Ghostland

by Duncan Ralston

  "It's okay," he said.

  She shook her head. "It's not okay. Death scares the hell out of me, Ben. It always has. That's why I started watching horror movies, playing all those games with you. It was a safe outlet. That's what Allison told me. I could look at death from a distance." She felt tears coming. "That's why I couldn't be friends with you anymore. Because when you died it made death real. It was all I could think about. Everything I did, death was right behind the corner waiting for me. But then I realized—Allison made me realize—all this time I've spent hiding from you I haven't just been hiding from death, I've been hiding from life. I guess I always kind of knew it but coming here with you proved it to me. So let's live, okay? For everyone who died here." She took Ben's hands, the bulky gloves an almost agonizing barrier between them. She craved contact, to feel the warmth of skin on skin. "Let's live," she said again, smiling through her tears.

  Ben swallowed hard and nodded, both of them crying now. He wiped his eyes with the heels of his palms. Lilian let them fall.

  Garrote's voice startled them both. "Careful, you idiot," he said, his words slightly slurred, coming from the nearby doorway. "I still need my damned tongue."

  They peered into the room, saw Garrote seated on a toilet and a man with his back turned to them, dressed in a blue Polo shirt, reaching into Garrote's mouth with a pair of pliers. Garrote's right hand was wrapped in bandages soaked through with blood. A half-drunk bottle of scotch labelled Macallan 10 Years Old stood beside the toilet. Garrote winced as the man pulled a tooth from his open mouth and dropped it into the blood-spattered sink, where it clinked against the porcelain.

  "Who's that with the pliers?" Ben asked, moving to try and get a view of the man's face.

  Lilian looked in the mirror to find out. His face was just out of sight but in the corner of the mirror she saw another man, one unseen by Ben and the others. He lay in a tub full of black water, his eyes white globes of fear staring directly at her from within a pitch-black face pitted and scalded, his hair melted away in clumps, his shoulders and arms and chest a topographical map of pustulating sores and burns speckled with small white feathers.

  Lilian backed away from the room, the terrified eyes of the tarred and feathered man etched onto her retinas when she blinked. She squeezed her eyes until the image faded.

  Plink! Another tooth dropped onto the porcelain.

  "Are you okay?"

  "I saw…" she began. She just swallowed hard and shook her head.

  "What was it?"

  "Don't look," she warned, and Ben stepped back from the bathroom door without question.

  Only one way left to them now. The door at the end of the hall was painted black as death. Lilian felt like they'd been pushed this way, lead here, everything in this house poking and prodding them toward this last door, this final threshold.

  She couldn't help but feel that whatever lay beyond that door, it was something she wouldn't want to see.

  "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Ben asked.

  She nodded, no need to see his face to know it was true. She could hear it in his voice.

  And before they could make a decision to keep going or turn back the way they'd come the house again decided for them as the hallway burst into flames. The wallpaper bubbled and peeled, the curtains blackened and curled, scraps of burning fabric fluttering toward the ceiling, where flames rolled toward them in red-hot waves, and at the end of the hall a woman screamed, burning from head to toe, flailing her arms and running zigzag toward them, heaving against the walls and pinwheeling away as her clothes peeled from her charring flesh.

  Lilian didn't waste another second. She turned, yanked the black door open and leaped blindly into the room, Ben at her heels. The fiery woman fell in a scorched heap at the foot of the door, her flesh sloughing off in sheets and melting into the Persian rug like gobs of candle wax, setting its fringe on fire. With her bones exposed the woman still writhed, her jaw and all of her teeth visible as she screamed, begging for her agony to end. Even after the burning woman's screams died her carcass kept moving, squirming and bubbling, reminding Lilian of the black snake fireworks Ben used to light on the Fourth of July, the ones that grew and curled over themselves as they turned to ash.

  She slammed the door and leaned against it, finally turning to look at their surroundings.

  THE HOUSE SPEAKS

  GARROTE'S OFFICE WAS large, with polished wood floors and a high ceiling. A large brass globe stood at its center and a lion's head hung above a fireplace. An armchair had been placed on one side of the hearth, a samurai helmet in a glass display case on the other. At the far end of the room stood a large mahogany desk, inlaid bookshelves on the wall behind it. Images in frames dotted the walls elsewhere, some large, others small. Mostly book covers behind glass, the few others photographs of Garrote with famous people, with his Army platoon, with his books.

  Through the windows, Lilian could see what was likely the top of the wall surrounding the park. For a reckless moment she thought that if they could leap across the chasm between the window and wall they could escape, but it looked far too wide. They'd need something to cross it. The fall would be too high to survive without severely broken bones.

  "I've seen this room," she said.

  "This is where I saw him that day." Ben pointed to the window in the corner. "Standing in that window."

  Lilian shivered, remembering the enormous shadow that had flitted past the opened doorway the day Garrote House rolled through town. She backed away from the black door, wondering if it had been the remains of the Odells—what the Ghost Brothers had called "the Behemoth"—that she'd seen through the window. She wondered, if she'd been the one to see Garrote that day instead of Ben, would she have been the one whose heart stopped beating? Would she have been forced to live under Garrote's shadow the past four years, wondering Why me? Forever wondering if Garrote would come back for her, to stop her heart for good? Had it all come down to bad luck? Or had Garrote wanted Ben to see him? For the thousandth time she cursed herself for ever having told Ben to look out the window that day, for having shown him this damned house.

  Unaware of her guilt, Ben crossed to the globe. "This is a Lenox Globe," he said.

  "Isn't that what you and the detective were nerding out about this morning?"

  He set it spinning and grinned back at her, the globe a whirling blur of greens, brown and blue at his hip. "It's weird," he said. "You're the one who's good with directions but I'm the one who loves maps." He slapped a palm onto the globe to stop it from spinning. Lilian imagined all the tiny people on the Eastern seaboard his hand would have crushed.

  How many people died by Garrote's hand today? she wondered. Hundreds? Thousands? Is anyone still alive out there? Are we the last?

  "All right, all right, wait your damn turn!"

  Lilian startled at the sound of Garrote's voice, while Ben lifted his hand from the globe and aimed the stun gun.

  The writer's hologram sat hunched over the typewriter, his hair a mess, dark patches under his eyes like shriveled teabags, a smoldering cigarette clamped between his lips. Balled-up sheets of paper were strewn everywhere on the desk, the floor. There was a half-empty bottle of Macallan at Garrote's right elbow, alongside an ashtray full of cigarette butts. Several more bottles poked out of the trash bin beside the desk. The writer typed in a flurry, then paused, listening.

  "Yes, I can hear you, dammit!" he shouted. "I'm typing as fast as I can!"

  "Who's he talking to?" Lilian asked.

  "The ghosts," Ben said. "He's talking to the ghosts of the house. The ones who lived here before him."

  As he spoke figures appeared half-formed around Garrote, more like true apparitions than the holograms they had seen elsewhere in the house. She recognized the Odells and their curly-haired twins from the photographs she'd seen—but also as parts of the monster called the Behemoth. Beside them stood a pasty-faced butler, holding his arms behind his back with his chest heaved outward, a
nd the maid they had seen in the kitchen, who was now whispering in Garrote's ear. Then a pair of builders with handlebar mustaches, dressed in dirty overalls and flat caps. One man was studded with nails. The other had an iron rod jutting from the top of his skull. More ghosts stood behind them, huddled in a tight group between Garrote and the far wall: a Native American shaman, his rich brown skin painted from the waist up; the governess with the rotted child in her arms; the tarred and feathered man, the whites of his eyes stark against the shimmering black tar on his skin; the burning woman, her embers still smoldering; three bored-looking teenagers from the '80s, each missing parts of their face or an arm or bleeding through their vintage T-shirts.

  Garrote took a long drag on his cigarette, nodding as the maid spoke into his ear. On his right Hedgewood began flapping his tongue, spattering his cummerbund with gore.

  "Goddammit, Ollie, can't you see I'm listening to Lutessa? Wait your fucking turn!"

  The maid finished speaking and Garrote began again to type. "These old bones," he muttered, smiling as his fingers clattered over the keys. "These old bones sure do tell the tale."

  The long ash fell off his cigarette onto the blotter. He brushed it away absently and kept typing. Then they disappeared.

  In the silence that followed, Ben spoke. "A Roller-Coaster Ride Thru Hell, Garrote's first novel, was super-successful. He made a ton of money from the paperback and movie rights, even though a movie never got made. But after that he wrote two critical and commercial bombs, Shōki and Blood Red." Ben shrugged, scratching his chest absently, over his heart. "They're okay books, not his best. He thought getting a change of scenery might help his writing, so he bought this house, on the other side of the country from where he grew up in Connecticut. After that he wrote one hit after another, starting with The House Feeds, about a writer possessed by the ghosts in his house. It's basically The Shining without all the psychic stuff. After that some fans came up with this crazy theory that the story was autobiographical, that the ghosts in this house had actually told him what to write."

  "I guess it's true," Lilian said.

  "I guess so." Ben looked around the room in thought. "You know, in The House Feeds there was a trapdoor underneath the main character's desk, leading down to these creepy old catacombs under the house."

  "How did it open?"

  "I haven't read it in a long time." He broke away from her and approached the desk. "The globe is too obvious. So is the lion's head."

  "A book, maybe?" she suggested.

  He shook his head. "He already did that in the library. Garrote hates to repeat himself. He says self-cannibalization is for lesser writers than him."

  Lilian followed Ben to the desk. All of the clutter from the holographic flashback was gone, leaving only the old black Remington typewriter on a green leather blotter, a small gargoyle facing the desk chair with a clawed finger pressed to its smiling lips as if to hold back a secret, a mug filled with pens, and an antique ink quill set.

  The chair squeaked as Ben sat in it. He picked up the gargoyle and examined it briefly before setting it back down. He hovered his fingers over the keys and mimed typing for a moment, getting into the zone. Then he rolled the chair back and peered under the desk.

  "There's a wire under here," he said, sitting back up.

  Inspiration struck and he raised the typewriter off the desk, revealing a thick black cable that trailed from its base to a hole in the desk. "The typewriter! Of course!"

  Lilian rolled her eyes. "Of course."

  He picked up a sheet of paper, rolled it through and began typing. For a machine called that called itself "Noiseless"—according to the name printed across the top—it sure made a racket. The words came easily, as if Ben himself were possessed. When he'd finished Lilian looked over his shoulder and read it aloud.

  "'The last living ghost looked over the burning ruins of the world he'd conquered and thought, This land belongs to us now—a world of the dead, a world full of ghosts.'" She cocked her head at Ben. "Did you just make that up?"

  He shook his head, frowning at the page. "It's the first line from Shōki. A flashforward to the end of the book. I thought maybe it would trigger something, like a password."

  "Passwords are usually one word," Lilian said. "What if it's just 'Shōki'?"

  "Maybe."

  He typed the word. Nothing happened. "There's no accents on the keys," he said.

  "I've got an idea." She leaned over him and tore the page from the typewriter, then started pulling out the ribbon, getting ink on her fingers.

  "What are you doing?"

  She pulled out enough until what Ben had typed was no longer visible. Then she saw what she was hoping to find. "If this opens the way down someone must have used it before," she said. "Look."

  Ben peered over her shoulder. He saw the same thing she did, the code Shoki237, repeated several times. "Like the signed hardcover in the library," he said. "I guess I should've thought of that."

  Lilian shrugged. "Well, you didn't, so kiss my score and get out of the way, chump." She made to sit down beside him on the narrow seat. Ben stood up quickly, looking anxious. She ignored his embarrassment and carefully typed out the password.

  As she struck the 7 key a sharp click came from beneath the desk. She leaped out of the chair as a section of the floor rose several inches then began rolling away from them, exposing a dark chasm below their feet. The chair was swallowed up by the expanding hole. It struck something hard, then something else, again and again, the crashes moving further from them, down and away. It sounded like stairs.

  "Whoa," Ben said. "Cool."

  Lilian squinted down into the dark passage. "Not much light down there."

  Ben reached into the leg pocket of his cargo shorts and plucked out a box of matches. The box had a blue pattern and the name Kitchen God. Weird name, she thought.

  He nodded and struck the first match, then crouched, holding it over the stairwell. The warm yellow glow illuminated dark wainscoting and candles in holders at intervals along the walls. The smell that arose from within was dank and musty, the stench of age and rot.

  Lilian wondered when this passage had been opened last. Someone must have used it at some point in the past four years. The great gobs of melted wax on the candles indicated the electricity had never been updated in this part of the house. But the password had been used multiple times recently, judging by the imprints on the typewriter ribbon.

  The floor began to shake, as if the trap door was already closing. Ben had already descended the stairwell up to his shoulders. He gripped the edge of the passage, eyes wide in fear, trying to look around the foot of the desk. "What's happening?"

  Lilian didn't know. The passage wasn't closing, not yet. She couldn't think what could be shaking the floor, unless—

  Out in the hallway a deep, rumbling horn blared, echoing through this house of the dead. Her skin prickled with fear.

  The Behemoth had found them.

  THE RED WATER

  THIS FEELS LIKE a trap, Lilian thought as she hurried down the steps to Ben's side.

  The smell was even worse down here, like when her dad had pulled up the floorboards at the old house on the Duck Bill, and the stink of dozens of dead mice and dried feces had wafted up from the foundation. Ben struck a match against the box. Its sharp burnt sulfur smell smothered the stench as he held it against the wick of the nearest candle, revealing a long stairwell that descended into the darkness beyond a narrow landing and a door below them.

  The Behemoth's horn bellowed again, ringing off the walls above them. It was closer now, hunting them through the house.

  Lilian peered out at the slash of lowering sunlight as the floor rumbled back into place. With the keeper suit on, the ghosts couldn't harm her. But she couldn't protect Ben for long. She hurried down to the first landing, jerked the handle on the Maglock. The door wouldn't budge.

  "That's probably the first-floor entrance," Ben said. He struck another match and lit th
e next candle. The stairs descended another ten feet, stopping at another door, where Garrote's desk chair lay on its side.

  The Behemoth's horn blasted down into the passage. They looked up, gripping each other. Laura Odell's dead eyes peered down through the narrowing gap just as the entrance grumbled closed. Lilian and Ben huddled together in the darkened stairwell, the only light from the guttering candles.

  Could the Behemoth follow them through the trapdoor? Lilian wasn't about to wait around and find out.

  She hurried to the bottom of the stairwell, stepped over the desk chair and twisted the doorknob. Beyond was another long tunnel, a string of emergency lighting burning along the ceiling, giving the tunnel an eerie red glow. Bundles of thick cables came out of the wall near the ceiling and trailed down the hall below the lights.

  They stepped into the tunnel. Ben closed the door behind him.

  "I think we lost it," he said.

  "Don't jinx it."

  They followed the cables, their pale faces red from the lights. At the far end the lights trailed down another corridor to the right. When they reached it, Lilian began to hear a hum that rose in volume as they turned the corner, a hum she seemed to feel in her teeth.

  "What's that sound?" she asked.

  "Sounds like computer fans," Ben said. "We must be getting close to the servers."

  "Why would they put the servers so far away from the control room? Does that make sense?"

  "I was thinking that too. All these cables, hundreds of feet long. Seems like a waste of time and money."

  Another door lay ahead, with a Maglock like the others. A sign beside the opened door read, LEVEL 3 EMPLOYEES ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT! Lilian assumed the programmer must have unlocked it for them, and wondered if he'd be able to open the hatch when the time came. That would be too convenient—movie critics would call it deus ex machina. Judging by how well today had gone so far, she didn't suspect their time at Ghostland would end so painlessly.