No Doors, No Windows

by Joe Schreiber

  “It’s coming,” Owen whispered. “Red, I hear it! It’s coming toward us!”

  “Shut up,” Red muttered, more harshly than he’d intended. For the first time since Delia’s death and the subsequent investigation, he felt a tickle of true fear in the pit of his belly, sickly and humiliating.

  In the darkness, Owen screamed.

  THIRTY SECONDS—THE AMOUNT of time it took Scott to get back to the kitchen and find a rusty teapot that he could use as a hammer. Anything could be a tool, or a weapon. In the right helping hands.

  Whose hand is holding on to you?

  Wham. Crash. The hole grew slightly bigger. As a bludgeon, the kettle was hardly ideal, but at least it had a handle and a sharp edge to pound against the shattered plaster at the back of the closet, widening the opening that he’d begun with his fists.

  Wham. Crash. Bigger.

  Now the hole was large enough—a crooked oblong like the giant outline of an old man’s misshapen head—and Scott reached in and started clawing out whole chunks of dusty white material, tearing down the wall in slabs. It came readily, willingly, eagerly even. Air gushed out, as if he’d opened a dam of invisible water, and he breathed it in—it was as cold as helium vapor. He gasped, his breath ghosting out of him in shades of gray and silver.

  The odor hit him immediately.

  It was like nothing he’d ever smelled before. Moldy, rotten, fetid—a heavy physical shape that he could carve from the air and slap down on a petri dish for further study. It didn’t belong anywhere near his nostrils or throat or lungs; it felt as if he were breathing in vaporized particles of actual human tissue. Scott gagged into a half-coiled fist, covered his mouth, clung to the hole he’d knocked in the wall.

  In front of him, only blackness, with the odd, inarguable sense of vast open space, as if a whole hidden house were inside the walls.

  Visibility—none.

  Flashlight—no.

  Something inside him murmured: You don’t belong here.

  Yet how could he walk away now, when he was so close to finding out what might be on the other side? He thought of the blueprints that Colette had brought over, left somewhere back in the main entryway. But what good would they be if he couldn’t see?

  I’m not going in there alone in the dark, I’m just not, no way, that’s all.

  Almost unconsciously, his hand sank in his pocket, found the heavy, rectangular shape of his father’s lighter. He brought it out and thumbed the wheel, shooting first sparks and then a high, bright flame, and stared at the flickering space that was revealed.

  The long, rounded corridor in front of him seemed to stretch on forever.

  It was sparse and plain and narrow, with a curved concrete floor and smooth, almost circular black walls that didn’t look as though they’d been painted black but were somehow sculpted out of naturally black material—some substance that literally absorbed light. There were no doors and no windows. Although the passageway appeared to be straight, there was definitely some bend to it, some winding quality just outside the lighter’s glow.

  Seeing it here in front of him, as real as it was, brought on an entirely new species of self-doubt. It occurred to him that this space, which existed exactly as it was described in his father’s manuscript, might have been the last thing that the men in his family had seen before they finally lost their minds. Now he was seeing it too. He’d witnessed it once before and then snapped back to consciousness to realize that it was all a hallucination, but what if that last time had been a final warning, one he should have heeded? If he’d just put the manuscript away then, stopped working on it, and stopped thinking about Faircloth and his relationship to Rosemary Carver and her father—

  Faircloth was a serial killer, and this was where he brought his victims.

  But it wasn’t really Faircloth, was it? No, Faircloth was nothing more than a puppet, a fictional character imbued with something much darker.

  Scott pushed his way into the hole he had created, entering the black wing beyond.

  He looked around, the corridor broadening so that he could no longer see the walls on either side. His foot bumped into something on the floor, a solid object that he almost tripped and fell over, and he bent down to study it. It was a leather shoe with the laces removed, age-rotted and smothered in dust. How old was it? He had no idea. Just beyond, the widening space slanted leftward. He turned, and a marking on the wall caught his eye—scratched into the black surface at shoulder level.

  Scott held the lighter closer and saw that it was a date, eighteen hundred something. The rest was too worn away to decipher, or wiped away, as if someone had attempted an imperfect scrubbing job. As he looked down again to make sure he wouldn’t trip, he saw a huge brown stain on the concrete, splattered out in every direction, and knew instinctively that it was a starburst pattern of dried blood as old as the floor itself.

  He followed the passageway to the left, stepping carefully, and almost ran into the set of steel bars, like the door of a cell. It wasn’t locked, and as he pulled it open, the high creaking sound of old iron grating in his ears, he felt speckles of rust flaking onto his hands. On the other side was the biggest space yet. Within seconds, he grasped the layout, despite the flickering insufficiency of the lighter’s flame.

  Oh no.

  The chamber was divided into stalls on either side, not as black as the walls surrounding them. They had heavy wooden doors equipped with bolts that locked from outside. Inside each stall, Scott saw dirty floor and rusty chains bolted directly into the walls, with heavy manacles at the end of them. Tin bowls and cups, dried out for over a century, lay in the corners in the dust of old straw. One stall had a ragged, colorless shape he didn’t recognize at first; upon closer inspection, it became a child’s doll. Above it, on the pale wooden wall, was written:

  The Lord is my Shepherd I Shall not Want He Leadeth me

  The crooked, spidery letters trailed away to nothing.

  Scott looked ahead. Up at the far end of the room was a long workbench, its corners carefully sanded off. As he approached it, he began to make out the shapes of tools, carefully organized for convenient access. Here were the sharp edges that he’d found nowhere else in Round House: axes, drills, a whole arsenal of hammers and chisels and clamps, pliers and wrenches, pincers and screws. Beyond that were archaic instruments that seemed to require some new vocabulary to describe—an awl, an adz, things even older and more arcane, items that hadn’t been named since their invention a thousand years ago. Tools defined only by the hellish extremes of torment they inflicted on their victims. There was a stove, like a smithy’s forge, an array of black rods standing in formation next to it—brands, pokers, and long, clawed metal andirons. A bellows and a sack of something slick and crumbled that he supposed might at one time have been coal. Hanging from a hook above it was a leather apron with thick straps and heavy metal buckles, stained so thoroughly with layers of dried brown that it probably would have stood up stiffly all by itself.

  Scott picked up one of the hammers, a blocky thing with a spiked steel head, and looked at the name burned into the wooden handle:

  FAIRCLOTH

  The lighter flickered and then brightened again. Now the handle read:

  MAST

  With the hammer still in his hand, he looked back around at the stalls, realizing only now how many there were—how big this room had been made, in order to accommodate all its occupants. Eight stalls with two sets of chains dangling in each stall. He imagined his oldest relative back here, Joel Townsley Mast at the beginning of the family line, tending his secret life by the light of the forge. He would be dressed in the leather apron and perhaps nothing else, illuminated in that hivelike orange glow; sweating as he went about his work amid the screams and pleas and sobs that came from the stalls around him.

  Scott’s foot clanked over something, and he looked down to see a square trapdoor constructed of heavy wood with an iron ring.

  He grabbed the ring and pulled. />
  It was too heavy. He couldn’t lift it, couldn’t even budge it.

  One last try. He grunted, felt the muscles in his lower back and shoulders aching in protest. Then, unexpectedly, the door popped up, the ancient hinges squealing as the slab of wood was flung open.

  Scott squatted down, the trapdoor balanced on his knee, and held the lighter down into the blackness, but it did no good. He saw only the very outer portion of a rusty metal pipe that ran straight down.

  It smelled damp down there.

  He could hear the soft but unmistakable gurgle of water—some kind of underground well, or …?

  It was inspired by an unfinished story that his great-grandfather had written, Aunt Pauline had said—

  In front of him, in the last of the stalls, something moved.

  He sucked in a gasp. The noise that he had heard was a slow crackling sound, and then it stopped. He thrust the lighter higher in the air, as if raising it might somehow make it brighter. Instead, the flame snuffed out completely.

  Oh God.

  Hands spread out from the darkness, stroking his face, cheeks, and the back of his neck like bundles of oily feathers. He couldn’t scream. The palms smothered the noise before he could make it. Reaching up to pull them away, he felt only open space, as insubstantial as cobwebs. In the blackness, other hands groped at him, sticky, searching, but every time he moved to free himself, he found nothing but empty air.

  The lighter—he still had it. He flipped the wheel, sparks flying, and in that instant, the faces flashed all around him, hollow-eyed, starved, stringy hair stuck to their skin, chained in their stalls awaiting further agonies or death. As one, their cracked mouths open to silently shape his name.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head.

  He ran, clumsily, half blindly, one arm outstretched in front of him, rounding the bend where the corridor curved, blundering upward toward the place where the black wing joined the rest of the house.

  As the voices of the house grew louder around him, Scott ran faster, his free hand clawing at his skin where he’d felt the hands touching him and, even now, feeling nothing there.

  OWEN STAGGERED BLINDLY in the dark woods, tripping and stumbling through the snow. His guts ached and his chest burned, but he kept moving, heedless of where he was going, knowing only that he had to get away.

  The touch of the hand on the skin of his neck had been leathery and damp, sour-smelling, edged with ragged nails. He could still feel how the fingertips had lingered under his chin, somewhere between a grab and a caress, tilting his head to expose his throat. Screaming, Owen had twisted around as if to look at the thing, but the night’s blackness filled his eyes to the brim.

  “Owen!” That was Red shouting out for him. “Get your ass back here!” There was a crash, and the other man cried out in pain and surprise. “Oh shit! What the hell? What the fuck?”

  Owen kept crashing along, arms outstretched, swiping aside pine boughs and branches. Whatever was behind him in the woods, he knew he had no real chance of outrunning it—not because he’d gotten a good look at it, even when it touched his throat, but simply because he knew what it was, on some primal level, had always known.

  It was the man.

  The man from Grandpa Tommy’s song.

  Tall man, tall man, dressed in black—

  Owen winced. A sharp branch speared the side of his face, raked a streak of pain into his cheek and brought tears to his eye. He was thinking about how foolish he’d been, how stupid to pick up that guitar and sing Grandpa Tommy’s song.

  Tall man, tall man, dressed in black—

  I’m the one who brought you back—

  Good God, had he invoked the thing by singing about it? He couldn’t remember why he’d felt compelled to do that. Something else had just taken over him, and up he’d gone without another thought, but …

  In the distance, he heard a laugh. He swung around, shoulders heaving, and stared back across the black terrain he’d just crossed. He couldn’t hear Red anymore, couldn’t hear anything at the moment except his own booming heart and labored breathing. His throat closed, his chest squeezing with panic.

  Damn it, this was bad. This was so bad.

  Tall man, tall man—

  His steps faltered, wobbling and disjointed, knees too weak to propel himself forward. Whatever was behind him in the woods, he could sense it growing silently closer, stalking him, as if it were herding him deeper into the forest. Toward what, and why?

  Fear struck a series of reverberating notes down his back. Abruptly he felt as if he were going to lose all control. Remembering the song that Grandpa Tommy had sung him made him feel even weaker and more afraid, a cowering child in an overgrown man’s skin. What was wrong with Grandpa Tommy anyway, that he had to sing that song to Owen when he was a kid, Grandpa’s face pale and scared like a junkie, stupid old fingers trembling so hard he could barely hit the right chords?

  Movement in the trees behind him now, branches crackling. Owen held his breath and was unable to repress a soft, nasal-sounding whimper. The noises got closer. This was it. Giving way to near hysteria, he felt a terrible looseness spreading through his lower abdomen, as if he were pissing himself or bleeding out. Feet shuffled off to his right, the muffled thump of boots in snow.

  “Owen—”

  Red staggered into him, practically bowling him over. Red’s fists found Owen’s coat, grasping its collar, dragging him down in a wet snowdrift.

  “Red?”

  “Stay low. You hear me?” The other man’s voice was a shaking whisper in his ear. “Don’t move.”

  “Red—”

  “I saw him,” Red hissed, “I can hear the son of a bitch. He’s back there in those trees.”

  “We have to get out of here.” Owen’s eyes felt as big as fishbowls, still not nearly big enough to take in the volume of the night. “It’s not human.”

  Red didn’t say anything. He hunkered down next to Owen in the snow, staring hard off at the copse of trees they’d just come through. Owen could feel the wind starting to rise up again from behind him, blowing back in that direction, and thought, It’s carrying our scent back to him. He’ll be able to smell us.

  Red elbowed him hard. “That way, over there.” He was clutching something that Owen hadn’t noticed before, what looked like a pocketknife, pointing deeper into the woods. “There’s a slope, the ground goes down into some kind of clearing. I can see lights down there.”

  Owen looked and saw them too, yellow and white that glimmered through the crooked branches like cheap jewelry. At the same time, the noises in the trees behind them started again, a graceless shambling sound coming toward them. Barely thinking, he pushed off, found his balance, and rose to his feet, swiveling and barreling forward toward the downward slope, in the direction of the lights.

  Don’t look back. Don’t look back.

  The snow grew almost instantly thicker beneath him, wetter, harder to navigate. He heard Red grunting after him, the bigger man laboring to cut a path. On level ground, Red would be faster, even in the dark, stronger, more agile, years of professional football making him innately more powerful.

  But this ground wasn’t level.

  Owen heard him fall.

  He looked back.

  In the second or two that he stood there gaping, he saw Red writhing around in the snow, trying to pull himself up. He’d done something to his leg, stumbled over a rock or root system hidden beneath the double treachery of snow and blackness, and twisted his ankle. He was muttering to himself, swearing, rubbing his leg, and struggling to regain his footing. Somehow he managed to stand and reach into his pocket for his cell phone, only to drop it again in the snow.

  “Fuck,” he said, and bent down again to look for it, laughing a little hysterically. He was still searching when the soft creaking noise up above sent a wet load of white slush sliding from one of the pine boughs.

  The trees behind Red opened up, branches pushed aside. At the sound of snapping
twigs, Red jerked his head around, mouth open to say something, and saw it. He tried to get upright, pawing at the snow, crawling forward. His head went up once, eyes meeting Owen’s. “Help me,” he said.

  Then the thing came down on top of him with a thick, wet ripping noise, like muddy carpeting being pulled up. Underneath it, Owen heard the sound of something heavy and lifeless dropping into the snow.

  He ran down the slope toward the lights.

  He didn’t look back again.

  SCOTT RAN BACK OUT of the black wing, the lights of the dining room hitting his eyes like blinding daylight. Slamming the oak door behind him, he scooped up the phone where he’d dropped it on the floor. The buttons were the size of pinheads, too small for his trembling fingers. Cell phones were not made for emergencies. He dialed.

  “Sheriff’s office.”

  “This is Scott Mast. I need to talk to the sheriff.”

  “Scott Mast, you said?”

  “Yes, yes—”

  “Can you spell that for me?”

  “M-A-S-T,” he almost shouted. “Mast, for God’s sake. I need to talk to Sheriff Mitchell, it’s an emergency.”

  There was a long pause, tinny music, and he realized he’d already been put on hold. He stood in the far corner of the dining room staring at the door. He needed to get away from here. He’d discovered what he’d gone to find—the wing itself, and the end of the story. Once the sheriff came out to look at the old addition, there would be investigations, perhaps even human remains located in the old stalls, certainly enough to—

  “Hello?” said a brusque voice, not one he recognized, though it had to be Lonnie Mitchell.

  “Yes, I need to report …” What? “I’m out here in a house north of town, and I found something you need to come out and see.”

  “We’re a little busy at the moment, Mr. Mast. Or haven’t you looked outside lately?”