The House by the Cemetery

by John Everson

  “Help,” she pleaded at them. “Get me out of here.”

  At that moment, a chainsaw growled to life in the background, and a hulking man wearing a pig’s head stepped out of the shadows behind her.

  “Holy shit,” Amy said from right behind them as the smell of gasoline and blue smoke filled the room. She shoved at Larry to keep walking, and he and Lisa laughed and stepped through the doorway back out into the hall, and then into the kitchen. Diane and Troy followed with Pam lagging just behind.

  “That was pretty awesome,” Troy said.

  “Gross,” Pam complained. She had not wanted to come, but Lisa had insisted. “You are not pussying out on this one,” Lisa had said. “A Bachelor’s Grove Haunted House? And Lon managing the props and shit? It’s gonna be epic.”

  The kitchen was lit with one bare bulb, which hung from the ceiling on a wire that swayed back and forth, throwing weird shadows on the room. The place looked as if it had recently been used as a slaughterhouse. Blood was splattered on the peeling old country wallpaper, and an axe was embedded in the far wall. A woman’s body lay on the floor, blood pooled all around her head. A butcher knife handle stuck out of the back of her head; the silver tip of the blade protruded from her forehead. The tip of it gouged the floor.

  “Damn, that looks real,” Troy said.

  Lisa laughed. “You know it’s all just for show. I don’t know how anyone could be scared of this shit.”

  She looked pointedly at Pam, who looked away. She stepped closer to the sink. One side had what looked like a human heart sitting in the middle of the basin. Around it, a thousand squirming maggots jittered and shifted.

  In the basin next to it, a human head sat with its neck over the drain. Its hair was matted with blood, and gore streaked its cheeks.

  “Oh my God,” Pam said and stepped away.

  “You are such a baby,” Lisa said, and bent closer to the sink. “They sure did good work here though.”

  The eyes of the face were bloodshot and glossy; she could have sworn she saw the damn thing blink.

  “Hi there,” the bloody lips suddenly said.

  Lisa shrieked and jumped back two feet.

  “Gotcha,” the human head laughed.

  Behind her, Troy and Diane were bending over the woman with the knife in her head. Just as Lisa jumped, the dead woman began to rise up from the floor.

  “That’s it,” Diane said, and bolted for the next room.

  The rest of them followed, and a moment later, they found themselves in a bedroom with floral wallpaper. The sheets of the bed were rumpled, and a pool of red marred the center. The reason hung from the ceiling above. A girl in a white nightgown drenched in crimson hung from the ceiling. She looked as if she were crouching there; both of her legs were stretched out like a sprinter at the starting gate while one hand clutched the ceiling, surrounded by bloody handprints. Her other arm reached out toward the bedroom door, as if she were begging for help.

  “She better not move,” Diane said.

  “No way they could hang someone up there every night,” Troy said. “I don’t think we have to worry.”

  The closet door creaked open at that moment, and they suddenly heard the singsong chant of a group of children. “One, two, Freddy’s coming for you….”

  A hand emerged from the closet, wearing a glove tipped with long knife blades. The blades trailed down the wall with a faint scraping sound, before Freddy Krueger emerged in his familiar red and green sweater from the closet, his face a burned mass of scars. “Welcome to my nightmare,” he said and started toward them.

  “Time to go,” Pam said, and bolted back out of the room. Lisa laughed and followed her down the hall to a room that offered two exits. The walls shimmered with red and blue light, and hidden speakers played a taut, synthesizer-dominated soundtrack that gave Pam the creeps almost as much as the setpieces of the house. A sign seemingly written in blood said ‘Don’t Go In The Basement’. A human skeleton seated in what looked like an electric chair pointed with one bony finger toward the stairs that led upward.

  The darkened stairs that led down had another placard nailed to the wall next to them. ‘No Exit’, the sign said. Screams erupted from the dark below, and they didn’t sound like a recording.

  “I guess ‘up’ it is,” Pam said.

  She started up the steps. The walls were covered in a strange array of taxidermy. There were animal pelts stretched out with pins, and the full heads of a raccoon, a squirrel, a goat and other creatures emerged from the wall at odd intervals.

  There were also the stretched-out skins of three human faces.

  As she passed one, it let out a scream, and Pam jumped. “Jesus,” she complained. Her heart was pounding a mile a minute now. “I really just want to get out of this place,” she murmured.

  “Gotta love a skinhead,” Larry laughed behind her.

  The attic was creepy. The music here was louder, and the first thing they saw was a girl’s head lolling through the broken glass of a window. The shards had clearly punctured her throat, and her mouth hung open in a silent scream.

  “Ouch, I bet that had to hurt,” Larry said.

  To their left an old woman sat in a wheelchair. A rope was fastened around her neck and stretched up to a hook in the ceiling. To their right were racks and racks of what looked like costumes. It could have been the props department for a horror movie. There were lots of velvet vests and gowns on hangers, but there were also rubber masks of all sorts of monsters, from the overt Frankenstein’s monster to more freakish things with three eyes and hag hair.

  The floor had an arrow painted on it in red pointing the way into the aisle in the center of the costume collection. Words were painted on the floor next to the arrow.

  ‘Shed Your Skin and Choose Another,’ they said.

  “I’m not going first,” Pam announced.

  “Chicken,” Lisa taunted. “Let me show you how it’s done.”

  She held out her hands and began to walk through the aisle of outfits, making them all shift and move as she passed through.

  Larry grinned and patted Pam on the head as he passed her, pulling Lisa by the hand behind him. Amy followed closely behind them.

  “Come on, Pam,” Diane urged, as she and Troy walked into the aisle. “The sooner you get through it, the sooner you’ll get through it.”

  Troy laughed at that, and the two passed into the aisle of clothes. Pam was about to follow, when she heard Lisa scream ahead.

  “Oh shit,” she whispered. Her knees were shaking and she couldn’t seem to walk forward.

  Just then, someone in the mask of an ancient woman with frizzy hair and a horrible wrinkled face poked out of the aisle. She held a sickle in her hand and made a pass of it through the air in front of Pam.

  The girl shrieked and leapt backward, shocked out of her paralysis. The figure disappeared back into the aisle and a moment later, Diane screamed.

  Pam staggered backward, past the old woman in the wheelchair. That monster, at least, she knew wasn’t real.

  She rounded a corner and bent over, trying to catch her breath. “I just want to go home,” she whispered. “I just want to go home.”

  From the far end of the attic, she heard Larry laughing, and then another shriek. It sounded like Lisa. Then Diane was demanding, “Go, go, go.”

  The upstairs grew silent, except for the eerie music overhead. Pam took a deep breath, steeling herself to follow them alone through the costume maze.

  Something creaked in the floor in front of her, and Pam looked up to see two hands reaching out of a door in the floor toward her. Before she could move, the hands grabbed her ankles and yanked. Pam fell backward, as her legs slid forward.

  She hit the ground hard, her head bouncing on the wooden floor. Pam opened her mouth to scream, but hardly any sound came out.

  And
then the hands pulled her down into darkness, and the door above her head slammed shut.

  She hadn’t had the chance to voice even the faintest scream.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Perfect,” Jillie said. They had just entered the Nightmare on Elm Street room. “There’s a bed in here,” she whispered. “Unless someone’s already under it, that’s where I’m staying.”

  The sound of children singing the Freddy Krueger song suddenly began, and Jillie pushed Ted in front of her. “Don’t let anyone see me,” she said, dropping to the floor.

  The closet door opened and a moment later Ted was face-to-face with the infamous boiler room killer.

  “Welcome to my nightmare,” Freddy said, clicking his finger blades together.

  “I was just leaving,” Ted said. He turned and hurried back out of the room.

  Jillie lay perfectly still beneath the bed. There was nobody else there, and she held her breath until she heard the closet door close again. She intended to stay here until the place closed for the night. And then, once she was alone, she’d be able to walk around and really take the pulse of the house. She would text Ted to come back then, and let him in so they could set up their EMF meter and take some readings. Not that she couldn’t feel some of the energy here herself. But she wanted recordings and scientific readings. Maybe with some evidence, she could get the county to reconsider what it was doing. Show them the danger they were exposing all sorts of people to, especially all the kids who would be walking through here in the next three or four weeks.

  Jillie edged her way to the center of the space beneath the bed, put her hands on her chest and closed her eyes. For a few hours, she needed to be very quiet.

  Outside in the room, the closet door opened again and Freddy said, “Welcome to my nightmare.”

  He was greeted with the shriek of a teenage girl.

  Chapter Twenty

  “That’s a wrap,” Lon called. “All of the living have left.”

  Argento stepped out of the closet on the first floor. He pulled the black hood from his head, and began to peel off his black leather gloves as he joined the others in the gathering room.

  “How was your body count tonight?” Lon asked with a grin.

  “I think I made a woman pee,” Argento said.

  “Nice!”

  Lucio came walking down the stairs first, still wearing the old hag mask and carrying the sickle. Bong was just behind him, and June followed. Her throat appeared cut from ear to ear and one of her eyes appeared gluey white.

  “Oh my God, that was so much fun,” Jeanie said, emerging from the basement stairs. She was followed by three zombies. They made for a strange sight, as all of them were laughing.

  Chelsea, the girl with the knife through her head, came staggering out of the kitchen. “Lying on the floor all night is going to get old really fast,” she complained.

  “Did you freak anyone out, though?” Jeanie asked.

  “I made one guy scream like a little girl.” She grinned. “He really thought I was just a dummy, and was about two inches from my face when I jumped up.”

  Lenny came out of the back bedroom still wearing his Freddy mask. He clicked and clacked his blade fingers together while the family room filled with the cast of the house.

  “All right,” Lon said. “Great job, everyone. That was an excellent night’s work and we sent a lot of people home happy. With wet underwear, maybe, but happy. But now it’s late and we do it all again tomorrow. So, get out of your costumes, leave them on hangers upstairs, and let’s get the heck out of here. Thanks for making it creepy!”

  “Did you have fun?” Jeanie asked Bong. She gave him a much longer kiss than she had at the start of the night.

  He shrugged. “People don’t seem to like Asian ghosts who crawl down the hallway at them. So I really didn’t meet any new friends, although I talked to June a bit. Plus, now my arms are tired.”

  “I’ll rub you down when we get home,” she promised.

  “I’m counting on it,” he said.

  “Somebody help Allen out of the sink in the kitchen,” Lon called.

  Jeanie grinned and patted Bong’s shoulder. “I’ll be right back,” she said.

  She walked to the kitchen and found June already there, with the front cabinet open. “I’ll lift while you push,” Jeanie offered. The counter creaked upward on hinges, and Allen rose up slowly, rubbing his neck.

  “Damn, that’s a long night,” he said. “How long are we doing this?”

  “All month,” June said. “We’ll get you some Bengay.”

  Allen snorted and staggered off toward the bathroom.

  “How are you doing?” Jeanie asked.

  “What do you mean?” June answered.

  “Well, it’s none of my business, I guess, but…I thought you and Lenny….”

  June snorted. “Lenny spends too much time at my place, that’s all.”

  “But,” Jeanie began. “With the Nightmare on Elm Street room and all, I thought….”

  June grinned, but she didn’t look happy. “Yeah, a lot of people think. But, if you’re interested, he’s available.”

  Jeanie’s eyelids shot open. She put her hand up. “No, I didn’t mean….”

  June shook her head. “Look, I don’t care,” she said. “He crashes at my place a lot, that’s all.”

  “I have Bong,” Jeanie said. “I’m not after Lenny.”

  June shrugged. “Suit yourself,” she said, and began to walk away. But then she looked over her shoulder and said something that made Jeanie’s stomach go cold.

  “Lenny’s a good lay if you’re feeling dry. Just sayin’.”

  Jeanie took her time putting the kitchen countertop back in place and closing the cabinet doors before she returned to the bedroom where Bong waited. She didn’t know why June had said that, but she couldn’t stop hearing it in her head.

  She shook her head until it went away, and then she raised her chin and kissed Bong on the lips.

  “Hey,” she said. “Wanna take me home?”

  * * *

  The voices had been silent for a while now. Jillie slid out from her hiding place beneath the bed and stretched. Her back was stiff. She walked over to the window and peered out the black curtains. The forest outside looked completely dark. No headlights in sight. She pulled out her phone and texted Ted.

  Jillie: Where are you now?

  Ted: Went home. Are you ready for action?

  Jillie: Think so. All is quiet.

  Ted: Be there in ten.

  Jillie: Cool.

  She walked to the hallway and peered up and down it for several seconds, listening for any sound in the house. Hearing none, she finally stepped into the hall, and walked down to the dining room and kitchen. There were no lights on. She hit the flashlight app on her iPhone and shone it around the rooms. Nothing there but props. Grotesque, red-splashed walls and chains and furniture.

  Jillie walked to the other end of the house and found the room with the stairs to the attic and basement. She shone the light on the darkness going down, and carefully stepped on the first stair. She hadn’t gotten this far on her tour earlier.

  One by one she crept down, pausing to listen at each step. When she reached the bottom, she flashed her phone in a 360-degree arc, absorbing the layout. The place looked like a junk shop, with mirrors and bureaus and boxes all stacked in rows. She peered at herself in one mirror and almost jumped. A ghostly white face appeared just behind her own. Then she realized the ‘ghost’ was fastened to the beam just above her head – so anyone who looked in the mirror (which was tilted upward) would get a shock.

  She moved down the row of junk, strategically placed to allow ‘zombies’ or other ‘monsters’ to hide and jump out, no doubt, while corralling the patrons down a specific path. And that path now resembled a museu
m of horror. Every twenty feet or so, there appeared to be a small set constructed to represent some kind of horror theme. To her left, she saw the half-nude manikin in a tub of red, meant to depict the Countess Báthory. But that gory tableau wasn’t what made her pause.

  There was something wrong here.

  Jillie had followed her career as a ghost hunter because she had always been sensitive to things. She knew most people thought she was a nut, but that didn’t change the fact that she sensed things. Her spine seemed like an antenna for ghosts; it chilled and sparked whenever she was in areas reputed to be haunted…and often in places that were not. She could always seem to find cold spots in old buildings where there was no breeze. There had been many times walking through a cemetery that she had felt fingers brush across her face when she bent over a gravestone to read the inscription. As if the dead were reaching up from the earth to greet her softly. She had felt things that other people didn’t ever since she was a kid. It had all started when her family moved to an old house in Virginia for a couple years when she was four. Every time she’d gone into the basement, her mother had found her standing in the corner, talking to someone. She barely remembered those early years, but her mom had told her later how unnerving it was to see her conversing with the wall. But kids often had imaginary friends, so her parents had chalked it up to that.

  When they moved across country to the Chicago area, she no longer talked to walls…but there was one place in the house that bothered her. It felt wrong. Every time she’d walked into the room she’d felt cold, sometimes to the point of shivering. It was her dad’s den, and over time she began to avoid going there, which her father never questioned, because he didn’t want to be disturbed when he was working there anyway. Every time her mother sent her there to call her father or take him something, she’d complained that it was too cold in there.

  “It’s the same temperature as the rest of the house, baby,” her mom insisted. And Jillie had argued over and over again that it was not.

  “It’s like walking into a freezer,” she remembered saying.