by John Everson
By lunchtime, his face and back were completely drenched in sweat, but he had finished the attic area – he’d shored up the side walls and added new walls to barricade off sections of what had previously been one long room. He wiped his face with his sleeve for the fiftieth time, and surveyed the work.
Mike nodded. It was good.
So. Now he’d taken care of the attic and the basement. It was already August, and finally time to power through the main floor. The haunted house people would need to get in here soon to start decorating the place. Perry had hired a deep-cleaning crew to go through the place so at least Mike wouldn’t be running into piles of dirt and dust on every surface. But he would be replacing the floor in the kitchen and patching several walls where animals and leakage had taken their toll.
He picked up the saw and some wood and moved them downstairs. It took a couple more trips before he’d carted all of his equipment to the front room of the old house. He realized that he hadn’t seen Katie yet today and frowned. She’d been turning up every day by late morning, and here it was afternoon, with no sign of her. He hoped she wasn’t mad at him; last night, he’d put his arm around her and kissed her, and she hadn’t resisted…but when he’d slipped a hand up the back of her shirt and started moving his fingers to trace the line of her bra, she’d suddenly pushed him away and said no. He’d gotten frustrated and walked away to take a piss, and when he returned…no Katie.
Mixed signals. Always the story of his life, it seemed.
Mike shrugged, feeling defeated as always by women in general, and attacked the old yellow linoleum with a crowbar, peeling the stuff off the wood beneath a chunk at a time. By the time he had a sizeable pile stacked up, and was nearly done with the removal project, he heard a familiar voice.
“Looks like fun,” Katie said from behind him.
Mike straightened up with a groan. “Not so much,” he answered. “Where ya been?”
“Aw, did you miss me?” she asked.
“Could have used a hand, yeah,” he said.
She pouted. “So, I’m just an extra hand to you?”
Mike tilted his head and rolled his eyes. Then he reached out and slipped a hand around her thin waist. With a tug, he pulled her close to him.
“Not just an extra hand,” he said.
“Hmm,” she answered, and took his free hand and pressed it to her breast. “Just an extra chest?”
“Not just that either,” he said, but there was a catch in his voice. He could feel his jeans growing tighter.
“Tell me you missed me,” she said, and pressed her lips to his for just a second. Then she pulled away. “Tell me.”
“I missed you,” Mike said. “A lot.” In his head, he was thinking that she didn’t have any problems bailing out on him last night, but he held his tongue.
Katie smiled. “Good. I work for love.”
“Sounds like a Ministry song,” he said.
Katie only looked confused. Probably too young to catch the reference.
She shrugged. “I hope you don’t mind Emery helping out today. We were hanging out so I brought her along.”
“Sure,” he said, while inside he groaned. So…today she brought reinforcements. Why? To fend him off?
“Does she like tearing things apart?” He hefted the crowbar with one arm before holding it out.
Katie shrugged. “She’ll do okay.”
At that, a floorboard creaked in the hall outside. A moment later, Emery’s dour face peered around the corner. Mike thought she looked as if someone had kicked her dog. She did not look like she wanted to be here. Well, he thought, the feeling is mutual. I don’t want you here, either.
“Here she is,” Katie announced. “C’mon, Em. Mike wants you to help dig up the floor. You’re good at digging things up, right?”
The other girl said nothing, but moved forward to take the crowbar from her friend. Then she stood still, waiting for instructions.
“Do you have another one for me?” Katie asked.
Mike picked up a hammer and pointed to the teeth at the back. “You can use this. We’re just trying to peel up all the old flooring, so that I can get at the boards beneath. Most of this material needs to be replaced if we’re going to have hundreds of people walking back and forth through this room.”
He demonstrated swinging the hammer to catch at the old linoleum and pulling it up by the back of the hammer. After cracking off a couple squares, he handed Katie the tool. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “I should have something else we can use in the trunk.”
When he returned a couple minutes later, the two girls were both leaning over the hole in the floor, looking down into the basement.
“Not exactly where we need a window,” he said.
“What about a door?” Katie asked.
He shook his head. “Not that either.”
Mike got down on his knees and pulled up the old flooring with a second hammer. Emery stared at him blankly for a minute, and then gouged at the floor on the other side of the hole from him.
Katie’s lips pursed in a faint smile, and then she began working between them.
With three of them working on it in tandem, the ten or twelve feet of old flooring quickly turned into piles of scrap.
“All right,” he announced finally, wiping the sweat off his face with the bottom of his shirt. “That was the easy part. Now we need to pull out the old wood. You might want to let me take care of this part.”
He swung the hammer at a blackened part of the plywood near the rotted-out hole, but instead of going through, the tool only bounced back, as if it had hit a springboard.
Emery stepped closer and held the crowbar out in front of her. But before he could take it, Mike realized she wasn’t holding it out for him. She was getting ready to swing.
And then the heavy iron hit the board and something cracked. A moment later, she pulled back on the tool, and a two-foot chunk of old flooring popped up and out. It landed next to his feet, and Emery looked up at him. She didn’t smile.
He did. “Well, I guess I was wrong,” he said. “Looks like you can take care of this part just as well as I can.”
Katie raised an eyebrow and he quickly amended. “Okay, maybe better than I can.”
He picked another spot, and began working on removing the old wood a few feet away from Emery, who worked like a piledriver, jamming the crowbar down and then bringing it back up only to slam it back again.
The room was filled with the sounds of crashing tools and splintering wood for over an hour, until Mike called a time out.
“All right,” he said, standing straight up with a groan. “I think that’s enough for one day. It’s after five.”
Katie rose from where she’d been kneeling on the far end of the room from him. Emery simply stopped moving. She watched Katie expectantly.
“Do you have any beer?” Katie asked.
“I thought you worked for love?” he answered. With the back of his hand, he wiped a river of sweat from his forehead.
“And beer,” she said. “Plus, I was really thinking of you. Because you look really hot.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Nobody’s told me that in ages.”
“Never let them see you sweat,” she said.
“Come on,” he said. “The cooler should still be full.”
* * *
“You know they killed people here,” Katie said.
Mike crumpled an empty PBR in his hand and tossed it to the side of the porch. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about human sacrifice,” she said matter-of-factly. “They hung them upside down from the rafters and bled them like cattle. And as the victims died, the coven lay on the floor naked beneath them. The blood of the innocent rained on their chests and privates, and they moaned in ecstasy as the hanging ones screamed.”<
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“You’re making this shit up,” Mike said.
Katie shook her head. “I’m not. Haven’t you heard people talk about Bachelor’s Grove?”
Mike nodded. “Of course. I’ve heard all the stories. People have picked up hitchhikers along the turnpike for years. But before they ever get the hitchhikers home, they disappear into thin air. Ghosts.”
“Ghosts of the hanging ones,” she said. “Ghosts trying to find their way home when their homes have disappeared with their lives, and time.”
“Why would anyone have done such a thing?” he asked.
“Anger,” she said. “Revenge.”
She held a can to her lips, but then didn’t drink. She set it back down on the fresh wood of the deck. “You’ve never heard people talk about the sacrifices here then?”
He shook his head and popped the tab on a new can.
“They talk about ghosts, and strange lights bobbing between the cemetery stones. And they talk about the ghost of a woman, who’s often seen crying as she cradles the ghost of a baby. That’s probably the thing people talk about the most when it comes to Bachelor’s Grove. The woman with the lost child.”
Katie nodded. “Well, they have that part right then, at least. Everything that happened here happened because of her. The jealousy, the murder, the rituals and revenge.”
“What did she do to cause all of that?” he asked, still not understanding.
Katie handed her can to Emery and stood up.
“She did what every woman does, only she refused to do it the way most women do.”
Katie met Mike’s eyes with a sad, long gaze before she said simply, “She loved.”
Then she walked to the door of the house and went inside.
Mike felt a chill suddenly, as the sounds of the forest birds and bugs hummed unbroken all around him. He looked up, and found Emery staring at him. She said nothing, but raised the PBR to her lips and took a long swig. He sat there with her in silence for several minutes waiting for Katie to come back, feeling increasingly uncomfortable.
Finally, he shook his head and stood up. “I really need to get going,” he announced.
When she didn’t answer, he picked up his empty cans and the cooler and walked it to the truck.
When he came back, Emery was gone. He picked up another empty beer can, and then emptied another that still was mostly full over the banister. Then he called into the house.
“Hey girls, I’ve gotta get going.”
When he received no reply, he walked inside and checked the kitchen and back bedroom and upstairs.
There was nobody there. They had vanished again. He didn’t know where they’d gone; apparently they’d disappeared into the woods surrounding the old house, because they hadn’t walked out the main gravel path that led to the turnpike. They’d have passed him.
“So long and thanks for all the beer,” he murmured. He locked the front door and went back to the truck. He noticed Gonz’s vehicle still remained where it had been this morning. He’d have to call Perry if the guy wasn’t back tomorrow.
“People,” he said, pulling with a crunch of gravel onto the turnpike and gunning the engine.
“Can’t live with ’em, can’t gut them with a knife and leave them to bleed out over a coven of devil worshippers.”
He looked back at the entry road to the cemetery in the rearview mirror.
“Usually.”
Chapter Thirteen
Sweat trickled down Mike’s back in multiple mini-rivers. It was supposed to hit ninety degrees outside today, but the house felt like a hundred and ten, especially in the back bedroom, where he couldn’t budge the window. He was going to have to fix that, or the fire marshal wouldn’t approve the place for opening. But he’d skipped working on it this morning when he’d started on the outer wall. Animals or an old leak, maybe both, had led to a large rotten section that he had to repair. When he’d first come into the house, he’d found that one corner of this room had a pile of drywall chunks and wood and mud. You could see a small glimmer of outdoor light if you looked into the blackened hole in the wall. Luckily, this was the only full breach he’d found between the house and the outside, and it was small. But it needed to be sealed and patched.
He stood up from gouging out the soft drywall and groaned. His back got stiff way too easily these days. Thanks to his efforts, the hole in the wall had grown from something a mouse or chipmunk could have fit through to a three-foot-wide explosion in the wall. But he’d finally found solid drywall. The outer structure was solid except for a small area where the original breach had begun, so he’d shore that up and then bring in some new drywall to cover the hole. But first he had to get something to open this window. He couldn’t work in this heat anymore.
Mike walked through the hallway, wiping the sweat from his forehead and neck. He hadn’t realized just how hot he’d gotten until he stepped out of the bedroom, which had to be one of the most stifling spots in the house, since he’d gotten all the other windows to open and shut.
He stepped out onto the front porch and the temperature dropped at least ten degrees.
“Whew,” he said out loud. And then he realized that he wasn’t alone.
A thin man with dark unruly hair leaned against the banister. He appeared to be sizing Mike up. But he didn’t say a word.
“Um, can I help you?” Mike asked, wiping his wet hand on the thigh of his jeans.
The man nodded slowly. He looked to be in his thirties, and was slight of build – maybe five and a half feet tall. He had a narrow nose and dark, shadowed eyes, and when he looked down – which he seemed to do often – his hair covered his face.
“Sure,” he said. “Can you show me the house?”
Mike was taken aback.
“I don’t think so,” Mike said. “It’s not open for visitors.”
The guy nodded his head. “Yeah, I know. But I’m not visiting.”
“Who are you?” Mike asked.
“Sorry,” the guy said, sticking out his palm. “They call me Argento. I’m in charge of decorating all the rooms in this place for the haunted house.”
Mike grinned then and shook Argento’s hand, which felt thin as a girl’s. “That’s different,” he said. “I’m Mike, I’ve been fixing the place up for you.”
The guy nodded, but said nothing.
“When are you planning to start working?” Mike asked.
“Tonight,” Argento said.
“Oh,” Mike said. “I didn’t realize you guys were going to be coming in yet.”
“So, can I see it?” Argento asked, ignoring Mike’s comment.
“Yeah, sure,” Mike said, and opened the door. “No air conditioning, so it’s not exactly pleasant right now.”
“No worries,” Argento said. “I like to work at night. Should be just fine.” He walked inside, and Mike followed with a frown. Something about this guy was off.
Argento stopped in the kitchen and pointed at the faucet. “Does that work?”
Mike shook his head. “No. I’m assuming it used to be connected to a well, but nothing comes out.”
“Good, we can make a fountain of blood there.”
“Yeah, sure,” Mike said, and shook his head. Of course, they’d make a fountain of blood in the rusty sink. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Ha.
They moved slowly through the house, Argento walking up to corners and touching doorways. Now and then he mumbled something to himself, but Mike didn’t answer. The words weren’t for him. And he honestly had no idea what they meant. It sounded like a barrage of random syllables.
“Phenomena,” Argento murmured at one point, while touching a window. And then, “Tenebrae, Suspiria…. Zombie. Duckling.”
Zombie duckling? Mike thought. What the hell?
Every time Argento’s finger touched a surface, it seemed
to evoke a new disconnected word. “Beyond. Demons. Fascination.” At one point, he laughed when they were in the large master bedroom with a connected bath. He swung his hand out in a wide gesture and announced to a nonexistent audience, “Bay of Blood.” Then he shut up for a while, as he opened the closet and returned to the hallway to look in the other rooms.
After they’d walked the rest of the first floor in silence (aside from a couple more of Argento’s nonsensical whispers), the thin man suddenly looked at Mike and said, “Stairways?”
Mike took him to the attic staircase, and they quickly ascended.
As soon as Argento reached the top, a smile broke out on his face. “Yes!” he said. “Oh, yes!”
Mike had no idea what he was agreeing to. The man continued to hold a conversation with himself.
“Grudge. Suspiria. Even House on Sorority Row maybe…” Argento said, peering into the side room that Mike had walled off.
“Are there any drains up here?” Argento asked after a moment.
“You mean, like bathroom faucets or toilets?”
The man nodded quickly.
“No,” Mike said. “Only on the first floor.”
“Pity,” Argento said, and went back to touching the walls. He pulled out a phone and snapped some pictures, and Mike kept moving to stay out of the way. Then the decorator abruptly turned and walked back down the stairs without another word.
“Freak,” Mike whispered to himself, before following.
When he got downstairs, he led Argento to the den and showed him the new flight of steps leading down to the basement. When he moved the bookcase, the man’s eyes lit up. “House by the Cemetery,” he whispered, and immediately disappeared through the opening.
Mike followed, and after watching the man skulk around in the basement for a few minutes, he walked to the exterior stairwell and called to the man. “You could have them either enter or exit the house here,” he said, pointing at the stairwell that led back up to the outside.
