The Haunting of Sam Cabot (A Supernatural Thriller)

by Hall, Mark Edward

  Chapter 11

  I stood in the center of a vast, dimly-lit room. At first it looked like the living room of my parent’s home. It had the same furniture, but the room was much larger than I remembered. And there were other problems. Everything in the room seemed to glow with a faint, blue luminescence as did the gauzy shadows that stretched at odd angles across the carpeted floor.

  The first thing that made me realize it was a dream was the way the shadows all seemed to converge in the middle of the room. This was not how things in the conscious world worked.

  The second thing that tipped me off was that at the far end of the room, draped either in rotting lace or a clotted tangle of spider webs, lay two side-by-side coffins; one for my mother, and one for my father. Although I somehow knew that the coffins contained my parents I also knew this wasn’t at all how things happened all those years ago. They hadn’t been shown at home, as this dream suggested, they’d been shown at the funeral parlor downtown.

  So, why was I dreaming about my parent’s funeral at all? I hadn’t dreamed about them, or even thought about them for a very long time. Actually I’d spent the last thirty plus years trying to forget about them. “Forgetting makes the pain go away,” a shrink once told me. “Ah, but as much as we would like to forget, we never really do.”

  Maybe not, but I’d been doing one hell of a job forgetting up till now. And by the way, what the hell was this dream doing in my head anyway? The last thing I remembered I was writing a story about being down in the basement talking to the Hulk . . . no, that can’t be right. You can’t talk to a furnace. Not in the real world at least. Furnaces are inanimate objects. They are a collage of iron and tin and ceramics, all dreamed up and put together by the most intelligent species on the planet. But this isn’t the real world anymore. The thought occurred to me that I’d left the real world behind when I moved into Farnham House.

  It’s not really a furnace, you know. It’s something alive. You even gave it a name.

  That doesn’t mean it’s alive. Lots of people give inanimate objects names; boats, planes, cars. Some men even name their dicks.

  But this isn’t your dick, is it, old buddy. This is the monster that lives in your basement, not the one that lives in your pants. The monster you named the Hulk.

  So, what’s your point? My problem is I’m dreaming about something I never wanted to be reminded of . . . the deaths of my parents. Why do you suppose that is?

  When no answer was forthcoming I stepped closer to the twin coffins and peered down into them, one, and then the other. Both my parents lay on their backs, hands folded serenely across their chests. Their eyes were wide open and staring, like wet glass marbles that reflected the eerie blue glow of the room. Dad’s thin lips were peeled back, exposing his teeth in a frightening grimace, not unlike Greg Farrington’s frightening and fear-filled grin on the day he volunteered information about our new/old house—information I never shared with Linda, by the way—and warned me about Carlisle. As if I needed any warning. Now, old information-overload Greg was pushing up daisies in the local cemetery and here I was dreaming about a time and place best left forgotten.

  As I stood between the rotted lace-draped coffins staring down at the corpses of my parents amongst the folds of satin lining, I noticed a curious thing. There was something dark leaking from their bodies, spreading out and staining the lining. Must be blood. The thought shot a quick spasm of panic into my heart. How could it be blood? The mortician would have drained all the blood from their bodies—all the blood that hadn’t been lost in the accident, at least—and replaced it with formaldehyde, the standard-practice embalming fluid.

  For what seemed like a terribly long time, I just stood there between those two coffins, hardly able to breathe. As I stared down at my dead parents I thought that except for their faces with the open glassy eyes, they could be sleeping. I expected at any moment to see them sit up and tell me what a brave little guy I was for handling their deaths with such poise and sophistication.

  But they didn’t do that. No, not for a minute did they do that. Even so, I wanted to scream at them, ‘I was in shock! What the hell else was I supposed to do, throw a temper tantrum? Dad, you were drunk. You killed yourself and my mother, not to mention the people in that other car. You did a stupid thing. You left me, and I had to grow up fast, and alone. There wasn’t anybody else who could or would take care of me.’

  Suddenly a low, dull thumping sound filled my ears causing me to flinch with each beat.

  I wasn’t sure whether the sound originated outside the house or inside it, but the longer I listened to it, the louder it became until it pulsed like a frantic heartbeat inside my head.

  At least now I know I’m dreaming, my disengaged yet rational mind said. So, why can’t I make myself wake up?

  The thought sent a sudden rush of alarm speeding through me. Maybe I’d never wake up from this nightmare. I heard myself moan softly, and tried again to come awake. To no avail. In a slow, fluid motion, I felt myself turn around. My eyes widened, and as I tried to pierce through the shadows, I vaguely sensed motion in the darkness. But I couldn’t focus clearly enough on anything to know what was there.

  Once again I glanced down at my dead parents. Dad was still lying on his back staring straight up, but now Mom lay in a fetal position, her knees pulled up to her chest. She was turned away from me and I noticed for the first time that she was wearing a dark-colored dress that looked like a ball gown—the gown she was wearing that night—which appeared to be ripped and stained. It hung in loose tatters from her shoulders.

  No way was she buried in that dress.

  It was New Year’s Eve. They’d been to a party . . . and, on the way home . . . No, I don’t want to think about that anymore.

  As I watched, the deepening shadows of the room bled like ink stains into the coffin, obscuring my dead parents.

  I felt compelled to move closer to make sure they were still there, to make sure they were all right.

  Of course they’re not all right, you idiot. They’re dead . . . They got all mangled up in that car crash. No one could have gotten out of that alive.

  But the insistent thumping sound—that I suddenly realized was not inside my head—made me turn away. Please let me wake up from this nightmare.

  The sound gradually shifted from a thumping heartbeat to a harsh, abrasive noise that sounded more like a shovel being thrust into dry, pebbly soil. As I focused on the sound, trying to pin down its source, the scratching blended into something else, something that sounded vaguely like a low, whispered voice.

  “Is someone there?” I called out and my words were muffled inside my head as if my ears were filled with water.

  There was no reply. I didn’t really expect one, but the dull scuffing sound did suddenly stop, leaving behind a dense, throbbing vacuum. Nearly frantic, I looked around the room. I needed to run, but I had no idea which way to go. There were gaping, dark doorways on all four walls. The darkness within all of them fairly vibrated with pitch black shadows.

  “Who’s there?” I called out again, my voice weak and scared, almost breaking in my throat. “What do you want?”

  My eyes shifted again to the two coffins in the center of the room, but complete darkness had surrounded them now and I could no longer make them out.

  Just at the edge of hearing, I heard a voice whispering softly.

  Come with me. You need to see this.

  At that moment I again heard the shovel digging into pebbly earth, and I started walking forward, toward the nearest door. It didn’t matter where it led. I had to leave this room. I had to find a way out of this nightmare before it was too late.

  The open doorway swelled with darkness so thick it seemed to be a living, breathing thing. As I felt myself being drawn toward the opening, the rough scraping sound rose even louder until it grated on my nerves. I suddenly realized that the sound was coming from the darkness beyond the doorway.

  I had a sudden vision of
the grim reaper digging my grave. Pure, blinding panic filled me. I tried to turn away and run, but the doorway continued to draw me forward.

  Welcome home, Sam, a papery-thin voice whispered. We’ve been waiting for you.

  I’d never forgotten that first day at Farnham House, how I was convinced that someone had spoken those exact words in a moment of strangeness unlike anything else in my experience.

  “Somebody, please . . . help me,” I called out, and then my voice stretched out into a long, keening wail. The closer I got to the door, the more the darkness within the doorway resolved, taking on a series of undulating shapes.

  For a paralyzing instant, I didn’t recognize what they were, but then I saw that the darkness had assumed the form of several gauzy but human forms.

  Ghosts.

  I wanted to scream but couldn’t. I could see them, waiting for me in the darkness beyond the doorway, arms outstretched and anxious to take me into their embrace. I could see the smoky undulations of black against black; I could almost feel the iron-tight grip of arms closing around my body, of hands at my throat crushing the life out of me.

  Welcome home, Sam. We’ve been waiting for you.

  Using every ounce of effort I could muster, I turned and began to run.

  I didn’t care where. All I knew was, I had to get away from the door and the shadowy figures that beckoned there. My bare feet whispered on the carpet like high, panting breaths as I dashed across the living-room floor and through one of the other doorways. I had no idea where it led and I didn’t care. My only thought was, I had to get away from those terrible shadows. My shoulders and the back of my neck were prickling with knots of icy tension because I knew they were coming for me; somehow I knew they were closing the distance between us. Their hands were hooked like claws, ready to snag me and drag me down. I grabbed the edge of the door jamb and wheeled around as I darted into what turned out to be a long, narrow corridor. It was dimly lit, but light enough for me to see. I stumbled as a terrible groan wrenched from my throat.

  All the while, I knew they were directly behind me. I didn’t have to turn and look; I could feel their awful presence just inches away, breathing down my neck. And I could feel that their souls were anguished beyond articulation. Then I suddenly knew who they were. They were the souls of those who’d died inside this house. And I knew what they wanted. They wanted me, another soul to further fuel their anguish.

  As I ran, the corridor seemed to lengthen, telescoping crazily away from me. Numerous doors lined both sides of it, and I could see that some of them were open.

  Through the widening cracks, I caught fleeting glimpses of more people inside the rooms—shadowy figures that reached out for me as I ran past them.

  Welcome home, Sam. We’ve been waiting for you.

  I knew that even the slightest faltering of my pace would be disastrous. They would catch me and then . . .

  Please don’t catch me, I kept thinking as I fought back panic and tried to think clearly. Where can I go? How can I get rid of them? They had all gathered from out of the many rooms now, and were moving swiftly behind me, like winged shadows of the night. No matter how hard I ran, the distant, dark end of the corridor seemed to telescope away from me.

  The floor pitched violently, at crazy angles that threw me off balance. My arms flailed wildly, and I tried to scream but couldn’t. My breath was burning like acid in my throat and lungs.

  Suddenly, with the fluidity of dreams that only makes sense within a dream, I found myself running in another place, and as I ran, I realized that this was no longer the house of my childhood, the house I had grown to the age of twelve in—this was the cellar of Farnham House. I ducked beneath low, cobwebbed rafters and sections of brand new chrome heat pipe as I ran deeper into the bowels of the basement, all the while terribly aware that the shadowy ghosts were still behind me, relentlessly dogging my every step. The cellar turned into a long, twisting tunnel whose distant end was lost in darkness. The rough scraping sound that filled my ears might have been my own breathing—or the sound of my bare feet skidding on the dirt floor—but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was a shovel digging a grave—my grave—in dry pebbly soil. My mind was a raging white blank of terror as I forced myself to keep running, even though I knew that I was close to collapse. Somehow—amazingly—I kept going, fleeing from one kind of darkness into another.

  Up ahead I spotted the Hulk, with its grinning maw of a mouth. As I moved toward it, I felt no comfort seeing it because beyond the louvers, on the inside of the firebox, the Hulk was burning ferociously, orange and yellow flame dancing and roaring. My heart sank. It was as if I was being herded by dozens of shadowy ghosts into the fiery maw of hell.

  I knew in my heart that it couldn’t actually be the Hulk, because this was a dream. In reality the furnace had not yet undergone its first test firing since being rebuilt. I had just this morning spoken with Carlisle about it and he assured me that the time was close but there was still some tweaking left to do before the test firing could be accomplished. Even so, there was something horribly real about the entire experience of this dream.

  Welcome home, Sam, the Hulk seemed to say. We’ve been waiting for you.

  You want me to burn. Is that what this is about?”

  We want you to see.

  We want you to understand.

  What do you want me to understand?

  Why you came to this place.

  Tell me!

  You cannot know until you know.

  That doesn’t even make sense.

  Again with an abrupt but perfectly acceptable dreamlike shift, I realized that I was now inside another place running for my life. Not my parent’s house, and not the basement of Farnham House. This time I was upstairs in Farnham House. There was no furniture, and the walls were all a dull gray. Obviously it was the Farnham House of yesteryear, long before we ever came here. I saw windows with tattered shades partially raised. As I glanced left and right, I saw ink-dark silhouettes shifting like smoke in all of the windows, and I caught the faint glow of dozens of eyes, sparkling in the dark as they stared at me with cold, bitter malice.

  As I ran, all the glittering eyes left their places and chased after me. I could hear the rasping of heavy breathing and the sounds of anguish keeping pace with my every footstep. I could almost smell their sweat and their fear. I wondered if they were keeping their distance to tease me, to toy with me. At any moment, I fully expected them to spring forward, and then I would feel cold, powerful hands grab me and take me down. I needed to understand why these restless spirits wanted me. But I thought I knew. Their spirits were not yet resolved. They needed closure. That’s why I had come here, to give them closure.

  But why me?

  How could I give them closure?

  They want me to burn!

  The thought filled me with a gnawing dread certainty. No matter where I go, no matter what I do they’ll always be here with me. And eventually they’re going to get their way.

  In another sudden and dizzying dream shift I was outside running along a darkened, storm ravaged road. Swaying trees towered above me, their branches laced together to block out any light from the night sky. My feet slapped the ground, but the gravel hurt my bare feet, making it difficult to keep my balance. Rain sheeted across me, and several times, I stumbled and almost fell; and still, the shadowy figures dogged my every step. But how? Why couldn’t they just leave me alone?

  Wind was whistling in my ears with a dull, hollow sound that spread chills up and down my back. Pain and exhaustion sizzled like electricity inside me, sapping my strength. There was no hope. No escape. I was doomed. A great sadness welled up inside me, almost overwhelming. Finally, in resignation, I slowed my pace, and then drew to a halt, panting heavily. I wanted to turn and face the shadow people, but all I could do was close my eyes and cringe, waiting for them to swoop down and have their way with me. For a terrifying, timeless moment, I waited, and finally the fear and pa
nic inside me subsided as I accepted my fate.

  But nothing happened.

  Then, at some indistinct point, just below the rapid thundering of my pulse, I became aware of a faint whining sound.

  I opened my eyes and looked into the swelling storm to see the minivan carrying Linda, Sean, and perhaps Carlisle rounding a bend in the road. The whining was the sound of the vehicle’s tires as they tracked over the rain-slicked blacktop.

  For the entire length of this long and terrible nightmare I’d been trying to shake off the shadow people who had been relentlessly dogging me. Now, like an expulsion of pent-up breath they were gone, deserting me like rats deserting a sinking ship, moving toward the oncoming minivan and spreading out across the highway. I saw it all too clearly, and I was powerless to prevent it. I waved my arms and tried to scream, to warn Linda, but it was too late. Through the windshield I saw her give the wheel a violent twist, sending the minivan careening wildly. I screamed as colored lights exploded around me.

  Then the dream changed again and the flashing lights of emergency vehicles were everywhere, surrounding the twisted wreckage of two automobiles. I was struggling to understand. I’d only seen one vehicle; our minivan. I’d seen the shadow people block the road, and then the blinding crash. Where had the other vehicle come from?

  I tried to get close to our minivan, but now I no longer recognized it as our minivan. Suddenly I was very confused. Men wearing uniforms were holding me back, sadly shaking their heads.

  “It was the shadow people,” I said. “They’ve been chasing me. When they saw the car they lined up across the road. They caused this to happen.”