A Home by the Sea (A Supernatural Suspense Novel)

by Saunders, Craig

  *

  Her whole family were there in the Black Room. A family of the dead, a grotesquery, a tableau of slaughter.

  Jonathan sat on Irene’s lap. Her baby looked up at her, no longer a toddler but just a little baby. His lips were blue. He had livor mortis on his back, livid purple and full of dead blood. Around his neck was a thick knot of flesh where he’d been strangled by an umbilical cord.

  He’d been born dead, killed because of her stupid accident, or maybe he’d been dead before. It didn’t matter.

  Yes, yes it does, someone said, but nobody’s mouth moved.

  Paul was there, smashed to pieces, missing an arm and a leg...the pieces he’d lost when a lorry hit him. His face was barely recognisable, but for some reason he was naked and she recognised what remained of his body. His head sat in his lap and he held it there with his remaining hand. The first two fingers of his hand were missing, too. His hand slipped, and his head tumbled to the floor, but there was no sound in the...

  Dream. Dream of us ‘til you wake. You have to wake.

  Marc and David were rotten blotted corpses, holding hands. Marc was light, ethereal, almost transparent. David bore the wounds he had after death, in some sick twist of fate, doomed to spend the rest of eternity a husk, blind in whatever fucked up afterlife this was.

  You’re here, too, Irene. Remember?

  Her mother walked up to her, seemingly fine, until she tried to make a sweet noise at baby Jonathan. Irene realised her throat had been cut from ear to ear. The sweet baby noise came out as a gurgle, and blood splattered across her and the baby.

  Irene just smiled and wiped the blood from the baby’s eyes, happy because her family was with her at last.

  But where’s Sam, Irene. Where’s Sam?

  ‘I thought I’d never see you all again,’ she said.

  But no one could talk, because they were dead, weren’t they? They couldn’t come back, but she could.

  Then whose voice was she hearing? Who was whispering in her ear?

  In her dream she could feel the pain from her limbs and from her back. Such pain that she could not bear. She was drawn from her position, where she’d been sitting. Drawn high.

  Jonathan grew, though, to a toddlers size as she realised she was no longer sitting, but hung, swinging from hooks. Her arms were pulled back, stretching her shoulders painfully, and the toddler dropped from her arms to the floor. He pushed himself up and swung her, chuckling, while she screamed in agony from the hooks in her flesh. He pushed her like she would have done for his giggles on a child’s swing.

  Paul came and pushed from behind, somehow able to find his way and push even though he was decapitated, mutilated almost beyond recognition. She cried out in pain, in terror, in sorrow...but the dead did not care, her dark family just pushed all the harder.

  David and Marc and her mother all pushed and she swung and screamed until she woke and found that the dream was true.

  She hung from the hooks and Marc pushed her back and forth, smiling, grinning, with missing teeth and rotting lips.

  ‘Awake?’ he said. ‘Good.’

  He pulled a knife from his pocket and flicked it open. He held it before her eye.

  ‘Scream all you like. No one can hear you down here.’

  He cut off her right ear, and she did scream. She screamed until her throat was raw.

  *

  ‘You know, I always wondered what it’d be like. Hanging there. I never took a body from here. I think I’m going to have to take one soon, though. Marc’s not up to much. You queer boy friend’s falling apart on me.’

  He spoke into her ear, which he held in his hand. Blood ran in a heavy river down the side of Irene’s neck and onto her shirt, a blue cotton shirt that looked black in the heavy light and the blood.

  ‘I’m going to kill you,’ she managed, through such agony she never knew existed.

  ‘I don’t think you are,’ he said. He laughed, insane and cheerful.

  ‘I’m going to get my baby back,’ Irene managed, though the pain, towering, immense, threatened to pull her back under, into a dream populated by the dead.

  Sam hadn’t been in the dream because he wasn’t dead.

  He’s not dead.

  Just knowing that gave her the strength to smile at the madman holding her ear.

  It gave him pause for a second. She saw rage and confusion flicker across his face.

  Not yet.

  She let the smile sink down, confused herself. She was dying, probably, or would soon be dead. And yet she wanted to smile. Maybe she’d been driven insane, with the pain and sorrow. Maybe she was as insane as Franklin.

  ‘He’s upstairs. I don’t think he likes me. You can see him soon. He’ll be down here, in your place, though,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep him down here, ‘til he’s big enough, anyway. I’ll probably need a few bodies by then. Even with the mannequin close by, I’ll need a few more bodies. Fifty? A hundred? I confess, Irene, I don’t really know. Still, easy enough to get them. It’s not like there’s a shortage of people.

  ‘But I think I’ll fuck with you a little while, first.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ she spat. For some reason there was blood in her spit, too, and she felt a piece of tooth come flying out. She’d bitten down so hard against the pain she’d cut her mouth and cracked her own teeth.

  ‘No, honey,’ he said, and that hurt more than the hooks and the gaping hole where her ear had been, because it was what Paul used to call her. ‘I am going to kill you. But I don’t want to waste the chance to have a little fun.’

  Her sledgehammer was in the corner. He saw her looking at it.

  ‘That? You think you can get it?’

  No. She didn’t. But she couldn’t let him win.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I can, because I’m not hanging from hooks, see?’

  He held out his hands and wriggled his fingers.

  ‘Let’s play, shall we?’

  He walked to the corner of the room. Picked up the sledgehammer and she knew she’d lost.

  Not yet, said that voice. Not yet.

  Paul? Didn’t sound like Paul. But either way, all it did was make things worse, because there was no hope. Sam was alive, but she’d lost. There was no way to win.

  Pain to come, but no more sorrow, unless it followed her in death. She knew she was going to die now, and she’d been fooling herself to ever think she could do anything else against Franklin.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, for Sam, for all the dead that came because she’d fallen in love with Paul. But she couldn’t be sorry for that. Not ever, not even with Sam upstairs, beyond her hearing, even though she could feel him. Not even with Franklin coming at her with her sledgehammer, the one she’d fooled herself into thinking would smash him to pieces. But it was her that was going to feel its dull bite.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said again, and cried, her tears mixing with her blood, as he came at her.

  *

  ‘Let’s play a little game,’ he said while she sobbed. She didn’t want to beg but she would. Anything so he didn’t do it.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘I’ll do anything...I’ll...’

  He swung the hammer. Broke her shin. She screamed and screamed and then blacked out again.

  ‘Fuck,’ she heard him say as she drifted under...consciousness, wakefulness, was a murky pool, and she felt herself sinking, sinking to the bottom.

  As though from under thick scum filled water, she heard the hatch to the Black Room open and shut. She tried to swim back to consciousness, but she couldn’t.

  For a time, she closed her eyes and there was nothing, no thought, no pain, no love or anger or sorrow. Just...nothing...

  And then, they came to her and pulled her up.

  *

  Her family were there again, her rotten and dead family. In one instant they were pulling her through murky crud filled water and out into the air. Even though she knew it was just a dream before death, she still took a deep breath before she opened h
er eyes and looked around.

  She wasn’t beside a pool, in the open air. She was in the Black Room, still.

  She wanted to cry, but you can’t cry in a dream, you can’t cry when you’re hanging from rusted iron meat hooks looking down at the ruins of your ear on the floor and your body, swinging, surrounded by a morbid family gathering of mutilated dead. They swung her and swung her and though she understood now the pain to come she couldn’t wake, the pain was too much.

  But it wasn’t that they were being malicious. Paul, her beloved, looked infinitely sad, his head looking up from below, even though he stood behind and pushed. Jonathan, giggling, a toddler still, pushed her backward. Her mother, whom she’d never particularly liked, looked upon her with love, too.

  Marc and David held hands in this sick dream, and pushed at her with their free hands, pushed so hard that she swung like a small child on a swing, back and forth at an insane tempo, the agony from her limbs and her back growing and growing...

  ‘Wake up,’ someone said.

  That voice she didn’t know. It was none of her family. Not Jonathan, either. She knew Jonathan’s voice well enough, even though he would never speak.

  ‘Wake up!’

  No, no, no, she wanted to say, but the pain of swinging on the hooks was too much...too much. The only way to stop them swinging her was to wake...

  To wake...

  She woke, but there was no one there but her and the only person who could save Sam was her.

  She swung, still, from the dead pushing her in her dream. She put her own effort into it too, growling and biting down so hard she cracked her own jaw bone.

  Back and forth, swing, swing, honey, and that was Paul’s voice, in her head, driving her on before she passed out again because agony was her friend now and she knew how Paul got down from the hooks.

  Because he loved enough to take the pain. So did she. She swung, growling, blood pouring, flesh tearing, until she felt the hooks in her flesh pulling away, taking her flesh with them, and then she tore her back free completely. Her top half came free, the hooks ripping though her triceps first, then the weight of her upper body tearing the hooks from her hands, in between the flesh of her carpal bones, from the big trapezius muscles in her back, but leaving her legs hooked. She fell straight to the floor, not expecting it, not expecting it at all, and smashed her head into the black concrete floor.

  She swam down again, saying ‘no, no,’ over and over again.

  The pain was too much, but her family were there, pushing her, pulling her, trying to get her free.

  Jonathan, a toddler again, sat on his haunches and stroked her hair from her face.

  ‘Why?’ she asked, from within the dark.

  But she might as well have asked the sea.

  And while she sank down, the dead pulled on her ruined legs. Pulled hard enough to tear the last of her flesh free.

  *

  Irene came around from unconsciousness again, and her legs were free of the hooks. There was a fire in her limbs, something burning bright, and she remembered it was pain, but it was a kind of pain that had become part of her. She couldn’t walk, because he’d completely shattered her shin, but she could crawl. She crawled to the corner, under the stairs and took up the sledgehammer in her torn hands.

  It was her one chance. Her only chance. She knew she’d never get another.

  If you’ve made a mistake, if you’ve done something wrong, you better make damn sure you make it right.

  ‘Paul...’ she said, but her dead had deserted her now she was awake. She missed them. Wounds and all. But now she was like them. She was no longer whole. She raised her hand to the side of her head, but then she let her hand dropped again.

  The loss of an ear didn’t fucking matter.

  He mattered. The sledgehammer. Sam.

  Nothing else. Nothing else in the whole world but this moment and this place and this one last chance.

  She willed herself to stillness. Willed her hands to work on the sledgehammer, though they were slipping even on the rubber grip, slick with blood. The first two fingers on her right hand wouldn’t work, and she couldn’t stand. There was a fire in the side of her head and she was groggy from the blood loss. She could feel the break in her leg, a part of the pain, a scene in the whole of a movie, but she shut it down, concentrated on the smiling faces of her family, because suddenly they were back, just as dead, but she wasn’t alone down here in the dark.

  Then she realised it wasn’t dark. The light was still on.

  *

  He was coming. She heard his footsteps sounding out on the floorboards above. The light...a bulb hanging from the ceiling. He’d know. Of course. He’d see the space where she should have been hanging and he’d see her under the stairs and he’d know.

  But he came down the stairs and her family were there. Her family were always there, dead or alive.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘How...’

  She heard his feet crashing on the stairs as he ran down quickly in heavy boots.

  The light bulb dimmed momentarily as he stepped onto the last stair.

  ‘Bitch,’ he said, and turned, because he knew exactly where she was.

  But when the light went out and it became pitch black she remembered exactly where he was and he was disoriented. He didn’t see her or the sledgehammer as she slammed it down onto his foot.

  *

  She heard the crunch and then a scream, thought of Marc, but only for a second. Of course he hadn’t screamed – he felt no pain.

  But she could destroy him. She didn’t need his pain.

  She hit out again, missed, then threw herself forward and swung again, this time catching his knee cap as he fell to the floor.

  She was screaming the whole time, her throat already raw. Spittle flew from her mouth, and for a time, she wasn’t dead or alive, but in that space in between that few ever get to see. A space where there is light in darkness, over beyond the borders of sanity. Paul had known that place.

  Irene was there as she swung the hammer again.

  The light came on and he reached for her, but even from her crouch she could swing hard enough to break his shoulder, then his face. She swung again and again, until he could stand no more.

  She pulled herself away from her friend’s broken body, but the creature on the hard stone floor was no longer recognisable as her friend.

  ‘You fucking bitch,’ said Franklin, his words slurred. But he wasn’t a threat now. He was just a lump of hammered meat.

  She stood back, ignoring his words.

  She thought that maybe he spoke while she worked, but she wasn’t sure. At that point she heard so many voices it might as well have been silent.

  She might not have been able to stand, but then, neither could he. She made sure, though. She broke every limb, screaming from her own pain and rage as she swung the hammer again and again.

  There was hardly any blood because he was already dead.

  She didn’t have time to gloat, nor would she, because she couldn’t stand to look at Marc’s body, broken and shattered, there on the cold bloody floor of the Black Room.

  ‘Finish it!’ he shouted at her through the shards of his jaw and his teeth, but she was crawling up the stairs.

  ‘Finish it!’ he shouted again, and Irene felt a smile on her face. She didn’t like the feel of that smile. It felt like it was coated in oil. But she couldn’t shift it.

  She left him the sledgehammer.

  ‘Finish it yourself,’ she said.

  She flipped the hatch shut behind her.

  *

  Irene crawled through the house, dragging her shattered leg behind her, leaving a trail of blood along the old unwashed carpet in the hallway. She followed the sound of baby Sam’s wailing.

  He was upstairs, screaming so loud she worried he would hurt himself.

  She crawled up the stairs, each riser igniting fresh agony in her wounds. She was gushing blood from some of her wounds, still, but she wouldn�
��t give in. Not now. Not when she was so close.

  She felt her eyes slip shut at the top of the stairs, on the hallway landing, but Sam’s screaming pulled her back awake.

  She found him in Paul and Franklin’s father’s bedroom.

  She thought she couldn’t cry anymore, but she could. Sam was bellowing, a healthy wail. It wasn’t a scream of distress, but because he was soiled and hungry – she understood that Franklin hadn’t thought to feed Sam.

  She was going to bleed to death, but she couldn’t die. Not now. Not before Franklin was trapped forever.

  She’d never make it to the car. She couldn’t drive.

  But she didn’t need the fuel. She didn’t need to burn the house down. No one knew he was there. She could just block up the passage, and leave him to rot. He’d never heal, and she knew why.

  Because that stinking fucking mannequin was in the room and that was all she needed to finish this. She understood what it was. She understood why she heard the thump thump thump of a heartbeat every time she was near it.

  It was his jar, his canopic jar, with the most important organ of all inside.

  *

  She understood that it wasn’t just his heart housed in the fucking thing, but his essence, his evil. It was that which stank, not the rotten heart, but the putrid nature of a man that had slaughtered more than twenty people, and a man who would kill and kill if she didn’t finish it once and for all.

  Marc’s body was battered, destroyed, but could she guarantee he wouldn’t find some way?

  She smiled through cracked teeth at Sam and it seemed to calm him, though she wasn’t sure he could actually see her well enough to tell a smile, but he knew his mother was in the room. His mum. She’d always be a mum to him. Never a mother.

  That oily feel left her, and her smile was pure.

  The sledgehammer was in the basement, in the Black Room. She knew she couldn’t make it back down there. The fuel was in the car.