by John Everson
“Oh my God,” he cried as she grabbed him. “What happened? Who did this to you? Is there someone else here?” He had a vision of a knife-wielding maniac turning the corner and coming at them any second now.
She sobbed in his arms and he hugged her tighter. Her back hitched up and down frantically and he wasn’t sure if he should get her out of the house or call 911 first. Was somebody here? He needed to know what had happened.
“Jeanie,” he said. “Please. Try to tell me what happened.”
He could feel her sobs changing. Her back was vibrating faster, in fast panicked hitches and he gently pushed her away from his chest to see…
…that she wasn’t sobbing at all.
“Gotcha,” Jeanie cried. She threw her head back and let out a spurt of laughter that stopped her from speaking for a minute. When she finally regained control, she said, “Who did this to me? I did!” She fingered the flesh hanging from her face and with both hands pulled on it. It stretched like taffy.
“What do you think?” she said. “Pretty sick, huh?”
Bong pushed her away. “You are pretty sick,” he said. “I can’t believe you did that to me.” His voice rose louder than he ever spoke. His words trembled with emotion. “I thought you were really hurt. You had me scared to death for a second.”
“Then it worked,” Jeanie said. “That’s the best thing anyone has ever said to me!”
“That was mean,” Bong said, shaking his head. He could feel his legs still trembling. “Really uncool.”
Jeanie took his hand and pulled him closer to her again. “Oh, c’mon, don’t be mad. I needed to see if I could pull this off before I apply.”
Bong’s brow wrinkled. “Apply for what?”
Jeanie grinned. “They’re opening a haunted house this fall near Midlothian and they’re auditioning for makeup people. I want to do it. You know I’ve always wanted to do horror makeup.” She hung her head and made puppy-dog eyes at him.
They were disconcerting when she had a slab of flesh still hanging off her face. The juxtaposition of cuteness and gore almost made him laugh, and Bong couldn’t help but grin. “You could totally get the makeup gig,” he said. “But don’t ever do that to me again.”
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” Jeanie said. She reached up and yanked on the fake slab of flesh. It separated from her cheek with a rubber-band effect, slapping against the back of her hand.
“I won’t ever do that again,” she promised. “But…could you do one thing for me?”
Bong raised an eyebrow. “Maybe. It depends.”
“C’mon,” she said. “I said I’d be good.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t say what you wanted me to do.”
“I need someone to practice on. It’s hard to do good zombie effects on yourself. This took forever.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “What do I get in return?”
Jeanie pressed her hips hard to his and licked the tip of his lips. “I can think of a few things.”
“Hmmm….” he said. His voice betrayed his interest. Jeanie didn’t waste the moment.
“I signed up for an audition on Thursday,” she said. “So, I really do need to practice. Could we stay in tonight?”
Bong thought of the potential payoff at the end of the night, and decided that a couple hours in the makeup chair would probably be worth it. Jeanie could be on fire when she was in the mood.
“Okay,” he sighed. “Whatever you want.”
She smiled. Kind of a weird smile, since she had painted teeth on her cheek. It was like he could see her whole jaw through half her face.
“But you have to wipe that makeup off first,” he said. “It’s too creepy to look at you that way.”
“I can do that,” she agreed. “By the way, what are you doing on Thursday?”
“Why?” he asked.
“I need to show off my work so I get the job, silly. That means you get to come with me to the audition.”
Jeanie grabbed his hand and dragged him down the hallway toward the bathroom.
Bong kept up a smile, anticipating the ‘payoff’ to come later. But inside…he was groaning.
Chapter Four
There were now piles of 2x4s, fresh pine flooring planks and some crossbeams next to the abandoned house near the cemetery, which wasn’t looking quite so abandoned anymore. Mike’s friend Aaron had helped him lug the wood down here after filling up the back of a pickup truck at Home Depot, and now Mike would be spending the next few weeks installing it all. With what Perry was paying, he couldn’t afford to pay for help to put it in, but he couldn’t have gotten it all down here from the turnpike on his own.
For a little while, during the load-in, this gig had felt great. He was working again. Something was happening. He’d make rent again this month.
But now, as he stood in the overgrown clearing, in front of a dilapidated old house, half-obscured by trees…he felt lost. Lonely. Isolated.
Mike was completely on his own, both here and at home. It wasn’t a feeling he enjoyed. Though it was one that he’d been forced to get used to since Mia had walked out last Christmas.
He started to whistle, some new pop song he’d heard on the radio just now on the drive over. But that whistle died out, quickly. It sounded false here. He felt as if he was intruding. This place had stood as it was for decades without anyone living here. And now he was changing it.
Part of him felt as if the trees themselves were watching him. And disapproving.
Mike shook it away and took his hammer to the rotted boards that comprised the porch of the old house. He’d be going in and out of this place all summer, so he might as well make sure he was not going to break a leg while doing it. So rebuilding the entryway came first.
It was also somehow comforting to be working for a while outside the house, rather than in, where every sound echoed. Where the air smelled of age. And forgotten history. Unseen death. Hidden witchcraft.
When he’d called Perry to tell him about the hidden room, his friend had assured him that whatever witchcraft or devil worship had gone on in the house had happened and stopped long ago. “No worries,” Perry had said. “That shit’s from like, the ’60s and ’70s when the teenagers and weirdos got in there. That’s when all those gravestones were knocked over, and that’s why the police have protected the place all these years. Keep that riff raff out.”
And then Perry had laughed. “Now we’re going to invite the riff raff in! Hey, make sure you open that back wall to the hidden room in the hallway, so that we can have easy access to the stairs to the basement. I don’t know that we’ll want people going through the bookcase in the den to get there…though you never know.”
Mike wedged a crowbar between a sagging gray plank and the post that supported it, and with one long creak, the board separated and popped. Perry’s story of devil worshippers hanging out in the cemetery and the house kept coming back to him. He imagined women with black capes and long silver blades walking in and out across these boards, with God knows what victims waiting in fear in the secret room inside….
He shook the thoughts away, and pulled the board free. It was just the first of many boards quickly lifted and thrown aside. In just over an hour, he’d stripped all of the surface wood, and piled it up in the long grass nearby. Most of the surface planks had come off easily; some crumbled to pieces instantly at the first prod of the crowbar. The side posts, amazingly, still seemed solid enough. He decided to simply reinforce them with new inner boards and use them, rather than replace, which would save a couple days. He pushed against a couple and they didn’t move much.
Mike shrugged. A couple crossbeams on those, and the new deck would easily support throngs of people stomping up his new stairs and walking into the house of horrors that was about to be constructed. He couldn’t rationalize spending any more time out here. He began to
measure and mark and cut. Board by board, the new entryway to the house was born. When Mike was ‘on’, he was good. By four o’clock, he was done with the new deck to the old house. He could have improved its footprint and built a longer deck, but that wasn’t the mission. People only needed to line up and get in the front door. And now it was time to get past that. Because the easy work was done. Mike had to go inside the house. Where the bugs lived.
Where the rot awaited.
Where, according to the stories, a witch once lived.
Mike stepped across the new porch and nodded. It felt good.
Solid.
Then he opened the door and stepped into the foyer. The sunlight slipped away and the temperature dropped about ten degrees. Part of him whispered that this wasn’t simply because the house was holding the cool air still from overnight. He remembered the things in the room behind the bookcase. Bad shit had happened here. Of that, he had no doubt.
He walked down the hall and looked again at the hole in the kitchen floor. He frowned. He should probably start on this room next. Cure the obvious structural problems and stop any critters from climbing up from the basement.
Something creaked upstairs. Almost like a door opening.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. He swore he heard footsteps above his head.
Mike cocked his head to listen closer. They couldn’t be footsteps. But…it could be an animal. Maybe a raccoon had come through the roof. “Shit,” he whispered. Something creaked up there again, and his vision of a raccoon sniffing around evaporated. That didn’t sound like an animal.
He took a deep breath and then quietly stepped out on the new deck to grab his crowbar. He wasn’t going upstairs without something to swing. No matter what it was. Mike took the stairs slowly, one at a time. He tried not to make them creak and give away his presence. Of course, the steady pounding outside for the last few hours should have done that handily anyway.
Still.
Mike reached the seventh and then eighth step. He realized he was holding his breath. His head poked above the floor of the attic, and he raised the crowbar, ready to strike, not sure what to expect. He stepped quickly through the threshold.
The room was empty.
He looked across from the dusty bureau to the boxes stacked on the other side, and watched the dust motes lazily cascade through the air in the beam of sunlight that streamed in through the small attic window.
He let go of his breath, slowly. Then he stepped onto the old plank floor. The wood creaked, and he looked back and forth across the expanse of the attic. He couldn’t see anything but old boxes and chests. He walked down the center of the space, holding the crowbar at the ready, in case something jumped out from behind a box. Something fast. With teeth.
Nothing did.
He walked back and forth twice, to convince himself that there was nothing here.
He returned to the stairwell, and then passed it to walk just beyond the old bureau. There was just a small space behind it, but he looked.
Nothing.
Mike shrugged. Maybe there was an animal in the eaves somewhere. He could push Perry to have someone deal with that. All he needed to worry about was carpentry on the inside of the old house. Not pest removal.
He returned to the stairs, and was just about to step down them when a glimmer on the floor caught his eye. He must have stepped right over it on the way up.
He bent down and picked up a silver chain with a small locket in the shape of a heart attached.
Weird that he hadn’t seen it before.
He opened the clasp on the locket and saw a black and white photo of a young woman’s face, faded almost beyond recognition. Mike shrugged and thumbed it closed before slipping it into his jeans pocket. Then he descended the stairs, looking frequently over his shoulder.
Something just didn’t feel right.
When he turned away from the last step at the bottom of the stairs, someone spoke.
“Hi there,” a cool, girlish voice said.
Mike nearly jumped out of his skin. She stood just to the left of the old stairway. A slim young woman with dark black hair, deep brown eyes and an obvious spark of energy that could melt the shield of a blizzard. Her smile made his lips shift.
“Um…hey,” he answered.
There was another woman, he belatedly realized, standing behind her. This one could have been a case study in opposites; she was heavyset, with long, tangled brown hair. Her face looked lifeless. No energy. Even her eyes were dull. She was the epitome of a wallflower; she seemed to literally blend into the background.
“What are you doing here?” Mike asked the first girl, stumbling over his tongue. She might be cute…but she didn’t belong here. This was a construction site. He wanted to be firm, but his voice didn’t carry the stick.
She didn’t seem to notice his discomfort. “I just wanted to see what it was like,” she said. “I heard you were going to turn this into a haunted house for Halloween.”
Mike nodded. “That’s the plan.”
“So…where will you put the dead bodies?” she asked. She put a hand up to her face to stifle the snort.
“They won’t really be dead,” Mike said.
“Ahh,” she answered. “They won’t?”
“No one ever really dies,” he said.
“Well,” she said. “I don’t know about that.”
She pulled a long silver blade from the back of her shorts. “When something like this goes in…it doesn’t usually come out the same way.”
Mike grinned…but it was a nervous grin. His grip on the crowbar tightened.
She laughed and tossed the blade at his feet. “Don’t wet yourself,” she said. “It’s fake.”
He picked it up and realized that yes, it was just a plastic toy.
“Isn’t that the kind of thing you’ll be using in here when the haunted house opens?” she asked. “Toy knives? I just picked it up on the side of the turnpike.”
He dropped the knife back on the floor and looked at her with his sternest expression. “You shouldn’t be here.”
She laughed.
“No, you shouldn’t be here,” she said. “But we can work around that. I won’t tell anyone.”
Mike shrugged. “Um, I was hired to be here, so yes, I absolutely should be here,” he said. “You, on the other hand, are definitely trespassing. But I guess it doesn’t matter anyway – nobody cares much about this place outside of Halloween.”
“Well, then it all works out,” she said.
“I suppose it does,” he said. “Who’s your friend?”
“This is Emery,” the girl said. “And I’m Katie.”
He held out his hand. “I’m Mike,” he said. “Glad to know you.”
Katie nodded and squeezed his palm tight. Her touch gave him a shiver.
“You will be,” she said. She sounded confident. It made him nervous.
He held out his hand to Emery, but she did not reciprocate. After a moment, he dropped his arm back to his side.
“You really shouldn’t be in here,” Mike said again. “It’s dangerous.”
She shrugged. “I wanted to see what the place was all about,” she said. “I heard it’s haunted.”
Mike nodded. “It has a bad reputation,” he said. “And I guess, this Halloween, we’re only going to make it worse.”
Katie grinned. “I like the sound of that.”
Her friend didn’t say anything.
Mike pointed toward the front door. “Sorry, but you guys really have got to go now.”
Katie pouted and crossed her arms. She didn’t budge.
“Seriously,” Mike said. “I’ve got work to do here. I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait until Halloween if you want to see this place.”
“Do I have to wait until Halloween to hav
e a beer with you?” Katie asked.
“Are you asking me out?” he said. His voice couldn’t hide his incredulity.
Katie shrugged. “I don’t know about out,” she said. “But we could sit on that nice new porch you built.”
“We could,” he admitted. “But there are no tables or chairs. Or bartenders.”
“All we need is beer,” she said. “What’ve you got in there?” she pointed at the red cooler sitting at the entrance to the kitchen. Mike had honestly gotten so wrapped up in the porch, he’d forgotten he’d even brought it.
He nodded, walked over to it, and popped the lid. The thought of having a beer with this intriguing (and damned cute) woman made him suddenly reconsider doing any further work today. “Don’t know how lowbrow your taste buds are,” he said. He held up a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon.
Five minutes later the three of them were sitting on the new planks of the deck, staring at the dark gray wood of the ancient house. Mike emptied half of his first can in about three gulps. Emery followed his example, but Katie only seemed to toy with hers.
“What do you normally like to drink?” he asked.
She grinned, looking at him with those wide brown eyes. They melted him, instantly. “Whatever’s handy,” she said. As if to prove a point, she took a slug of PBR.
“Do you live around here?” he asked.
Katie shrugged. “Not far. You?”
He nodded. “I’ve got a place in Oak Forest.”
“Girlfriend?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“Hey, we have something in common,” Katie said. “Blissfully single!” She tapped her can to his. “Cheers!”
He drank. And quickly popped another. He didn’t even look at the can. He couldn’t take his eyes off the girl.
Katie said she was twenty-three and liked baseball. Emery answered a few questions, eventually admitting to being twenty-six and also single, but really didn’t say much of anything, though he tried to politely draw her out now and then. When he mentioned movies or music or other potential interests, she just smiled and answered in monosyllabic shy yeses and nos. He eventually gave up trying to pull her into the conversation and just focused on Katie, who at some point popped him yet another beer, and sat with her hand on his thigh as the sun began to set. Eventually, when the words grew slurry and the belly painfully full, he excused himself to take a leak at the side of the house.
