The House by the Cemetery

by John Everson

  “The pain was horrible, and I screamed and screamed, but he just laughed and twisted the knife around until he could reach his bare hands inside me. I could feel something horrible moving and pulling inside and then his hands were in my face all covered in blood and he was saying something about the baby but…I didn’t hear anything else. That’s when I died.”

  “Jesus,” Mike breathed, and took her into his arms. “I am so sorry.”

  After a few minutes, he loosened his embrace and asked the most obvious next question. “But, how did you come back?”

  Katie smiled. “Emery did it,” she said. “She’s my anchor. If it wasn’t for her, I’d be in that cemetery out there right now.”

  “Emery?” Mike asked. His voice sounded more than a little incredulous because, well, from what he’d seen, the other girl didn’t seem to have a lot going on. “How did she manage it?”

  “She was one of my secret sisters,” Katie said. “There were five of us. We weren’t related by blood but we were closer than family; you’d say we were a coven. That’s part of the reason I moved out here to the forest. So we could practice our rituals without being seen. We came from different mothers and backgrounds, but together we formed a circle of unified power.”

  “You were witches?” Mike asked. This just kept getting weirder.

  “That’s the way most people label it,” she said. “We were connected to something bigger, that’s all I know. And Emery used her connections to stop me from leaving this world behind, even though Patrick had gutted me and killed my baby. She used her power to keep me from disappearing into the void, and I used mine to keep her alive all these years, just as she was then.”

  She rolled over on the bed to lie across his chest and stared down. Her face looked worried. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Do you still want to be with me?”

  Mike wrapped his arms around her slight bare shoulders and crushed her against him. “Yes,” he said. “I don’t care what happened in the past. All that matters is that you’re here now. And you might be the only woman I’ve ever really loved.”

  Katie smiled and planted a soft kiss on his lips.

  “You don’t know how glad I am to hear that,” she said.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Bong got down on his hands and knees in the attic room and steeled himself for another long night. June walked up the stairs and into the room a moment later and took her place on the chair. People would focus on her and assume she was the ‘jump scare’ of the room, when actually, it was Bong’s job to jump out and scare people. She was the distraction.

  “Looks like you nicked yourself shaving again,” he joked as she lolled her head back, exposing the red gash.

  She held up the large straight razor from the table next to her. “Yeah, seems like it happens every day. This job is a killer.”

  “I’m not sure my knees are going to take this abuse for an entire month,” Bong said. “I may end up becoming the scary Asian ghost in a wheelchair!”

  “I’m not sure that’s going to have quite the same impact,” she said with a laugh.

  Her voice made him grin. She was one of those people who always made people feel up.

  “Are you wearing kneepads?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Nah, hadn’t really thought of that. I don’t think it’s part of the costume.”

  “I think we can find some pads that nobody will notice,” she said. “I think that’s a much better plan than the wheelchair.”

  He shrugged. “Probably a lot cheaper too.”

  “I work at Oak Forest Hospital,” she said. “I think I can find something that won’t cost you a dime.”

  “That suits my budget perfectly,” he said.

  Just then, Lon’s voice interrupted from the base of the stairway.

  “The living are coming!” he said. “Let’s make some screams tonight!”

  That was the cue to shut up because the doors were opening. Bong flashed June a row of blackened teeth and moved back into the closet out of sight.

  Someone downstairs shrieked, and Bong grinned. It wasn’t really the kind of job he was interested in doing, but there was very clear affirmation if you were doing the job right. And so far, based at least on the number of screams, jumps, squeezed hands and quick exits, they all seemed to be haunting the house well.

  Bong wondered how Jeanie was doing. She was one of the floaters on the first floor, and sometimes played the ravenous zombie, while other times she simply held out her guts, trying to get people to touch them. She said the guys sometimes would, but usually the girls yelped and said ‘no way’.

  This was supposed to be a job that brought them closer together, but honestly, Bong felt like it was going to have the opposite effect. He’d been so tired the past few nights that he’d passed out as soon as he took her home. The only time they’d had to talk was on the car rides to and from the house.

  Three boys walked into the room. They looked college age and one of them was prodding the other one forward.

  “Touch it,” he said. “You know that’s a dummy.”

  They stepped closer, and the provocateur pushed his friend to bend over.

  “Ten bucks if you give her a kiss.”

  The other one stepped forward then, so all three of them were hovering over June, who managed to stay amazingly still. “Hell, I’ll do it for ten bucks,” he said.

  Bong couldn’t watch anymore. He pressed the button to start the strobe and began to crawl quickly toward them just as the guy bent down over June’s face.

  “Oh shit,” the ringleader said when he saw Bong coming out of the dark, eyes and teeth blackened, his movements made more jerky and strange by the lights.

  They were all so focused on June, that Bong’s entry really freaked them out. The ‘brave’ one probably leapt the most. Bong kept relentlessly moving toward them, and while one of them started laughing at their surprise, the threesome quickly exited the room. Bong crept back to the closet.

  “What did you do that for?” June asked before the next group arrived. “You didn’t wait for my cue. I think I could’ve made one of them piss his pants!”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I knew I was early, but they were just making me nervous with all the kissing talk. They were getting a little too close, I thought.”

  “Thanks,” June said. “That’s sweet, and I appreciate it, but I can handle the frat boys, don’t worry.”

  Bong nodded and ducked back out of sight as the next group entered the room. Stupid, stupid, stupid, he told himself, and steeled himself to make sure to wait this time for June to move. Then he laughed inside at his own private joke. Seemed he was always waiting for a girl to make a move.

  June jumped, and Bong started out of the closet toward a handful of high school girls.

  When they saw him, they screamed. “It’s like The Ring,” one of them said.

  He had to grin at that. Sometimes the wait was worth it.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Mike walked the attic, making sure all of the props were where they should be. He rehung a costume that had fallen to the floor and pushed a trunk back in place with his foot. Then he shut out the lights and went down the stairs to do the same on the first floor. He and Lon were taking turns handling lock-up each night, so one person didn’t always have to be at the house insanely late.

  It was hard to even recognize this as the same smelly, rotten and forgotten house he’d walked into less than three months before. Between his renovations, coats of paint, props and gelled spotlights, it was like a whole new, ancient museum of movie sets.

  He walked down the stairs and shook his head at the dining room, decked out in the most suggestive cannibal décor possible. The leg bone – red with fake meat – still gave him the creeps and Argento and Lucio had finished what they called the ‘Tobe Hooper Room’ over a month earli
er. It was their first project, because they wanted people who walked into the house to be immediately reminded of Hooper’s most famous, most harrowing film.

  Mike flipped off the hidden red spotlights and then walked down the fingernail-etched hallway toward the den. That remained one of his favorite spots in the house. He still couldn’t believe that someone had built a hidden bookcase/stairway there, or that it still actually functioned, decades later. But he’d oiled and cleaned it, and now the room served as a great scare for the house. When a group entered the room, they found a suspiciously cozy spot with a glowing fireplace (electric) and a smoking pipe in an ashtray next to an easy chair. But then they noticed the pool of blood on the floor beneath the chair, and then maybe they noticed the giant framed portraits hung all around the room depicting serial killers, each grinning and holding his or her weapon of choice.

  That’s when the door slammed shut, and something groaned behind them. Some patrons screamed, some turned and ran for the door. But either way, they were forced back into the center of the room, faced with a man in a terribly deformed rubber mask who was holding a large axe. When they became sufficiently freaked out, the bookcase would click and swing open with an extended creak. The flickering red and orange lights that escaped from the dark stairwell behind it did not provide any confidence for the haunted house visitors, but the room’s axe-wielding mutant didn’t give them much of a choice. They headed toward the stairwell down to the basement every time. For those who did get past the axeman (or when they needed to jam groups through the house faster), there was a back door that led back out to the hallway where both the stairwells up and down were. But Lon wanted them to use the bookcase basement entry as much as possible. It was a great gimmick and they hadn’t even had to build it.

  At the moment, however, nobody was in the house but Mike. He walked over toward the coffin that leaned sideways against the far wall and reached behind it to shut off the glow of the fireplace and a couple other quietly shifting LED lights tucked around the room. The cords were hidden behind the coffin, so patrons couldn’t see the source of the ‘atmosphere’, which Argento said ruined the effect.

  As Mike reached behind the coffin for the switch, someone screamed in the basement.

  His heart froze.

  Nobody was supposed to be left in the house.

  “What the fuck?” he asked. Luckily, nobody answered.

  Mike walked toward the bookcase and fingered the hidden latch that remained where it had been set up dozens of years before. The wall of books and skulls and other arcane decorations swung inward at his touch.

  The scream did not repeat, but now Mike’s ears were tuned. He listened to the air move as he stood at the top of the steps, waiting for some sign that someone was alive and moving downstairs.

  None came.

  Mike took a deep breath and forced his foot down on the first rung of the staircase he’d rebuilt. He had heard something down here, he was sure of that. And he couldn’t leave the house without checking it out.

  Carefully he eased his foot down another step, and then the next. He didn’t want to make the steps creak. He still had visions of some coven of devil worshippers stabbing wild animals in the heart and then hanging them to bleed out over the original earth floor of the basement, as he’d discovered in his first couple weeks on the job. Whoever had been responsible had never been caught, and he didn’t fully believe that they were gone. It occurred to him suddenly that Emery may have actually been the culprit, which was something he would have to ask Katie about. But if she hadn’t been…well…the haunted house activity may have chased them away for now, but….

  When he reached the bottom, Mike blinked as a red spotlight moved across his face. The room had been set up to have slowly shifting colors and hues, and noise or not, he would have needed to come down here regardless to shut everything down. He stepped to the side wall and lifted a fake wood shingle to expose the lighting switches. He flicked the colored bank off, and then flipped a switch to light the downstairs in a series of cool white lights. The non-haunting bank.

  The bulbs lit the long expanse of the basement without revealing any people. Just long empty aisles in between setpieces of horror.

  Mike stood and simply listened for a moment, waiting to hear if any sound repeated the anguish he’d heard before. He could hear his heart beating louder than any sound in the room. But the sound, whatever it had been, didn’t reoccur.

  He turned to flip the downstairs lights out completely, when something thumped at the end of the aisle. It seemed to come from somewhere behind the Báthory and Exorcist tableaux.

  Mike frowned.

  There was nothing down there, except the long false room where the water heater and furnace were. The small room where he’d put Katie’s coffin was also down that way. Nobody should even know that room existed, let alone be in there. Even the haunted house cast didn’t know about Katie’s room. They knew about the other section though, because Lon ran Ops out of the utilities room. Mike started walking down the aisle.

  As he drew closer, he heard another noise. Something like a gasp.

  Mike’s chest constricted. Nobody should be down here. Especially not in the hidden basement room. He’d seen all of the regulars leave the house.

  “Why me?” he asked silently, and then reached for the inset latch of the door. It opened quietly, and for a moment he was able to see what was going on within without alerting the people inside.

  The glimpse made his heart ice over.

  Inside the small hidden room, Emery held a long knife to the bare side of a man who’d been stripped naked. The man appeared to lean heavily against his captor. Mike couldn’t see his face, but Katie was walking around the two of them in a circle, whispering things. Emery spoke along with her in unison. As Mike watched, trying to figure out exactly what Katie and Emery were up to, he saw Emery lift the silver blade higher in the air. Before he could react, she brought it down and drew it across the man’s side. Then she reached across his middle and ran her hands over the wound, cupping and gathering the blood that welled.

  Katie walked around and around the two of them, but Emery never looked at her. Instead, she moved to where the coffin that they had dug up sat. Only, the cover had been removed since Mike was here last. Emery held her hands out over the open coffin and let the blood drip off her fingers. She shook her hands then, sprinkling it on the bones that Mike dug up from the cemetery.

  The victim himself didn’t move, he just stood there in a trance, bleeding and blinking until Emery turned back and rubbed her hand over the crimson wound again.

  Mike couldn’t hold back then, and stepped down onto the dirt floor.

  “What the hell are you two doing?” he asked. His voice was quiet, but his tone told how freaked out he was. Katie moved away from the still, naked man who, strangely, remained standing, and put her hands on Mike’s shoulders. “It’s okay,” she said. “We just need to siphon a little life from him for me to hang around.” She kissed him, wrapping her arms around his neck to pull his eyes away from the naked, bleeding man.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked, moving to push her back. But she didn’t let him get away. When the touch of her lips had calmed him somewhat, she pointed to the wooden box at the far side of the room. “That coffin that you dug up for me?” she said.

  He nodded.

  “Those bones are mine,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?” Mike asked. “You’re right here. You’re not a ghost.”

  “Aren’t I?” she answered. “Take the chain off from around your neck.”

  “The one I found in the house?”

  She nodded. “Give it to Emery.”

  He frowned, but raised the necklace past his chin and over his head. Emery took the chain and locket from him and slipped it into her jeans pocket.

  The naked man now stood abandoned
in the middle of the room; he remained still as a statue, though he could have easily walked out of the room.

  “So now what?” Mike said, when Emery had hidden his locket.

  “Now try to touch me,” Katie said.

  Mike shrugged. He had held Katie before they’d gone to the stupid expensive Red Robin for half-assed burgers a few hours ago, and he’d held her again later tonight when she’d dressed up in her witch-ly ‘haunt’ costume and prepped to walk the halls and scare people. Not to mention touching her as she kissed him seconds ago. He didn’t see why taking off a necklace would change anything there.

  He held out his arms to pull her close but instead she sidestepped them, and whispered in his ear. “I need you to finally understand,” she said.

  “Understand what?” he asked.

  “Understand that I’m dead,” Katie whispered.

  When he shook his head and turned to look at her, she kissed his lips and pulled away. He felt the faint spark of electricity that he did every time her mouth met his.

  “You’re not going to like hearing this, but it’s true,” she said. “I died a long time ago, and while I’ve told you that, what I haven’t told you is the body you’ve been holding isn’t real. But I want it to be. I want to come back. And if you help me…you can be with me forever. I’ve kept Emery with me all these years… I can do the same for you.”

  Mike shook his head. “You’re real,” he said. “I can feel you. I’ve kissed you.”

  Katie smiled, but it was a sad smile. “You think you have. Now give me a hug,” Katie urged.

  Mike put his arms around her and started to pull her close.

  Only.

  His hands went right through her.