fabric still hung from the posts.
The bed cover and canopy looked like they were made from the same red velvet material. Strips of fabric lay in torn and blackened tatters across the bed. What had been pillows were now hollow husks, their feather guts strewn about the mattress and floor in brown rotting lumps thick with a yellow jelly that glistened whenever the light slung beneath Howard’s rifle moved across them. Cracked floral wallpaper drooped in limp and blistered sheets, hanging from the wall plaster like half-peeled banana skin.
The air felt charged, as if a bolt of lightning from the storm outside could blast through the broken window frame at any second. Derrick paused, his stomach churning with fear. Listening, trying to isolate his senses, he said, “I’m still feeling like we’re right on the precipice of something. Something real bad is, like, right here with us, man. Real bad.”
Howard spun the thumbscrews on the sensor box and pulled it off his rifle. He rattled the QQTV and looked at it, front and back, before holding it up to his ear. “You sure this Quadro-shit works?”
“Quantum Quadro-Thermosonic Vector sensor. And, it should be working. Point it at me and check the reading.”
Howard held the box toward Derrick and nodded. “Yep, you’re glowing like a goddamn lava lamp.”
Rubbing at his chin, Derrick said, “Well, what the heck? Something’s definitely here ...”
Derrick stepped forward, holding out his hand to take the sensor. Howard tossed it toward him and Derrick tried to grab it but felt it bounce off the edge of his thumb.
“Dangit, H!”
As if in slow motion, Derrick watched the silver box tumble end over end, to land on one corner on the floor with a flat metallic tink.
“Whoops ...” Howard exclaimed as the two halves of the box split the duct tape. A brilliant blue flash shot out from the sensor box, illuminating everything with bright light and black shadows. The room filled with an unworldly sound like Obi Wan Kenobi shutting down the Death Star’s tractor beam. The screen on the sensor flicked off, and the room dropped to dim light punctuated only with the beams of their flashlights.
The floorboards in the entire center of the room suddenly sank as if the kitchen downstairs, directly below them according to Derrick’s flawless directional sense, was sucking in a massive breath. Then the wood planks blasted upward like someone planted a grenade under the middle of the floor.
Derrick was blown back through the door and into the wall in the hallway. His breath whooshed out of his chest in a cloud of white condensation. The temperature dropped so rapidly it felt like someone slapped his cheeks and hands as he gasped to regain his wind.
Derrick watched giant clawed, skeletal hands dig deep gouges in the wooden floor as a massive skull rose from the jagged hole in the center of the room, lifting through a rain of falling ceiling plaster and clattering splinters. Its ragged, yellow teeth looked impossibly large as they gnashed at the wet chunks of dirt slipping through the gaps between its bones, shattered teeth, and remnants of tissue to splat in dark globs of earth that writhed with beige worms and pale maggots.
Derrick could hear the thing’s wheezing breath that, even without lungs behind the massive cracked and splintered rib cage, exhaled a charnel stench of rotting viscera mingled with the copper tang of old blood. The smell was putrescent, a thick miasma that coated Derrick’s tongue, crawling to the back of his throat. As the thing heaved itself bit by bit, through the tear in reality, he turned his head and vomited the remnants of his Burger Queen lunch.
Ah man, why is a skeleton breathing?
Derrick’s thoughts were slippery and faded almost as quick as they came. He tried to lever himself up against the wall but a pain worse than he’d ever felt exploded from his thigh and his body refused to get up. His vision split and swam, a slow spin that rotated left then snapped back. Double vision and vomiting ... that’s not good.
Derrick tried to look down at his legs. There was blood, but he couldn’t focus. He shook his head and regretted it when a wicked pain lanced from the base of his skull to rip at his optic nerves.
Squinting his eyes, he tried to resolve the two giant skeletal figures into one. The creature was pushing its body up through the shattered floorboards. Grave dirt pattered a tattoo matching the wet slopping sounds of torn and pulped organs falling free from the bones, the earthen placenta of an obscenely large desecrated grave.
Derrick fought to remain coherent against the mental assault of what he was seeing. Too many organs, he thought watching thick ropes of intestine spill to the floor, loops catching and tearing on the splintered jagged edges of the hole. Then more, tumbling out with slick masses of wet earth ... and more.
Where’s that dirt coming from ... we’re on the second floor?
Why can I only see black beneath the floorboards? What if it grabs Howard and pulls him into that abyss?
Seeing the rip in reality was like staring at a sheet of black carbon nanotubes ... flat-black, nothing. There was no howling sound, but an opening, a void, a gate ... to somewhere else.
With a thick sucking sound, the colossus pulled its giant rotten emaciated feet from the hole in the floor. Chunks of gelatinous flesh sloughed from the bones, sounding like jello squeezed through fingers. The peeling flesh looked strange with skin of different colors mixed with the gray-green pallor of rot. Loose muscle stripped off like string cheese, but didn’t seem to match the bones and tendons. The thing squatted, covering the shrinking rip in reality that had birthed it, hunched in the squalid room that was much too small to contain it. Derrick gasped as the gate between its feet snapped shut.
All he could hear was his own rapid breath and blood shushing through his inner ear ... then the sound of a grinding stone
mill rumbled, and the massive skeletal head swiveled toward Derrick.
Broken antlers jutted from the sides of its head, and where eye sockets and nasal cavity should be, the cracked and yellowed bone was rough but featureless. A dim glow like swamp light poured from the thing’s jagged mouth, rotated about the room, casting sulfurous beams through the thick swirling dust.
What the heck is that? No, wait. Where’s Howard? Derrick thought. A vision of half of Howard’s skull, spilling brains and blood as it rocked on the ground where the open gate had been flashed through his mind, and he called Howard’s name, but he couldn’t hear his own voice over the ringing in his ears. One or both of his earplugs must have fallen free when he was blown through the door.
Derrick’s head lolled forward, as his sight began to fade.
Was Howard still teaching his afternoon class? Derrick tried to focus, the sound of clattering and grinding bones just audible over the keening whine; his ears ached. He tried to raise his head, to look toward the sound, but his head felt impossibly heavy.
No, not in class. We were on a road trip ... and ... oh man, we’re in some kind of a real fix, aren’t we?
How the heck did we get into this situation anyway ... oh yeah, Derrick thought, as his brain dipped further into the enticing blackness, that’s right .... We drove here in that stupid VW Bus that Sarah always makes us take on these bug hunts. Never the helicopter, oh no, always the frakkin’ bus.
Dang ...
I hate ...
that stupid bus ...
Derrick could only see contrast variations, grays on blacks. But the darkness was coming. He could hear the chalky grind of bone against wood getting ever closer. The cloying scent of rotting flesh and marrow was so strong that Derrick was panting to avoid breathing deep. His empty stomach clenched again right before he passed out.
CHAPTER NINE
