Now Entering Silver Hollow

by Anne L. Hogue-Boucher

  She changed. Phil still didn’t move. His face was slack, eyes wide. The fine hairs on the back of his neck stood erect, his spine ramrod straight. His vision clouding, he could do nothing but drool and feel his whole body stiffen as it did during feverish masturbation fantasies.

  Mystery Man would have broken the spell and wrapped the monster up in some magical device. Phil didn’t.

  A trickle of red flowed from Phil's nose and spattered on his shoes, then the floor, making blooming red roses as they dropped. Drip, splat. Drip, splat.

  The girl was no longer a girl, but a twisted, gooey, abyss-shaded slick of a being. It engulfed him, its tendrils long, supple, and slick as it took him into her—into it.

  Phil saw stars burst before him and inside its body. Such brilliance! Aligned with perfection, he heard the singing of the heavens, the smell of blooming spring, and his skin growing warm as the blanket of bliss overcame him.

  The stars grew fatter, large as saucers—growing and bursting forward until they encompassed his vision in a brilliant white light.

  Then nothing.

  DUBBS HOUSE

  “Son of a bitch, Chet. You don't mean to tell me there's a junkie squatter where Phil's workin'?”

  Chet gave a half-smile. “Yep. Only Phil would have this kinda shit happen to him, eh?”

  “That poor son of a bitch.” Postman said, a scowl crossing his boyish face.

  George Postman was a young deputy, but he was competent, in the constable’s estimation. Chet (short for Chester, thank you very much), was the old constable, and the days of waking up and hopping out of bed were long gone for him. The joints creaked and cracked even when he sat down.

  Chet was too old for this crap. Phil was a hardworking, nice guy, and he had to fall for that crazy bitch, Linda. Linda was mean, demanding, and what the intellectuals would call an ignoramus. Bigoted, rude, and conniving. Everything Phil wasn't. Unlucky bastard making bad choices, Chet had said on more than one occasion to Postman, whether the kid was listening or not.

  “Yep. Let's go see what we can do.” George said.

  The prowler rumbled and roared to the scene before the paramedics got there. Chet checked his time. They were there in less than one minute from the when the Phil made the call. Record time. The ambulance would take another eighteen to twenty minutes.

  Chet got out of the police car first and pointed George toward the van—where the end was open—and it looked a right mess. A first-aid kit was ripped open and the contents strewn on the ground and over the back of the vehicle.

  “Be careful not to disturb anything, George. Remember your contamination rules.”

  Contamination rules was a reminder to the eager deputy not to crap all over the crime scene. If there was a crime scene.

  The little voices belonging to whatever lived in the pit of his gut were screaming at him that this was a crime scene, and to not believe what his eyes were telling him. His face stood out in stony, grim relief as he approached the property.

  With each step he took, a scream settled into his throat, and he kept swallowing it. It settled in the pit of his stomach where the voices came from though his heart was strong and steady.

  He hated this place—Dubbs House—with a passion. When he was a boy, it was a house again, and the ladies who lived in it were bat-shit crazy. Mary Sellers-Watson-Kellogg was one of them. The socialite was from Beanton (where rich people had to have multiple last names—he didn't understand that and he never would—nonsense pedigrees) but moved to Silver Hollow with her friend when she was in her late forties.

  She hadn't started out insane. No, sir. This was a respectable woman who ran a bed-and-breakfast when she'd first purchased it, and she and her friend ran the place which drew a crowd because of its strange history. When people suggested to her she should play the place up as haunted, Miss Sellers-Watson-Kellogg refused with a “tut-tut. The history of the place is what’s fascinating, not the fairy tales.”

  Elizabeth Maxwell-Hunter (another one of those pedigreed women), however, was much more into the fairy tales of the place.

  The lover, Elizabeth, held a séance there one Halloween, and his parents attended. They went, because not only were this couple of so-called spinsters two of the most interesting people in the town, and both rich, gorgeous, and different—they were charming.

  He remembered that he'd gone trick or treating in Silver Hollow, which, back then, was an active but small community. Chet was only five years old, climbing up onto porches in his big-boy bandit costume, holding his pillowcase open and greeting neighbors with a voice so small they had to strain to hear him. The people he greeted laughed and gave him everything from sweets from Haverty’s to caramel apples. He remembered the apples wrapped in cellophane and tied with orange or red satin bows. With each visit, his mouth watered but he remembered his manners, gave a whisper of thanks, and hopped away from each house.

  Then, he had to stay in with his big sister (who was nineteen and had just gotten a job as a secretary down at Hudson's law offices in the next town over). She helped him bathe, count his candies and treats, have a handful of his loot, and then put him in his jammies. Chet could still see the Sunny Train pattern hand-embroidered on the faux pocket of the red flannel.

  Gretchen told him a Halloween bedtime story where a brave constable saved a young boy from werewolves with his silver bullets. He closed his eyes, the bed turning into a fishing boat, rocking among the stars, circling the pregnant, glowing moon—where a werewolf howled in the far off distance, then sang of mares and does eating oats.

  When he woke up with the sun shining through his window and forcing little Chet’s eyes to open, a brick had settled into his stomach—maybe the candy was no good. Beads of sweat covered his brow, and his mouth was dry. He swallowed sand and thought that the sandman must have missed his eyes or used too much of his sleeping dust.

  The little boy in the Sunny Train jammies climbed down the stairs to a silent house, rubbing the grit out of his eyes. Every morning the house was full of activity, even after his parents had returned from a party. There was the clattering of dishes, the smells of bacon and eggs for breakfast and fresh coffee brewing in the percolator on the all-gas stove.

  But not that morning. That morning, his parents were not at the table, and his sister, pale and drawn, was sitting there, wringing her hands and staring into space.

  “What's wrong, Gretchen?” he asked, his voice smaller than even last night, when shyness had taken over his throat. This time, it was dread’s icy cold hand clinched to his neck, squeezing the air out of him.

  Gretchen looked up and pushed her long blonde bangs away from her eyes—an automatic movement, as if she was in a trance. She turned to him, sniffed, and said in a stuffy, full voice, “Mom is in the hospital. Something happened last night.”

  Chet didn't understand. If she was in the hospital, then wasn't she going to be okay? That's where sick people got better, they'd always told him. Why was Gretchen crying?

  Mommy hadn't gotten better, and his father never talked about what happened. Chet never asked. His father had been an open man with his children, but that was one subject he refused to discuss—except to forbid Chet and Gretchen to go near that house or have anything to do with the people who lived and boarded there.

  So they didn’t.

  Chet learned why later on, when his father passed away.

  On his deathbed, he'd called for Chet, who was a young deputy at the constable's office back then. Ever the obedient son, he did as his father said, even if it didn’t settle with him.

  Chet shied away from death and hospitals, and the house his father was in (which was right down the street from the damned Asylum-House) was a mix of everything that made Chet want to scream and run away. But he went just the same. Max Callfield was his father, and he would show respect—the man continued to take care of him, even after Lisette Callfield was long in the ground. Though Max was never the same, he didn't become a monster or wind up beat
ing on them. He was just a shadow of a person afterward, eating tomato sandwiches for fun.

  “You have your mother's eyes,” Max said to Chet. Chet smiled.

  “Yes, sir, she willed them to me.”

  Max coughed and shook his head. “Got an answer for everything, boy. But I have little time left, and I need to tell you some things.”

  Chet turned serious and pulled his chair closer, cursing himself for wanting to pull away from the acrid odor of shit and vomit, the stench of death looming over his father like a cloud of Perdition. But he stayed in one place, so his father didn’t have to struggle to speak above a whisper.

  His father sat up as best as he could, and leaned toward his son, closing the gap between the two of them with the stench of rot mixed with antiseptics clinging to the air.

  Max put his hand up and touched Chet's shoulder. Chet was a child again. Helpless to stop the Grim Reaper from claiming his prize, helpless to lose yet another loved one. First, his mother, when he was five, under strange circumstances, then Gretchen, who'd died when she was twenty-eight, due to sudden cardiac arrest. Not that it made a lick of sense to Chet—it never would. It had something to do with this damn house he was standing in front of now. His instincts told him that then, when he was only fourteen-years-old—that’s when Gretchen died, and he trusted that.

  Max had not taken his daughter’s death well, and things got worse. That was when the drinking started. He’d drown himself in booze every night just to get himself to sleep, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, hopeful he’d set himself on fire. This kept up for six months, until one night, in a fitful frenzy, the man tried to burn down Dubbs House—a can of gas in one hand and a book of matches in the other. The plan failed when he got to the driveway and broke his ankle.

  That seemed to sober him up (in the figurative sense), but it seemed to Chet that he still blamed the house, too. It was there, in his eyes, whenever someone mentioned the place, and whenever he had to go near it to leave town. Whether he would admit that to his son was another thing, but Chet was an observant man, and he knew his father’s signals, if not the thoughts behind them.

  The son patted his father’s side, waiting for the old man to speak between the wheezes and rattles.

  “Listen, son, I have to tell you about your Mother, and what happened that night,” his father said at length.

  “Dad, you don't have to do this—you—” Chet said, feeling his ears warm and cheeks turn red as that icy grip tightened around his throat, silencing him.

  “Don't interrupt me, Chester Emmett Callfield. Listen close. I owe this to you. You were a little tyke then, and you deserve to know the truth of what happened that night.”

  Max told Chet the events of that evening, from the séance held by the enigmatic Elizabeth Maxwell-Hunter, to the events leading up to his mother's death. He let his father talk as Max described events he said he couldn’t bring himself to believe, and Chet had wanted to tell him not to hold back, but said nothing.

  That was when Chet found out that his mother never made it to the hospital alive. His father said she disappeared into the Asylum-House. There was no body buried in her plot because they never recovered one.

  Chet shook his head, unable to speak. Unable to believe what his father had told him. That morphine drip must have been something else, he started to say, but held back, unwilling to hurt his father’s feelings. The old man was hallucinating a memory for him, and it was coming out as a haunted house deathbed confession.

  But now that Chet, seventy-five-years-old, was standing at the front porch, his father's strange tale and his sister's death came back to him.

  Phil was in that house, nowhere in sight, his van messed up and things thrown askew, work boot tracks in the dust that accumulated thick on the old graying paint. Everything seemed to conspire to make the constable sick, his stomach rolling as if to tell him that danger was near, and he should vomit to make it go away.

  Even though Chet was over ten years past retirement, he was young in body and in good health. He'd outlived two doctors (his pediatrician didn’t count) and his third young internist told him he had the health of a forty-five-year-old man. He inherited that from his mother's side of the family—both his mother's parents lived into their early hundreds.

  Chet realized now that had been rough for them. They outlived their only daughter. Now, Chet wondered, if he would outlive his own son, a frown creasing his features as he tried to push the thoughts away and consider the matter at hand.

  Perhaps his mother would still be alive today if that—no—he clenched his fists and grunted to himself as he forced his attention back to the house and what he might find inside.

  Chet took a deep breath and climbed the beaten wood of the front porch and used his flashlight to push the door the rest of the way open. He stepped across the threshold, treading as if on ice during a spring thaw, as if the house might sense him and swallow him whole, as it did his mother.

  “Hausmann, you in here?” Chet asked, his shout hoarse as it reverberated off the walls, making an echo that sounded like it was mocking him.

  He waited.

  Silence.

  Chet had never been in the house before and always sent his deputy to chase out the squatters and drifters, or chase away the kids who shouldn't be anywhere near this place. Not that kids were a problem these days. The town was dying again, and the children were the first to go.

  This house killed my mother and my sister and now it wants more, he thought, then pushed it away.

  Now he had to find Phil, but this place was enormous. The foyer was bigger than his bedroom, and the stairs that led to the bedrooms/patient rooms (what a morbid place) loomed over him. A nagging sensation tugged between his shoulder blades, like when someone watched him during practice on the gun range. But who was watching him here? The unseen observer sent a chill washing over him, gooseflesh erupting over his arms and shoulders.

  He had his service pistol, and his pepper spray. An old house wouldn’t intimidate him from finding this young man and the woman that Phil was trying to help. Fuck’s sake, Chet, it’s only a house, he admonished himself.

  Sweeping through the main room, the kitchen, and down to the sunken dining area, he saw nothing, at first. All he could smell was dust, ozone, and the odor of almost-dried paint hanging in the air, a heavy blanket of chemical stench. His head throbbed.

  Out of the corner of his eye, a shadow passed. Chet turned, saw nothing, and shook his head.

  Fuck this place.

  The wind kicked up outside, scattering leaves everywhere, crying through the trees.

  “Hausmann?”

  Still no answer. Just the creaking and groaning of a settling house.

  With a grunt he saved for when he was forced to do chores, Chet made his way up the stairs. CRACK! The noise made him jump, and he fell backwards down the steps, catching the railing to prevent him from falling down more than one.

  It was his radio. Postman was calling him.

  “Constable, come back,” the young man’s voice sounded static-filled and staccato.

  “Callfield here,” Chet said. His voice was as mild and steady as ever, despite his racing heart and the urge to shit his guts out.

  “No sign of Phil or the woman. There appears to be some blood in the back of the van,” the deputy’s voice cracked at the word blood. It was climbing in pitch as if he were holding back a scream.

  Chet sighed. “Copy that. Get an investigator’s team out here from Centerville and tape off the area.”

  “Ten-four, sir,” George said. Silence fell once more.

  Chet’s legs grew heavy as he neared the landing, and he slowed his pace, that pull of dread stronger than ever. It wasn’t anything but his instincts talking to him, the way they’d done for as long as he could remember. There was a quick whoop of a siren in the distance

  At the top of the stairs, he found Hausmann, battered and bloody, but his chest was rising and falling. Chet leaned over to
listen to his breath and to feel for a pulse. It was faint, but there.

  But where was the girl?

  “Paramedics!” Distant voices, footfalls faint and the metallic crash of a gurney rolling over the threshold came from below.

  “Upstairs,” the old man said, raising his voice. “One male, forty-six years old; female nowhere to be found.”

  The medics hurried up the stairs and worked on Phil right away, busy chattering at each other to start a line and get a backboard as Chet searched the maze of other rooms for the girl who vanished.

  Maybe the place ate her.

  The layout of Dubbs House, regardless of the fact it was a bed-and-breakfast as its last incarnation, was far more like a hospital than anything else. The rows of rooms stretched out forever in front of him. It made him dizzy to look at it. Even larger than it looked from the outside.

  Chet walked from room to room, hand on the butt of his gun, which felt slippery. But the gun wasn’t covered in oil, no—it was the sweat from his palm.

  It took the girl like it took my mother and Gretchen, he thought, beads of perspiration gathering on his face. He kept going in spite of his ever-increasing heart rate. There was no sign of the girl in any of the rooms.

  He turned away, leaving the other rooms unchecked. Chet was coming back with George in a minute to come help him do a sweep of the rooms. The junkie or whatever she was didn’t leave a trace that the constable could see.

  A noise.

  Quiet sobs from the room at the end of the hall.

  “You've got to be shitting me,” he said under his breath.

  He headed for the room faster, lungs expanding to their limits to calm his heart. Inhale, exhale. Again and again as his heart thrummed, then slowed, obeying the flow of his breath.

  Pushing the door open with a timid hand, he expected to see what the dispatcher’s call had described—a naked, confused girl, maybe a junkie, needing help.

  What he saw almost pushed him into the arms of the Maniae. His mind reeled as he recoiled at the sight.

  The woman he saw was dressed as if she was going to a high-society soiree or dinner. But it wasn't the fact she was dressed, or weeping—it was that she looked like Lisette Callfield—a clone of his mother. The woman was staring off, toward a point to his right and behind him, and he shuddered. It was as if he wasn’t even standing there.