by John Everson
“Touch me,” she said.
He took her hand, and she squeezed. “You can feel me, can’t you?”
He nodded.
“And you’re not wearing the locket,” she said.
He nodded again.
“Because I’m real, not a ghost anymore,” Katie said. “I’m alive again.”
Mike shook his head.
“You don’t know how long I’ve waited for this moment,” she said. “All of the minutes and days and months and years stuck here in this house, doomed to wait and wait and wait until the time was right.”
“All of the rumors were really true,” Mike said. “You’ve been haunting this place all these years.”
“I’ve been here,” she said. “I’ve been waiting.”
“And Emery?” Mike asked, pointing to the dead girl on the floor.
“She performed the ritual that started it all,” Katie said. “After my husband killed me, she brought me back, using her own blood. At first, even she couldn’t really see me. I screamed with all my might and she would squint, as if she maybe heard some faint sound in the distance. She didn’t know that those sounds were me, trying to reach her. But she never gave up. She started performing other rituals. Blood rituals. And with every sacrifice, she gave me new energy. Made me stronger. Until she could actually see me and we could finally talk again.”
“And your reward was to kill her,” he said.
“That was always the price,” Katie said. “She knew that on the very first night that she cut her wrist and dripped her blood on my corpse. She could shed the blood of others to give her spell more power – give me more power – but in the end, only the blood of she who woke me could fully raise me.”
“Then why did it take so long for her to do it?”
“Because there was never enough blood,” Katie said. She lifted one leg over the coffin and Mike reached out a hand instinctively, to help her step down to the floor.
“You know how many people had to bleed in order for my bones to grow their flesh back,” she said. “Until you opened this house again, we saw one person in the cemetery every couple months. And almost none of them ever made their way into the house. There were never enough people to form a critical mass until you came. When I found out what you were doing, I knew that the time had finally come. I knew that you were here to save me.”
Katie took Mike’s face in her hands.
“Emery kept me from slipping away,” Katie said. “But you made it possible for me to come back.”
“Not just me,” Mike whispered, pointing at the door that opened on the rest of the basement. “Dozens of people out there are dead.”
“It takes an enormous amount of power to accomplish what we did tonight,” Katie said. “But we can’t look back now. The only way is forward.”
Katie stared into Mike’s eyes as she ran her fingers through the hair on the back of his head. “Will you move forward with me?”
Mike looked into her eyes and felt the power there. He tried to blot out the images of the blood in the hallways. He tried to forget the fact that two women lay dead on the floor on either side of them. He tried to remember sitting on the porch just a couple months ago in August with Katie, listening to her stories, living for the light lilt of her laughter.
“I want to,” he said. “But I don’t know.”
“Come with me,” she said, taking his hand.
Katie led him out of the basement and up the stairs to the main floor and then the attic. When he opened the trap door in the attic to finally descend into Emery’s room, Katie reached up to the door in the ceiling and pulled a bolt shut. They were locked into the hidden room. There were still candles lit along the walls, just enough to allow Mike to see the nails of the bed and the naked woman who approached him now from the stairwell.
She moved like a ghost, gliding along the floor in her bare feet. But she was a ghost no longer. When her hands touched Mike’s arms, she drew her hands up and under his sleeves, touching him and kneading his muscles with the tips of her fingers. Then she brought her hands down to his waist and drew them up under his shirt, ratcheting it up until he lifted his arms and allowed her to bring the blood-drenched, sticky cotton up and over his shoulders.
She threw the ruined shirt into the corner and then unbuckled his belt. As his jeans slipped down to the floor, Mike gasped.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know if I can do this now. After tonight….”
“I’m here,” Katie whispered, her lips just centimeters from his. He could feel her breath. “I’ll always be here for you,” she said.
Then her mouth moved down his throat to his chest and belly and below.
Mike closed his eyes. And instantly he saw images of carnage. The reflections of the night had embedded themselves on the back of his eyes.
“I think…I think I’d like to go home for tonight,” he said, despite the warmth that engulfed his erection.
Katie raised her head from his crotch and smiled sweetly. “This is your home now,” she said.
Mike frowned. “No,” he said. “I mean my real home. I could take you there. It has a real bed, with a real mattress.”
Katie smiled thinly, but shook her head no.
“You can never go home again,” she said. “Not after you killed all of these people. They’ll be waiting for you.”
“What are you talking about?” he said. “Emery killed those people, not me.”
“You did your part,” Katie said. “Emery used the knife, but you used the chainsaw.”
Mike shook his head. “No,” he said.
“Yes. While you were sleeping, your body let me in. And together, we cut through the hearts of dozens of people tonight. Your strength. My need. Together we swung the chainsaw back and forth and the people fell in pieces one after the other to the basement below.”
“I don’t believe it,” Mike said, though, even as he said it, he could smell the ghost of engine oil in his nose and see the spray of blood as a whirring blade bit through tendons and muscle and bone. “And even if it was true, nobody would know it was me,” he said. “Nobody is left alive!”
“There is one,” Katie said. “She’s probably reached the police by now. And even if she hasn’t…your prints are all over that chainsaw. And you’re the only other person running the house who isn’t dead. But you’re missing. Who do you think they’ll blame?”
Mike felt his stomach and throat squeezing shut. “I have to go,” he said. He pushed her aside and pulled up his jeans, fumbling to buckle them. He ignored the bloody shirt on the floor and headed straight toward the stairs back to the attic.
“If you leave me, they’ll put you in jail for the rest of your life,” she said. “Or give you the electric chair.”
“Not if I get out of here now,” he said. “I can wash my prints off the chainsaw, and go to the police myself.”
“Too late,” Katie said. She sat on the edge of the bed with her arms crossed. “Jeanie saw you doing it, and she’s already gone for help. And who do you think they’ll believe? A frightened girl who just escaped from a slaughterhouse…or the drunk that she says killed everyone?”
Mike hesitated. In the distance, a police siren began to whine.
“What do I do?” he whispered.
“You serve me,” Katie said. “Just as Emery did.”
She patted the bed beside her. “Come here. They won’t find us here.”
“I just want to go home,” Mike whispered. Tears of frustration and fear rolled down his face.
Katie stood up and walked across the room. The red and white plastic cooler from Mike’s truck was there. When she returned, she sat down again next to him and popped the tab on a Pabst Blue Ribbon and held it out to him. Cold drops slid down the can as a cocoon of foam arched out of the opening.
�
�Your home is with me now,” she said. When he took the can and slugged back a long gulp, she brushed the hair away from his eyes. “Don’t ever forget that.”
When he finished the beer, she kissed the tears from his face, and pushed him down to the bed. Mike didn’t protest too much. He really didn’t know what to do at this point. He was overwhelmed. Lost.
And then her lips were on his, and his mouth filled with the heat and need of her tongue. For a few seconds, he forgot about the horror of the night and lost himself in the promise of her. The girl he had fallen in love with so many weeks ago. The girl who until tonight had seemed sweet and playful and innocent. The girl who had really been a ghost. The ghost of a witch who was anything but innocent.
He kissed her back with growing passion and then felt the wetness of her need upon him. And then he thought about nothing but filling her for what seemed like hours.
It wasn’t hours.
But when he lay back, spent and gasping for breath, Katie rested herself half on, half off of him. She kissed him gently on the mouth and the cheek.
“Give me your hand,” Katie said.
He didn’t question her, but offered his left hand.
She took it and squeezed it in hers. “You are mine now,” she said. “In heart and soul and body.”
She lifted a knife in her free hand and he flinched.
But Katie only kissed him and lifted her hand from his clutch to the air above them. She pressed the blade into the center and drew it down. A red mouth opened in her palm.
She took his hand next, and touched the blade to it.
“My blood in yours, and your blood in mine,” she said. “Forever and always.”
She said other things then, words he didn’t recognize. But he didn’t pull his hand away as the cold steel threatened his skin. “You won’t ever leave me?” he whispered.
Katie shook her head. And then she drew the knife down until droplets of red splattered Mike’s chest. She tossed the knife away and gripped his wounded hand with her own. Their fingers entwined and locked.
“My life is yours,” she whispered.
“And mine is yours,” he answered. It seemed like the right thing to say. For better or worse, it was true.
She smiled and pressed her body against his, holding their bleeding hands up above their heads. She kissed him deeply, and he responded. He realized that he was already ‘ready’ to consummate their new bond. And she didn’t hesitate to guide him inside.
He was lost in the smell and heat and feeling of her when he realized that there were sirens now just outside. And the tread of boots and steps overhead.
Katie’s eyes drew him in, and she nodded. She heard them. She kissed him and pulled him close. Mike accepted her embrace and didn’t pull out from her until they were both nearly asleep.
Voices and radio calls and yells and commands echoed from the attic above and the main level below.
Mike only barely heard them. He pulled Katie close and the whole world simply went away.
They fell asleep in each other’s arms, hidden in the secret heart of the house, as just a few yards away, police officers and ambulance drivers began to lift body after body onto stretchers to move them to the many trucks with flashing red and blue lights that gathered outside.
Epilogue
A pickup truck rolled past the ribbons of broken yellow police tape that still fluttered loosely in the faint winter breeze. The truck bounced down the ruts of the old gravel road that led from the Midlothian Turnpike around the small pond that bordered Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery. Its tires left darkened tracks in the hardened crust of snow that covered the ground in a blanket of white.
A pretty girl in an unseasonably short skirt and a half-buttoned yellow blouse stepped from the cab to the ground, her dark hair bouncing across her slim shoulders. Then the driver’s door opened and a big man in a long black wool coat and blue jeans quickly got out to join her.
She took his hand in front of the truck and led him up the wood steps to the front door of the old gray house hidden deep in the shelter of the forest. A faint plume of smoke rose from the chimney on its roof above. When they stepped through the creaking door inside, the woman leaned up to kiss the man, and then drew him down the hall into the house toward the bedrooms.
When they reached the bathroom next to the master bedroom, she pulled him inside.
“I have a surprise for you,” she promised.
But when the man stepped within the white-tiled room, the door behind him suddenly swung shut and an arm wrapped around his chest from behind. The steel of a cold blade slid firm against his neck.
The man struggled and kicked as the thick arm of the unseen man held him fast. But the knife only locked down harder, biting deep into his skin, and the man was forced to stop moving.
“You’ve been gone a while,” the unseen man said from behind.
The girl shrugged. “Slow night. But I picked you up a twelve-pack of PBR. It’s in the bed of the truck. Don’t forget to get it out before you drive away the evidence.”
“Small favors,” he said, as the girl unbuttoned her shirt and then slid out of her skirt in front of them. Her bra quickly joined the clothes on the tile floor, and she scooped down her panties to step into a white porcelain tub.
“Brrrr!” she complained, as she sat down on its cold surface.
“This will make it better,” said the man holding the knife. “Your weekly bath.”
He pushed the man forward until they stood at the very edge of the tub, looking over the girl who lay within. The man gasped and renewed his efforts to punch and knee at his captor, but he couldn’t seem to break free. Not with a knife at his neck anyway.
And then without ceremony, the knife wasn’t simply at his neck…but in it. The blade dug across his throat and bit down hard. The captive man thrashed in desperation then, but couldn’t escape the iron grasp of the other man. It was too late anyway even if he had; the knife sawed away at his soft flesh and in seconds his need to escape dissolved in a shower of blood. His life sprayed in a crimson mist across the tile, and the naked woman below closed her eyes and licked her lips as it rained down to cover her.
“Nothing takes away the chill of winter better than blood,” she sighed.
The man holding the knife frowned but said nothing. Instead, he pulled the hair of the victim, yanking the head back to open the wound further. He aimed the open gash of the victim’s throat carefully, working to ensure that every drop cascaded down the flawless white skin of the woman in the tub. Nothing wasted.
She reclined and arched her back, luxuriating in the warm spray of life that covered her. She may have returned from the dead, but she still needed the transfusion of life to keep her here.
* * *
Katie rubbed her hands across her belly and thighs and breasts, smearing herself in crimson.
A tear slid from the corner of Mike’s eye as he drained the last weak spurts of blood from the man’s dying heart, but he said nothing. He shook the tear away, and made sure that every last drop landed on Katie’s thirsty flesh before he dragged the body back outside to add to the pile in the unmarked, hidden mass grave out back.
Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery had grown a lot more crowded since Katie had come back to life.
When Katie had shown Mike what his new role was going to be, he had yearned desperately to leave. But every time he slipped out of the house and began to walk down the turnpike without her blessing, the hand that she had cut and shared her blood with burned as if it were being held to a fire. It grew until he was doubled over on the side of the road, and only abated when he returned to the house. Soon he stopped trying to leave. Every day now, he found it harder to contemplate walking beyond the boundaries of the cemetery. His past seemed like a half-remembered lost dream. The only thing that broke through the growing cloud in his brain was the smile o
f Katie each night when she drew him close in their hidden bed.
“I am yours, just like you wanted,” she would say as she stroked and kissed him. “And you are mine. Forever.”
* * *
As the echo of Mike’s work shoes tromped across the deck out front, dragging the body away, Katie shifted and smiled with satisfaction against the cool porcelain of the tub.
“Home, sweet, home,” Katie whispered.
About this book
This is a FLAME TREE PRESS BOOK
Text copyright © 2018 John Everson
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
FLAME TREE PRESS, 6 Melbray Mews, London, SW6 3NS, UK, flametreepress.com
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Thanks to the Flame Tree Press team, including: Taylor Bentley, Frances Bodiam, Federica Ciaravella, Don D’Auria, Chris Herbert, Matteo Middlemiss, Josie Mitchell, Mike Spender, Will Rough, Cat Taylor, Maria Tissot, Nick Wells, Gillian Whitaker. The cover is created by Flame Tree Studio with thanks to Nik Keevil and Shutterstock.com.
FLAME TREE PRESS is an imprint of Flame Tree Publishing Ltd. flametreepublishing.com. A copy of the CIP data for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
HB ISBN: 978-1-78758-002-2, PB ISBN: 978-1-78758-000-8, ebook ISBN: 978-1-78758-003-9 | Also available in FLAME TREE AUDIO | Created in London and New York
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