by S. R. Witt
Chase pulled the desk chair over and planted herself in front of the goggles. It took her a few moments to adjust the focus.
The old house in the picture looked like something out of a horror movie. It had that same, almost familiar, Midwestern style that had been enshrined in horror movies like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Unlike most of those terrifying houses, this one was in good repair. There were a lot of Very Serious people standing on the road in front of the house. They looked like they were arguing with the sheriff and his deputies, who were locking a chain around the gate to bar access to the home’s driveway.
A gigantic bold headline above the picture screamed, “DIOXIN DISASTER AT HARROW HOMESTEAD.”
The rest of the article was written in a terse, just-the-facts style that sucked any drama from the events it related. Every person in the picture was named and their ages noted, but Chase didn’t see any familiar names, except for Harrow. According to the article, someone had found dioxin on the property, and the whole place had been shut down pending some sort of investigation by the local authorities.
“It doesn’t say that they tore it down,” she said hopefully. “You think we ought to head out to the address they’ve got listed here?”
Paxton rubbed his chin. “Can I do a little more digging around in the paper? I want to see if I can find out anything else about the place. Or the town.”
Chase blew out an exasperated sigh and pushed away from the microfiche machine. “You’ve got an hour. After that, we need to move on to the next stop. Something tells me we don’t have a lot of time to figure out what happened to Mom and Dad.”
For the next hour, Paxton wheeled back and forth between the microfiche machine and the cabinets. He swapped cassettes in and out half a dozen times and scratched notes on the notepad he always kept in his wheelchair’s pouch.
“It doesn’t look like they ever tore the place down, but they never let anyone move back in, either. Or if they did, they didn’t report about it.” Paxton shoved the notepad toward his sister.
Chase looked at the numbers he’d scrawled across the paper. 2009, 2002, 1995, 1988, and so on, skipping 7 years between numbers all the way back to 1974. Paxton had scribbled a six under 2009, and the same under 2002, but there was a much larger number under 1995. Thirty-three. “What’s this?”
Paxton fidgeted in his wheelchair. “That’s the number of people in their late teens or early twenties that died between October 30 and Halloween in each of those years.”
Chase furrowed her brow. “That can’t be right.”
Paxton swivelled his chair to face Chase. “The microfiche only goes back to 1973, but the pattern of deaths is the same all the way back to 1974. Every seven years, six kids die just before or on Halloween. And every 21 years, six kids plus a whole bunch of other people die at the end of October.”
Chase clenched her fists and paced back and forth, a worm of anxiety chewing its way through her guts. “In the murder manual, there’s a line about playing the Game in the third cycle of the sacred number of years.”
Paxton shrugged. “That lines up. Lots of people think seven is a special number, and three times seven is 21.”
Cold sweat oozed through Chase’s pores, raising chilled goosebumps even under the warm weight of her studded leather jacket. “If that’s all true, then the Game is starting today.”
“I think you’re right,” Paxton said, hands restless on his withered legs. “Look at this article.”
Chase pressed her face back to the microfiche machine, and her eyes widened with shock. She recognized the pair of stern faces glaring at her from the grainy newsprint image, though they were much younger than she’d ever seen them.
She skimmed the story beneath the unlabeled photo, which was about the pictured young couple being banished from Crucible because of their shameful and blasphemous behavior that had somehow endangered the whole town. The article was written in a strange, stilted style that Chase of passages from a King James version of a bible.
Chase read the names at the end of the article, and her blood ran cold. “That’s impossible.”
Paxton chuckled from behind her. “No, it’s not. That’s exactly who you think it is.”
Mom and dad.
Chapter Thirteen
Home Again
Chase tapped the address of the Harrow family homestead into her iPhone’s Maps app and waited for the route to appear. A minute passed before an error notification popped up on the phone’s screen.
GPS signal not found.
“Well,” Chase said, noting her phone’s cell signal bars flickered from one to none. “I guess I should have expected that.”
She showed the error message to her brother, who grumbled and started the van. “Might be the mountains blocking some satellites. The curvature of the earth and all that shit. I’ll drive down the road and see if it ever picks up.”
But it didn’t. The siblings drove down Crucible’s main street until they reached the town’s western border and were left staring at the steep two-lane highway leading up through a narrow pass between two weathered mountain domes. Paxton took a left and drove back to the east until they hit the truck stop. “I guess we’re doing this the old-fashioned way.”
The parking lot had emptied out in record time after breakfast. The locals had headed on to their jobs or back home. The truck drivers had hit the road, a rumbling convoy of oversized vehicles driving right through the middle of Crucible. Chase wondered how they’d managed the covered bridge, which hadn’t looked anywhere near tall enough to admit a truck’s height, much less sturdy enough to bear its weight.
“Be right back,” Chase said, opening the van’s door as Paxton slid it into a parking space next to the building. “I’ll get us a map and some directions.”
Chase returned a few minutes later, a badly folded map in one hand and a triumphant grin on her face. “Hey, guess what? The guy who manages the truck stop is not a total dick. I think this town is up to three normal human beings now.”
She showed the route to her brother, explaining each turn with the landmarks the manager had drawn on the edge of the map with a shaky hand. “Did you get all that?”
Paxton raised one finger in the air. “I didn’t even try. You’re my GPS now. Make with the turn-by-turn directions.”
They did their best to follow the map, squabbling when they made a wrong turn, congratulating one another when they thought they were on the right track. It was slow going, but neither of them cared. They were glad to have some sort of normal conversation to chew over. They were especially glad to be distracted from the fact that their parents had apparently been part of some weird murder cult and had never bothered to warn their children that the same fate might befall them.
Finally, when they had taken the last turn and were driving down a long, hilly stretch of one-lane cracked asphalt, Chase leaned back in her seat and asked, “Can you believe this is where they grew up?”
Paxton rubbed his fingers on the steering wheel, clenching and unclenching them as his thoughts churned. “It sure looks that way. Mom did tell me once that they’d left their hometown after she turned eighteen. Dad would have been twenty. I guess now we know why they got the hell out of Dodge.”
“Why do you think they got thrown out of town?” The article hadn’t explained anything about the banishment, and Chase had never heard her parents speak about it. The idea that either of her parents would ever have done something blasphemous seemed bizarre to Chase. They’d always been quiet, calm, laid back.
“Who knows. Maybe because they wouldn’t kill each other for the sake of the Game,” Paxton said with a smirk. “They left in November of 1995, right after the last cycle. That can’t be a coincidence.”
As Paxton spoke, a dull buzzing sounded at the back of Chase’s head. It grew louder as they rolled down the road, and seemed to come from somewhere off to her right. Turning her head in that direction, Chase saw a golden halo the size of a school bus hanging in th
e sky. It rotated slowly, churning through the sky like the upper rim of a metallic tornado. “You see that?” Chase asked her brother.
Paxton turned his head to look where Chase was pointing. “What are you talking about? All I see is a big empty field.”
“In the sky,” Chase asked. “That ring.”
“I don’t see shit,” Paxton responded, a worried look flashing across his face. “Are you feeling all right?”
There was something familiar about the ring, and as they drew closer to it, the familiarity solidified in Chase’s head.
Looks like a quest marker from a video game, Chase thought to herself. The fuck is happening here?
The road they were traveling curved and drew ever nearer to the golden circle turning in the sky. Chase rubbed her eyes, but the ring didn’t change or go away. The fact that Paxton couldn’t see it chipped away at Chase’s confidence and made her wonder just how much of the world around her was real, and how much might be a subtle hallucination she didn’t know she was having.
When they finally arrived at a driveway, a chained gate blocking their passage, Chase knew they’d arrived at their destination.
The golden circle swirled above the weathered old building, a warm radiance urging Chase to come and explore it.
I could really use a level rating on this quest, she thought and stifled a dark chuckle. A wave of nauseating dizziness swept through her, and Chase clutched the van’s armrests as if she could keep her sanity from sliding away.
Paxton threw the van into park with its nose pointed at the locked gate. “You think it’s safe to go on in?”
Chase answered by pushing open her door and hopping out of the van. If she was going crazy, she wasn’t just going to sit and wait for it to happen. The rusty padlock holding the gate closed gave way to a sharp kick from Chase’s steel-toed motorcycle boot. Brittle after years of exposure to the elements, the hasp snapped with a crisp pop and fell to the ground. Chase pulled the chain through the gate and tossed it into the ditch next to the gravel driveway. Both sides of the gate swung open with a squealing creak.
“It’s safe now,” Chase said as she jumped back up into her seat. “Let’s go.”
Paxton grumbled at Chase’s cavalier attitude but eased the van forward. The driveway was overgrown and rutted, thin streaks of gravel showing through the verdant green blades of grass that had sprung up to almost knee-height over the years.
How long had it been since someone had come through here and cut them down? How long had it been since anyone had come to this house for any reason?
Chase looked in the rearview mirror on her side of the van and worried at the troubling thought. Anyone driving down this road would be able to see their van parked in a driveway where everyone in town knew no van should be. A closer look would reveal their out of state plates, and then the nosey townsfolk would get on the horn to the local police. Chase imagined the officer she’d run into coming out here, putting a bullet in the backs of her and her brother’s heads, and leaving their bodies to rot in the basement.
No one would ever find them. No one would be left to even look.
Paxton slowed at the end of the driveway, then eased the van around in a careful circle to leave its nose pointing back toward the country highway. It wasn’t much, but that bit of caution might save their lives if something went south. “Grab my wheelchair,” he said. “Let’s check this place out so we can get the hell out of here before Leatherface shows up and chainsaws us into sausage bites.”
Chase let herself out of the van and circled around to its back to grab her brother’s wheels. The golden light rotated directly overhead, and the thrumming in the back of her skull had become an irritating roar.
“Shut up,” she hissed through clenched teeth. The ring made it hard to string two coherent thoughts together, much less be aware of any danger around her. If it was some sort of quest marker, it should have vanished as soon as she reached the location it had marked for her.
But it hadn’t. Chase decided that meant she hadn’t found the precise spot where the quest would begin. She had to go into the house.
She unfolded the wheelchair next to the driver’s side door, and Paxton monkeyed down out of the cab with practiced ease. He needed some help navigating the rutted ground between the van and the house, but Chase didn’t have any problems pushing him. A pair of steps led up to the porch covering the house’s front door, and she manhandled the chair up onto the spongy wood, taking care to test it before trusting Paxton’s weight to each section.
Up close, the house was less intimidating than just dilapidated. It was smaller than it had looked in the picture accompanying the newspaper article, a simple one-story cube crowned by a steeply pitched roof. The porch ran the width of the house, hiding the pair of windows in the heavy shadow cast by its sagging roof.
The house was old, it was run-down, but it was most definitely not a horror movie set.
Chase tried the door and found it opened without any effort on her part. The hinges squeaked, but there was no one around to hear their racket except for Chase and Paxton.
She turned back to her brother. “I’ll take the lead. The last thing I need is you falling through a hole in the floor.”
“Is that a joke about my weight?” Paxton said through a grin. “You go ahead, I’ll follow when you tell me it’s safe. I’ve got you covered with Bessy.”
He patted the shotgun where it rested next to him, and Chase turned back to the task at hand.
The house exhaled as she opened the door wide. Its long-held breath reeked of aged newspapers, old cigarette smoke, and the still quiet of closed places. Chase poked her head through the open door and called out, “Hello?”
She didn’t expect an answer, but she wanted to give any hobos or wandering sasquatches who’d taken up residence here time to skedaddle before she intruded on their personal space. If there were any animals, her voice might be enough to spook them out of hiding, too. It wouldn’t do much for snakes, but wild dogs or raccoons would probably run away from humans rather than stand and fight.
Chase waited for a moment. When no wildlife or vagrants answered her call, she walked into her father’s old home
The ceiling was low, just a few feet above Chase’s head. It had once been a flat white, but the paint had long since yellowed, and a leaking roof had drawn coffee-colored stains across wide swaths of the old Sheetrock. A ceiling fan, faux crystals dangling from it in extravagant tiers, clung precariously to a sagging section of the ceiling, and Chase made a mental note not to get anywhere near it. She didn’t want all that wire and fake glass crashing down onto her head.
To the right of the entryway, a hallway led to the far side of the house, and Chase could see a kitchen branching off from the same side of the living room. The living room’s largest remaining furnishing was a threadbare couch. A coffee table, empty save for an open newspaper and a stack of envelopes on its right side, squatted in front of the sagging couch.
Chase made her way across the floor, wincing as the old wood creaked, but she didn’t fall through. After taking a few more test steps, she decided the floor was structurally sound enough for their exploration.
She motioned for Paxton to come into the house, and he manhandled his wheelchair across the threshold.
Her brother stopped in the living room, next to the coffee table. “Our ancestors didn’t live in a five-star hacienda, did they?”
“It’s 0 out of 0 stars for me, would not visit again,” Chase responded.
Midday sunlight streamed through the broken shutters, giving Chase enough light to read by. She leaned over the newspaper on the corner of the coffee table. Its yellowed pages were brittle and cracked with age, but the date was still clearly visible. October 30, 2009.
Exactly 7 years ago.
Paxton stopped in front of the ancient tube TV resting atop an old wooden console and pressed its power button with the tip of his finger. The button popped in and out with an audible crack, but
the television remained dark. “This place is weird,” Paxton said.
“It is fucking creepy,” Chase admitted as she walked into the kitchen. She rubbed the side of her head as the buzzing intensified. The golden ring wasn’t visible through the roof over her head, but she could feel it up there, like a weight on the top of her spine.
The kitchen was spotless, with nothing on the stove or counters. Chase pulled open the cabinets and found old boxes and cans, untouched for all these years. She took a box of rice off the shelf, and gave it a shake. The spout had been opened, and half the rice was gone, but there was no sign that rats or bugs had gotten into it.
Which didn’t make any sense. Rats got into everything, no matter how carefully it was sealed up. And if the rodents hadn’t gotten to the food, roaches should have. But this place looked like the door had been closed, and nothing had been inside even once during the past seven years.
Now that Chase thought about it, there wasn’t even dust on the windowsills or counters. She was about to investigate the dining room she could see through the arched opening on the far side of the kitchen when her brother called out to her.
“You’re going to want to see this,” Paxton shouted.
Chase backtracked through the strangely preserved rooms and found Paxton in the hall leading to the back end of the house. “What have you got?”
Framed pictures, almost three feet tall, hung from the walls. The one hanging closest to the mouth of the hallway was of their father as a young man. He was standing in front of this house, arms crossed over his chest, a scowl creasing his features. A simple plaque screwed to the wall to the right of the portrait bore a date, November, 1995, and two words: “Our boy.”
Chase walked down the hall toward her brother, pausing at each portrait. The next one in line was a man she didn’t recognize, a jagged scar racing down his left cheek, but the house was the same, except the porch hadn’t been added yet. The date on the placard was November, 1974, and those same two words. “Our boy.”
