Cades Cove 01 - Cades Cove: A Novel of Terror (14 page)

Tyler opened his bedroom door and slid inside. It made little sense that the room with the broken windowpanes seemed much more comfortable than anywhere else in the house. But it was. Wasting no time, he searched his desk and nightstand for the report.

The search proved fruitless. The report confirmed lost, he decided to bolt. His grade would suffer, but he figured his parents would go easy, considering. As he reached his doorway the front door creaked and swung open.

“
Auntie Jan?” he called out, ashamed by the edge in his voice.

No response, and then the door slammed shut. Maybe the wind did it. He recalled a pretty fierce gust when he got out of the car. But then he looked down the hallway. His parents’ bedroom door stood wide open.

Oh, shit!

Something rustled downstairs, and now Janice rang the doorbell and pounded on the front door, frantic to reach him.

Auntie Jan can’t get in?
…
She must be locked out of the house!!

The rustling grew louder, as if the back door had opened and the wind flowed freely inside. The wind moved from the living room into the foyer and rose up the stairs, lifting the row of family portraits that hung upon the stairway’s wall. Terrified, he listened to the progress of the draft, the wooden picture frames tapping against the wall as they settled back into their original spaces.

Too late to run downstairs and get out. He stepped inside the safety of his bedroom. As he did, the weird voice from yesterday called to him from atop the stairs.

“
For so-o-o long I’ve waited, my love.... My dearest Zachariah-h-h-h!”

The floorboards on his side of the hallway began to creak.

“
And now I’ll have my vengeance....”

He couldn’t see anyone, but the menacing voice drew nearer. The closer proximity of the last phrase accompanied more creaking floorboards next to Christopher’s bedroom. Tyler slammed his door shut and locked it. He then picked up his prized baseball bat that bore the signatures of his favorite Rockies’ players from the trophy shelf above his nightstand. He wielded the bat in front of him, ready if needed.

The footsteps stopped just outside his door. An unnerving silence followed, seizing the entire second floor, while Janice’s muted cries for him grew more and more frantic. The wait for what would come next excruciating, without warning something heavy crashed into the door, the force strong enough to bend the door’s hinges inward. He backed up, bumping into his desk while desperate to find anything else that could serve as a better weapon. Finding nothing, he became aware of a light tapping sound against the glass panes of his window behind him.

Tyler almost lost his balance as he whirled around, glancing warily over his shoulder at his bedroom door that remained closed. With his heart pounding, he looked over at the Hallo-ween spider he’d created to hide the football accident. For a moment, he half expected the orange-eyed arachnid to come to life and leap at him from its cardboard patch. The tape had separated on one end and the wind now whistled in from outside, pushing and pulling this portion of the patch against the window frame. At least the tapping sound had a logical explanation. What happened next did not.

A blue plastic folder arose from the small space between his desk and the window. At first he could only see the corner of the folder. As it brushed noisily against the back of the desk, he realized no wind could thrust it through that cramped space. The folder soon appeared in its entirety, the one that held his report.

“
Impossible…,”
he whispered. He reached down and picked it up. Empty. Whoever messed with him wasn’t finished.

“‘
Lookin’ for this?”

Like yesterday he couldn’t move, as if every nerve had froze. The voice that spoke now sounded softer, almost husky. Fine wisps of reddish blond hair appeared in his periphery. But unlike yesterday’s experience, he had no idea how this peculiar female crept up behind him with his door shut. She held his report in her right hand, outstretched from behind him just above his waist. Her arm and hand were bare, porcelain white except for the bluish ends of her fingertips.

Unsure of what else to do he reached for the report, hoping her gesture friendly. But as soon as he touched the papers, brushing his hand against the pale cold wrist of the girl, she tightened her grip on the report. He turned to look at her, but before he saw her face he felt a powerful push against his back, launching him across the desk and sending him crashing through his bedroom window.

“
TIME TO DIE-E-E-!!!”
the voice shrieked.

Glass shards and splintered pieces of the window frame sliced through his skin, and he tumbled down the steep gabled roof beneath his window. From there, a fifteen foot drop awaited him before he would slam into the concrete walkway surrounding the backyard’s sprinkler system. In panic, Janice ran as fast as she could to the backyard, screaming Tyler’s name while his cries filled the air.

Chapter Fifteen

“
Come on…
come on!”
David hissed at the pickup truck in front of him.

Like him, the slow-moving vehicle seemed headed to Littleton Adventist Hospital. When he reached the parking lot David swerved around the truck, glaring at the old man driving the pickup who returned his irritated gaze with a similar facial expression. He pulled into the first available spot and parked his car, feeling a tad guilty when he saw the aged gentleman help a crippled elderly woman get out from the truck’s passenger side.

“
Sorry about that,” he said in haste as he ran past the couple on his way to the automatic door leading to the Emergency Room’s reception desk. Janice met him when he approached the waiting area, her eyes red from crying.

“
How is he?”

His voice thick from worry, all he knew until now was Tyler had a bad accident at the house. Janice called his office, speaking with Nancy and then Ned before they tracked him down in a meeting with his support staff.

“
We spoke to the doctor a short while ago and Ty is going to be all right,” she informed him, pointing to where Miriam sat next to Jillian and Christopher. “Mir is a mess over this, as you can imagine.”

Miriam sat huddled in one corner of the room with one child on either side of her. They hugged their mom and lovingly stroked her shoulders as she wept. It touched him at how mature his youngest kids seemed as they comforted her.

“
Everything’s going to be all right, babe,” said David, once he reached her. He kneeled down and took her in his arms.

“
It tried to kill him, David!” she cried in anger. “It pushed him through his bedroom window!”

She pulled away and narrowed her puffy eyes.

“
Or, should I say
SHE?!
”

“
What? Who’s
‘she’??”
His mind reeled. He knew exactly what Miriam meant by her words. At the same time, he pictured his son being shoved through his window.

“
Don’t play stupid or coy with me!” She took hold of his face in her hands to where she could look directly in his eyes and he couldn’t avoid it. “You know who I’m talking about!”

Guilt forced him to close his eyes. He didn’t know what to tell her. He often found it maddening to try and gauge how much she knew about an issue as opposed to what she didn’t. She obviously had guessed the gender of the presence in their home from the whispers the afternoon before. Did that also mean she had made the same connection as he, that it was the ghost of Allie Mae?

Until she actually said so, past experience taught him not to jump to such assumptions. Lord knew he’d be in a deeper world of shit if he asked her if she meant the young girl from Cades Cove and it turned out she didn’t.

“
Ty went into the house looking for his history report, since it wasn’t in his desk or locker at school,” said Janice, bringing them back to the more important issue of their son. “I should’ve insisted on going into the house with him….. He left the front door open while I waited in my car, and he promised to be out in five minutes. When six minutes passed I got out of the car. Immediately, the front door slammed shut. I ran up the walkway and tried to open it, but it wouldn’t budge. My house key wouldn’t even turn the lock! After that I heard a girl’s voice giggling...a really strange laugh, like it came from everywhere on the main floor.”

She paused, noting the fascinated but frightened looks on Jillian and Christopher’s faces.

“
Maybe I should wait to finish this later, when we can talk alone.”

“
No, it’s all right, Jan,” Miriam assured her, standing and pulling Jillian and Christopher up with her. “I’ll take the kids to get something from the vending machines in the hallway. That should give you enough time to tell David the rest of what you told me earlier.”

She dabbed at her eyes and walked toward the reception desk, her head bowed low while the children kept up with her, clinging tightly to her arms on either side. Just before reaching the desk, she turned to the left where a small row of vending machines stood. One of the receptionists glanced at her as she walked by and then cast a suspicious scowl in David’s direction.

“
So, tell me the rest of what happened,” he said to Janice, turning his attention away from the receptionist desk. He sat down in the chair next to hers.

“
Okay, David,” she sighed, briefly looking down at her feet as if collecting her thoughts. “When I heard the crash and the glass breaking upstairs, I panicked. I was about to break the dining room window and climb in through there when I heard Ty’s screams from the back of the house. I had to climb over the fence since I couldn’t remember the combination to the gate’s lock.... I found him hanging from the floodlight pole where his leather jacket had snagged. It caught him just beneath his shoulder and kept him from falling headfirst onto the sprinkler system.”

David shook his head sadly, forced to visualize what might’ve happened if the jacket hadn’t prevented Tyler’s fall.

“
He broke his collarbone….” Janice began to cry again. “When the ambulance arrived, he started telling me what happened, since until the paramedics got him down from the roof he was in way too much pain to speak clearly. He told me that he caught a glimpse of a girl in a light blue dress with reddish-blond hair. Then he told me she spoke to him, and that she had said something to him yesterday as well. ‘She calls me Zachariah, Auntie Jan’ he said to me. ‘Why does she call me that?’”

Her shoulders shook and David tentatively reached over his seat to hug her, finding it hard to prevent his own tears. He looked up when Miriam returned, noticing the kids had moved to a play area nearby.

“
So, Jan’s told you about Ty’s injuries?”

“
Injuries? She told me about his collarbone, but what else happened?”

David prepared for the worst, pulling away from Janice to face his wife.

“
His neck and hands were cut pretty bad. And one of the doctors said there’s a really bad scrape along his back....”

Miriam started to lose it again, looking for somewhere to sit before she collapsed. David stood up and rushed to catch her, but she waved him off, taking the chair across from where Janice sat. Her anger still hovered near the surface.

“
You need to be honest with me, David,” she said, glancing briefly at Janice. “It’s the girl, isn’t it? The girl named ‘Allie’. She followed us home for some reason. I know it and
you
know it.”

What else could he say? The mention of the name ‘Zachariah’ by Janice especially chilled him. The boy in his dream had so reminded him of Tyler when a few years younger. If Allie Mae’s ghost invaded their home, could she confuse the two boys as being one and the same? Could this also be the case for the name ‘Billy Ray’ he heard Sunday night, that she confused him with some other man?

“
Well?”

“
Maybe it is her...her ghost.”

Like when he first mentioned the idea to Norm earlier that day, it made him uncomfortable admitting this might be true.

“
How long have you known this?” Greater fury simmered within her reddened blue eyes.

“
Since Sunday,” he confessed, releasing a deep sigh. “In the middle of the night I heard a girl’s voice call out to some guy named ‘Billy Ray’ from the kitchen downstairs. I got up to investigate, and I never found anyone in our house. But before I came back to bed, I heard the same ringing sound you and I heard the night before in Gatlinburg. This time, it origin-ated from the crystal bowl on the dining room table.”

“
The antique your Aunt Ruth gave us for last year’s anniversary?”

“
Yeah, that one,” he confirmed. He sat down in the chair next to hers.

“
Why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?” she demanded, the wrath in her eyes gaining strength. “If you had told me Monday night, Jill’s experience that afternoon wouldn’t have been taken so lightly. Christ, David, if you’d mentioned this last night when you grilled everyone like Sherlock Holmes, Ty would’ve never gone inside our house alone!”

She shook with rage while he tried to move closer to her, bringing his arms around her while whispering his regret, over and over until she allowed him to hold her tight. She buried her head in his shoulder and wept again. His own eyes filled with tears while he continued to hold her. Meanwhile, the doctor returned with the latest news on Tyler’s condition.