Claire awoke to the growl of thunder. Opening her eyes, she saw lightning silver the curtains of the guest bedroom, the storm preparing to kick up again. She reached out and felt for Joshua, whose little body lay at a diagonal to hers. He slept between her and Ben often, and though this cramped their sex life, she didn’t mind it most of the time. She found Joshua’s shoulder and let her hand linger there for a long moment. The boy was sleeping peacefully.
She gave him a gentle squeeze, propped up on her elbows and glanced at the luminous red numbers of the digital clock: 2:25 A.M.
It hit her like a club blow. It was already early morning and she still hadn’t heard from Ben.
Stifling a sob, Claire reached for her cell phone. She frowned. It wasn’t on the nightstand where she’d left it. She stared bewilderedly for a moment, then realized with a rush of anger what had happened. Her mother—whose good intentions were often accompanied by overbearing behavior—had insisted on Claire taking something to help her sleep. After a brief argument, Claire had agreed, but evidently, upon finding her daughter snoozing under the sedative’s spell, her mom had removed Claire’s cell phone from the room thinking to let her sleep even if Ben should call.
Claire exhaled frustrated breath. For all she knew, Ben had found Julia already, and both of them were safely home.
Lips a thin white line, Claire pushed out of bed and stalked over to the door. What an incredible relief it would be to be met with good news, to learn that Ben had found their daughter and that everything was just fine. Claire let herself out of the bedroom as quietly as possible and moved quickly down the hallway to the stairs.
There was a portable phone sitting atop a small table near the base of the stairs. Claire snatched the phone from its cradle and listened for a dial tone.
The phone was dead. She returned the useless phone to its cradle and peered down the hallway. She knew it wasn’t her mom’s fault the landline had been knocked out, but what if Ben had been trying to reach Claire? Had her mom left her cell phone on the nightstand, Claire would have known if Ben or anyone else had called her. Shaking her head, Claire proceeded down the dark hallway and hissed as her bare right foot came down on something. Wincing, she reached down and felt for the thing she’d stepped on. She picked it up, and even before the lightning strobed again and revealed the object for what it was, she knew it was her cell phone. But why it had been left lying in the middle of the hallway, she hadn’t the slightest clue.
And why, she wondered, had her mother turned it completely off?
The trembling took hold of her. Quit being stupid, she told herself, but the shaking worsened. Why on earth was she so frightened? Nothing was wrong. For all she knew, Ben had left her a message already. She powered on the cell phone and was waiting for it to reveal its secrets when the lightning flashed and she caught a glimpse of something she hadn’t noticed earlier.
The portable phone. The one she’d tried just a moment ago. The reason it wasn’t working had nothing to do with a downed line.
Someone had unplugged it. The cord lay disconnected at the foot of the nightstand.
The light from her mobile phone suddenly illuminated the hallway. Heart hammering, Claire checked for messages. There were six of them.
Claire was about to push the playback button when the door to her parents’ bedroom creaked open. Claire swiveled her head in that direction and saw a dark figure fill the doorway. Too large to be her mother’s.
Dad then. But something about him was wrong. He seemed bigger, for one thing, but that was just the shadows, wasn’t it? Pretty soon the lightning would flash again and show how the gathered darkness had stretched his shoulders, made his legs look broader and more powerful than they were.
She discovered another detail that made her heart perform a sick, breath-stealing lurch. It was ludicrous, of course, but for the briefest of moments it seemed to Claire that the figure in the doorway was not her father at all but one endowed with a pair of curling goat horns, one whose pupilless eyes raged at her with cruel white malice.
Lightning sizzled beyond the curtains and she realized it was only her dad after all. But this thought, rather than bringing on a surge of relief or a fit of cathartic laughter, carried with it a new species of dread. For her father wasn’t moving at all, was merely gazing at her with unsettling hostility.
Now why should she think that? This was her dad, for goodness sakes, the man who’d read Clifford the Big Red Dog books when she was a kid and held her while she cried after botching a piano solo in the fourth grade. The man who’d wept when walking her down the aisle toward Ben because he was so happy for her, the man she hoped would come to be a father figure for Ben, who had always lacked one.
But why wasn’t he moving? Or talking? Or doing anything at all for that matter? He was just…standing there. Staring at her. And when a gentler flurry of lightning tossed pale luminescence through the hall she noticed something that made her take a step backward, that made her forget all the wonderful things this man had done for her.
A butcher’s knife dangled from his left hand.
No! a voice in her head cried. You only think you saw a knife, but what you really saw was something else. It could be anything—a butcher’s knife is the least likely.
Then why isn’t he moving?
Could he be sleepwalking? she wondered. Or in a state so close to sleep that the difference was negligible? Her dad was a heavy sleeper, so maybe he’d been partially awakened by the storm, and most of his mind was still in dreamland. That was plausible, wasn’t it?
Brilliant quicksilver lit up the hall, and this time there could be no doubt. He was grasping a knife.
And there was something else. Beyond him, where the bed was situated, the shapes were arranged in an unorthodox way. Dad slept by the door because he was protective; also, her mom wanted to be near the master bathroom, which adjoined on the opposite side of the room. What Claire should have seen in that narrow gap between her father and the doorjamb was her father’s rumpled side of the bed where the covers had been pushed back; beyond that would be the small mound of her mother’s slumbering body.
Yet there appeared to be something dangling off the bed on her father’s side, something that lay twisted like a broken mannequin.
“Mommy?” a voice above her called.
Claire gasped, clapped a hand over her mouth. She eyed her father’s figure, waiting for some sort of movement or gesture to show he recognized her.
“Claire?” Joshua called again, his voice tight with panic.
“Stay upstairs, honey,” she answered, but her voice came out breathless and weak.
Her father took a step toward her. He moved with an unnatural mechanical hitch, like a movie zombie. Now she was sure her dad was asleep.
He took another drunken step toward her, and now he looked even less like her father.
“Where are you, Claire?” Joshua asked.
Her son’s voice was different now, closer. He was out in the hallway searching for her.
Lightning again, and this time her father was in mid-step when it flashed. She was afforded a view of his face, which did nothing to calm her careening fears. But it finally compelled her to get moving, to take two backward steps so she could flip the light switch.
Yellow light washed the hallway. Claire’s body went slack. Her dad was grinning at her, a sadistic, obscene grin that made his blood-speckled face look like something out of a carnival funhouse. Only this was no luridly painted clown meant to frighten patrons who’d dropped a few bucks for a harmless thrill; this was her loving, devoted father leering at her from ten feet away. His striped pajamas were drenched a ghastly wine color, his hair spiked up like he had just braved a windstorm.
The hallway light splashed into the bedroom just enough to reveal what she’d hoped was just some appalling trick played by the lightning. But it was no trick. And there
was nothing funny or good about it. It was hideously real.
“What did you…” she whispered. But she couldn’t finish. Couldn’t speak or breathe or think. From above her Joshua called to her again. He was directly above her now, and soon he’d be down here, and she had to make sure he didn’t see this. She needed to get him out of the house entirely, needed to get them both out of here and into town. She riffled through her memory to recall where she’d left her car keys. Then, as her father took another clumsy step toward her, the same grin plaguing his face, she remembered she had no car. They’d flown into Denver and her parents had picked them up and driven them to their house just outside Boulder, the one they’d built after her father retired just two years ago. The house nestled in the middle of ten acres, most of that forest, with her dad’s woodworking shop adjoining the garage and her mother’s art studio just off the kitchen. But her mom would not be painting any longer. Her mom’s body was slumped over the edge of the bed, the eyes staring upside down at Claire. Her throat had been cut, and not just in a neat slender line either. No, torn open. As if the flesh there had been sawn by the blade rather than simply slit. The ragged mountain range of gore spanned her entire neck, but the horror didn’t stop there. The gown she’d worn had been peeled open to allow her chest to be carved up, the breasts no longer breasts, just mounds of maroon gristle.
Claire was shaking her head, and at some point she’d leaned against the wall for support. But that wouldn’t stop her legs from unbuckling. They were failing her now. And just when she thought she’d faint dead away, she heard her father’s voice, the pleasant baritone she’d loved since childhood. In his truck, singing country music. In church and around the house. He was singing now, but it was just a melody without words, a song she couldn’t place at first. She associated it with Ben, and for a confused instant thought it was one of Ben’s pieces, something he’d written for a film.
Then she had it. The song.
She shook her head, finally beginning to cry now because her dad couldn’t possibly know the song, or if he had heard it he’d never have the bad taste to hum it in her presence. But matters of taste had obviously been abandoned now, along with sanity and everything else she’d ever associated with Dale Harden.
He had murdered her mother, his wife of nearly three decades.
He was advancing on his daughter now, the butcher knife still dripping with blood.
He was humming “Forest of the Faun,” the song she most associated with the monster of Castle Blackwood. With Gabriel and the Sorrows.
“Dad, please,” she managed to whisper.
Five feet away, her dad raised the butcher knife.
Joshua’s voice, from the stairs to her right, “What’s Grandpa doing?”
“Go to the front door, honey,” she said, her voice cracking.
“Mommy?” Joshua asked, his voice little more than a whimper.
“Run, baby. Please listen to your mommy. You have to—”
But she never finished because her dad suddenly strode toward her and swung the butcher knife. Claire tumbled back and threw out her arms to intercept the blow. The knife came whistling at her. Their forearms collided halfway down and the blade whooshed an inch from her shoulder. She’d moved sideways in the macabre clash, and her dad, thrown off balance, hacked the wall and tumbled to the floor. But that placed him between her and Joshua, who’d reached the bottom of the stairs. Claire made an awkward lunge to step over her father. She cleared his body and had time to think she’d escaped him when he snarled at her. The whistling sound came again and the butcher knife sliced into her Achilles tendon.
Claire screamed and went down, the butcher knife buried in her ankle. Joshua was crouching over her, his hands wreathing her shoulders, and he was screaming at his Grandpa to stop hurting her, begging him to stop it, stop it. But Claire knew this was no longer her father. No, Gabriel had found them. Just as he had found and taken Julia. And now he wanted…he wanted…
“Go, Joshua,” she said.
“Stop hurting her,” Joshua was pleading. “Stop hurting my mom!”
The pain in her Achilles was sickening, and what was worse, Dale Harden was taking hold of the knife handle and attempting to wrench it loose.
Claire kicked at her dad, yelled, “Go now, Joshua! Run to the neighbors!”
But she didn’t even know where the nearest neighbors were. Down the rutted gravel lane somewhere, she supposed. She’d seen mailboxes, breaks in the forest, but—
She yowled as her father ripped the butcher knife free. He straightened, raised the knife two-handed above his wild, thinning hair. The crazed murderous look never wavered from his face, the stretched lips and the bared teeth and the eyes that had rolled completely white.
Without taking her eyes off her dad, she pushed Joshua away. He stumbled and fell, but she didn’t have time to think because the knife was cleaving the air. Claire jerked to the side just as the blade sliced down. It slammed into the hardwood floor and her father came with it, his hands slipping off the handle and smacking the floor. But not before his thumbs slid over the butcher blade. He howled and gaped in disbelief at his gushing thumbs. He’d slit both of them to the bone, and for a moment she caught a flicker of the man she knew beneath the blood-spattered berserker that had replaced him. Something tugged at the strap of her pajamas. The spaghetti strap jerked, stretched, and she realized it was Joshua who was yanking on her. Unthinkingly, she clambered to her feet and followed him, knowing even as she did she should have retrieved the knife from where it stuck in the floor. But she moved with Joshua instead past the phone her dad had unplugged and into the darkened living room. She’d only taken a few steps before the pain in her injured Achilles became unbearable. Joshua gripped her hand, attempted to drag her forward. But she fell anyway, breaking contact with her son as she did. With a backward glance she saw her dad had risen. Joshua hooked his hands under her armpits, was grunting with the effort of hauling her backward. She was weeping and struggling to rise, but the agony of her severed Achilles kept defeating her. On some level she marveled at her son’s loyalty, at his courage. God, most people would’ve fled long ago, or else would’ve hidden.
“I told you to leave, baby,” she said.
But Joshua remained grimly determined. Never before had he reminded her more of her husband. But never before had she so wished he’d act like a normal kid. Her dad was stalking into the living room now, the shadows swallowing him. The sight of her father’s lurching gait finally galvanized her into rising. She forced herself to hobble with Joshua through the small entryway to the front door. Behind her came the same macabre humming she’d heard in the hallway, the voice nothing at all like her father’s now, instead a deep rumble that sounded like boulders underground grinding together, a voice forged of hellfire and malevolent strength. It was Gabriel taunting them. Gabriel making sure they knew who was controlling her father and transforming him into a grinning butcher.
Claire and Joshua reached the door together, but her father was coming fast. His lurching movements were growing smoother, as if the intelligence inhabiting his mind were growing accustomed to its new host. Claire twisted the lock above the knob, made to open the door, then remembered the deadbolt.
Her father stepped around the corner.
Hands shaking wildly, the fear sweat thwarting her attempts at the deadbolt, Claire glanced down at her son. He was wrapped around her thigh, his small face upturned to hers, the eyes frightened but hopeful.
It steadied her enough to get the deadbolt open.
She ripped open the door, her father right behind her. She flung open the screen door—the wind so fearsome it whipped the door out of her hand and pinned it against the side of the house—and pushed Joshua through. Stumbling, he made it to the far edge of the covered porch, where the rain was slapping the concrete. Claire made to follow but a hand fell on the back of her neck, squeezed. Claire groa
ned, twisted away from her father’s grip, but the fingers cored into her flesh, driving her to her knees. She moved with it, thinking to simply fall sideways onto the porch and then to somehow join Joshua in their flight from this place of horror. But the thing that was no longer her father was inexorable. It forced her to the concrete with its crushing grip. She was on her stomach then, her upper body tilted down on the porch, her legs and feet inside the doorway.
In that moment she saw herself through Joshua’s eyes. Saw her own terrified face peering up from the porch, saw her hands splayed in futile resistance. She saw herself dragged back inside the house, her hips and her breasts abrading against the coarse stoop. She saw the grinning creature that scarcely resembled her father hauling her past the sweep of the door.
Then she was screaming as her dad strode past her prone body. She was bellowing for him to leave Joshua alone.
But he wasn’t going back outside to get Joshua. Not yet.
He was seizing the door and flinging it shut hard enough to shatter the frame.
Then he turned and stared down at her.
Brandished the butcher knife.
His savage grin became triumphant.
He raised the knife.
“I’ll have you all,” he said.
And staring up at the knife, Claire screamed.
About the Author
Jonathan Janz grew up between a dark forest and a graveyard, which sort of explains everything. Brian Keene named his debut novel, The Sorrows, “the best horror novel of 2012.” Library Journal deemed his follow-up, House of Skin, “reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Peter Straub’s Ghost Story.”
In 2013 Samhain Horror published his creepy novel of vampirism The Darkest Lullaby, as well as his serialized horror novel Savage Species. Of Savage Species Publishers Weekly said, “Fans of old-school splatterpunk horror—Janz cites Richard Laymon as an influence, and it shows—will find much to relish.” His vampire western, Dust Devils, was released to critical acclaim this February.
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