Cades Cove 01 - Cades Cove: A Novel of Terror (9 page)

“
Come out and show yourself!”

Not as tough sounding as he would’ve liked. He thought of Jillian trying to get him back after yesterday. That would make sense. But where in the hell did she learn to talk like that?
He moved into the kitchen, and Sadie lifted her head to let out a low, menacing growl.

If Jill’s messing with me, then why is the dog acting like this?

Sadie should be wagging her tail. Other than their mom, the dog favored his sister over everyone else.

No one in the kitchen, but the curtains above the sink swayed, like a slight breeze grazed them. Thinking whoever was here might be in the dining room, he set Sadie down on a kitchen chair—no easy task since she tried to jump back into his arms. She continued to whine, but once he got her to remain on the chair he took a few steps toward the dining room and then reversed his path. He ran through the living room and didn’t stop until he passed the foyer and reached the stairs near the dining room’s other entrance.

Again, he didn’t find anyone.

“
Okay, Jill…. I get it now,” he said snickering, but nervous. “You’re trying to freak me out after what happened yesterday, right? Well, it won’t work because—”

“
Guilty…both you and yer brother-r-r!”

An icy breeze embraced him from behind, where the voice now came. He tried to turn around, to take a look at whoever was there. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t move, which amazed and frightened him even more. The only thing he knew for certain it wasn’t Jillian. No frigging way.

“
Yer blood for mine,” the hollow voice whispered sultrily.

The coldness intensified...the mysterious presence drew ever closer. Out of the corner of his right eye he saw wisps of reddish blond hair. He finally managed to turn his head, but her image became a blur and disappeared. Taunting laughter filled the air around him, and he threw up his arms around his face to protect himself.

The laughter grew steadily louder and more derisive. Trembling in terrible fear, he thought he might faint. But the laughter faded, replaced by the sound of running footsteps on the driveway. The doorknob began to jiggle as other voices resounded on the front porch. Relieved that Jillian and Christopher were home, they already argued over who got to take Sadie outside to do her personal business.

“
Hi, Ty,” said Christopher, the first one inside. He sounded cheerful, but frowned when Tyler just stared at him without a reply.

“
Hey,” said Jillian, her tone casual until she turned to look at him. Like her younger brother, she frowned as well. “What’s up with you? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

He shook harder. Jillian and Christopher dropped their backpacks and came over to him. Though so badly frightened, he wasn’t about to talk about what just happened. Empowered by the urge to protect them, he stated that his tremors came from hunger. He followed them into the kitchen, looking warily over his shoulder toward the foyer while they got something to eat. Jillian had been right after all and everyone else was wrong. There
was
someone in the house with them…someone hard to see and definitely not nice.

Chapter Ten

David pulled up in the driveway just before 7 p.m., parking the minivan behind the BMW. A very long day, it started with the long line of parents in their vehicles waiting their turn to drop off the kids at Chester Elementary School. Jillian and Christopher were late to class, as a result. He should’ve known it would be that kind of day.

Things got even crazier when he arrived at work, as several amortization reports from last week needed to be completely redone. Then a representative from Kings Inc. brought in another box of investment documents just after 9 a.m., left out from the original files his department received at the end of September. To get everything fixed by six o’clock, it meant skipping both breaks and take lunch at his desk. The mound of paperwork grew another few inches in height, and the meeting to go over the prelims for Applewood Associates was now postponed until tomorrow morning, set for eight o’clock sharp.

He gathered his briefcase and laptop and stepped out of the van. Rather than go directly inside the house he walked over to the empty trash container sitting next to the garage, where Tyler returned it once he got home from school that afternoon. He opened the lid, using the garage’s floodlight to allow him to see inside the container. A small amount of liquid rolled around the bottom. Other than that, it was empty.

He closed the lid, smiling at the prospect of “Allie Mae’s Treasures” and the rest of their garbage lying someplace in the Morrison dump, where it would be crushed and buried within the next day or so. His mood brightened, he whistled a happy melody on up to the front door and stepped inside. Miriam and the kids waited for him in the living room.

“
I take it you all have eaten,” he said, after he hung up his coat and joined them.

“
Not yet,” said Miriam, her tone serious. “We need to discuss something with you first.”

All three kids sat with her on the sofa. Miriam said some-thing that morning about Janice having a date tonight. As he surveyed his family eyeing him solemnly, he wished for a buffer like her, at least long enough for him to figure out what this was all about. Something wasn’t right, and he could tell that Miriam had a bone to pick with him.

“
So, what’s up?”

He said this nonchalant and sat on the loveseat instead of his preferred Lazy-Boy, hoping a different vantage point provided an edge. While waiting for a response, he noticed the deep worry on his younger children’s faces. It seemed Miriam worried, too, just beneath her simmering anger. Tyler’s expression surprised him most. His normal upbeat brash demeanor absent, he appeared quiet and sullen.

“
There’s something in the house.” said Miriam.

“
What do you mean by that?” he replied. His mouth became dry as he considered what she surely meant.

“
Sh-h-h!
” she whispered, forceful. “It’s starting again…. Be quiet and you’ll hear what we’ve been listening to for the past hour.”

She and the kids glanced in different directions, but all had their heads upturned toward the ceiling as they waited for something to happen. At first, he heard nothing beyond the ceiling fan’s silent whirr. Then a series of gentle taps resounded from the corner of the living room to the right of the fireplace, just a few feet behind him. It sounded like a handful of tiny marbles dropped onto a hardwood floor upstairs. But no such floor existed on the upper level. The only exceptions to the wall to wall plush carpets were the tiled bathrooms located far away from where the taps originated.

What in the hell is that?

More ceiling taps soon emerged directly across from where the initial ones came from, next to the kitchen.

“
I guess we’ve got a really big rodent problem,” he said, standing to get a closer look at the corner behind him.

A tough sell, though he could picture a small army of field mice networking beneath the plywood and along the wooden beams separating the two floors. He remembered the fine-filleted job these little creatures did to the fiberglass insulation in the garage, spreading small pink tufts along an intricate maze they created near the hot water heater.

“
Sit down, David, and listen!” said Miriam, sternly, motioning for him to return to his seat. “It’ll change in a moment, and you’ll see we’re not talking about mice, rabbits or any other four-legged creatures from around here!”

She returned her gaze upward, this time to the fan/light fixture in the center of the living room. Tyler, Jillian, and Christopher’s eyes were already locked onto that spot.

David brought his gaze over to the same location. Suddenly, a loud scratching noise erupted from just above the fixture. Strong enough to shake the fan’s blades, the closest thing he could compare it to was thick tree branches being dragged across the ceiling toward each corner of the room. Strange whispers reverberated around the room.

It sounded like several voices at first, but he soon realized all belonged to one voice echoing eerily upon itself. The affect chilled him and made it hard to hear what was said. Like the hollow voice he heard two nights ago, this one sounded female in gender. But unlike that voice’s clear diction with a southern drawl, the words here were much more hushed and difficult to decipher. David glanced at his family perched on the edge of the sofa, ready to flee at a moment’s notice.

“
What do you hear?” Miriam asked him, the earlier harshness in her voice softened by uncertainty.

Relieved she hadn’t blamed him for this, he could tell she expected him to somehow make it go away; to banish the mysterious pestilence from their home. It brought little comfort to realize he seriously underestimated the scope of this thing.

“
I can’t make out the words,” he told her, after straining to hear the whispered message again.

“
But you hear the girl’s voice, right?” She sounded hopeful, that she and the kids hadn’t suffered a hallucination.

“
Yes…I do,” said David.

He rose to his feet again and moved over to the ceiling fan until he stood directly beneath it. The voice seemed louder here and its diction much clearer. Almost chant-like above the barely audible clicks caused by the fan’s ‘on/off’ chain brushing steadily against the light fixture.

“
He’s coming…the moth to the spider…while the butterflies watch!”

“
What do you hear now?” Miriam asked, tentative, rising from the couch.

“
Well—” His reply was interrupted by an immense slam that shook the entire ceiling. It caused him to duck away while Miriam scurried back onto the couch. She and the kids huddled close together. Several more thumps followed from upstairs, as if the furniture was being pushed across the carpet and slammed against a wall.

David ran upstairs. The ruckus continued until he reached the landing, and then it ceased. The chilled air reminded him of their unheated garage in the dead of winter—much colder than the previous night in the master bedroom.

“
David, are you all right?”

“
Yeah, I’m fine!”

He heard Miriam’s footsteps along with the children moving toward the stairs from the living room.

“
Don’t come up here until I say it’s okay!”

The master bedroom and one of the guestrooms sat above the living room. He stepped toward the guestroom, motioning again for his family to stay put where they presently gathered at the foot of the stairs.

He pushed the door open, which creaked tiredly, and stepped inside the room. Nothing out of place here, except it felt a lot warmer than it did in the hallway. He shut the door behind him and moved to his and Miriam’s bedroom. He heard movement behind the closed door and leaned in to listen. Someone approached from the other side, as if sensing his presence. He turned the knob and threw the door open, flicking on the light.

The room lay empty. He checked the closets and under the bed before moving into the bathroom. Cold as hell, a madd-ening sensation of being watched stayed with him as he moved about the bedroom and bath. When he returned to the bedroom’s doorway he paused to survey the room, listening intently.

“
David? Are you all right?”

Miriam’s voice startled hm. She and the kids were now huddled on the stairway.

“
I’m okay.” He backed out of the bedroom, turning off the light before pulling the door shut.

“
What did you find in our bedroom?” She met him in the middle of the landing, before he guided her back to the stairs.

“
Nothing,” he replied, and then let out a low sigh. “Other than feeling like Siberia up here, I didn’t find anything that explains the noises we heard.”

She shivered, folding her arms tightly across her chest. Near the top of the stairs, the kids waited…anxious. Looking at them all, David had no idea what to do next...how to effectively deal with an unseen menace he knew virtually nothing about. He urged everyone downstairs where they grabbed their coats, and after he coaxed Sadie out from her latest hiding place beneath the sofa, the family fled their infested home.

Chapter Eleven

“
How do we make it go away?”

Miriam took a sip from her strawberry shake after posing this question to her husband, who had finished his second burger. They sat in the minivan’s front seats, parked beneath a streetlamp at a local family-owned burger drive-in called ‘Pops’, in Littleton’s older business district.

“
I don’t know,” said David, quietly. He paused to sip his chocolate shake and turned to face her. “But we’re not going to be driven out of our house by whatever this thing is.”

“
Maybe we should call somebody,” she suggested, her tone worried. “Don’t they have people in the yellow pages who deal with stuff like this? I remember watching a program on the Travel Channel last week before we went to Tennessee, where this family brought in some researchers and psychics to investigate why their home was haunted.”

“
Ghostbusters?” David chuckled. Seeing his joke wasn’t appreciated he added, “So, you think we really have a ghost?”

She nodded she did.