Dead Souls (27 page)

With surprising strength, the psycho grabbed the rusty handle of the water pump, and ripped it free of its brace.

Johnny scrambled back against the door, watching through the opposite window as the psycho limped back to the car, the iron handle gripped in both his hands.

There was a moment of terrible silence as the psycho stopped, looked in at Johnny, and grinned. He appeared to laugh…then wound up and swung the iron handle around in a wide arc, smashing the rear passenger window in.

Johnny reached behind his head and felt out the automatic locks on the door, all the while frantically kicking his feet at the psycho who was clawing his way in through the shattered window. "You know, I've got a son about your age," the psycho barked, shards of glass puncturing his skin. "The two of you can get together, have a nice time!" He grabbed at Johnny, who thought with terrible fear and trepidation that certain, agonizing death would consume him should the psycho simply touch him. This thought gave him the strength to flee the car and seek another refuge. He turned, pulled the door handle, and lunged out into the foot-high weeds. Honeybees and damselflies rose up and away around him. He pushed through the weeds, looked back and saw the psycho crawling across the seat after him.

"Conroy! Your blood is mine!" he called.

Johnny stood and moved back around the front of the car, tripping through the weeds, hardly feeling the hidden brambles poking at his arms and hands. He fled into the high grasses of the backyard, his legs nearly buckling as he eyed his two choices: the woods, or the barn. Which would prove the better of the two?

Before he had a chance to consider the advantages and disadvantages of either, the psycho shot out from around the side of the car and blundered awkwardly through the weeds after him. His arms were outstretched, printed with bloody gashes from the broken glass he'd crawled across. He yelled, "Come to me, boy! Your parents, they are
awaitin
' for you!" His voice was saturated with mindless ferocity. His tongue lolled out like a dog's.

My parents…

Johnny shrieked, then spun and raced toward the barn, praying with outrageous optimism for all this to be some crazy nightmare, one he'd soon wake up from, sweating and shivering in his bed...alive.

…thump…thump…thump...

He shoved the thought aside and raced all-out toward the dilapidated barn. He could see a rusty clasp on the doors of the barn. It was free of a padlock. If he could get inside, maybe get his hands on a shovel or a pitchfork or some other makeshift weapon (as the psycho presumably had), then he might have a shot of coming out of this alive. It was a better substitute than getting lost in the backwoods of
Wellfield
, where the psycho had most likely spent his time hiding out.

Johnny reached the barn, yanked on the doors. The clasp separated. The hinges made a screeching sound like braking train wheels, and the psycho echoed the noise with an untamed shriek of his own. Johnny quickly slipped inside, grabbed onto the rusted handles, and pulled the doors shut…but not before the psycho shot a scabby arm in and latched onto Johnny's left wrist.

Johnny yanked on the doors, trapping the psycho's arm. The psycho howled in agony, but his grip was strong, fingernails biting like teeth against Johnny's skin. Johnny pulled the handles furiously and watched as the splintered wood on the edge of the door sliced into the psycho's skin. His wail was a cruel siren in Johnny's ears. Johnny was only barely aware of the blood bursting from the wounds he was inflicting upon the psycho's forearm.

"Let me go!" Johnny cried, only now aware of the suffocating heat inside the barn. He braced his foot against the lower frame and pulled on the handles with all his strength. The psycho's grip on him began to give, allowing Johnny enough leeway to break free.

Johnny stumbled backward and thumped down on the solid earthy ground. The psycho had fallen too; the door was cracked open and Johnny could see him outside, already climbing to his feet. Coughing, eyes stinging and tearing from the dusty air, Johnny quickly collected his bearings and raced toward the rear of the barn. The light faded as he approached the underside of a loft. A old wooden rope-extension ladder was perched up against it, leading perhaps fifteen feet high. He jigged his eyes back and forth, saw no means of a useful weapon…then, with no time to consider any other course of action, began climbing the ladder.

The psycho burst into the barn and barked something incoherent.

"No!" Johnny cried. "Leave me alone!" He ascended the ladder, his heavy breaths taking on a flat, dull tone in the empty barn. He was about three-quarters of the way up, when he felt the ladder tremble. He looked over his shoulder.

Beads of sweat fell from his brow onto the psycho, who'd begun making his way up after him. He'd had a limp, and it seemed to be encumbering him from scaling the ladder with any sort of speed. "Oh God!" Johnny screamed, then climbed up into the loft and glanced about in a panic. He saw a small porthole beneath the peak of the ceiling. Dim light seeped through, coating the loft and the drifts of dusty hay covering the planked floor. On the floor below the porthole was a moldy mattress, a graveyard of cigarette butts, and a cluster of empty beer bottles; at some point, someone must've thrown a small party here.

Johnny reeled over to the beer bottles and grabbed one by the neck.

The ladder shifted slightly from left to right…and then the psycho appeared, first his filthy matted hair, and then his face with the caved-in eye socket, caved-in forehead, and plethora of marks and contusions.

"
C'mere
boy!" he yelled. "Gonna teach you a lesson of God!"

The psycho reached over the top of the ladder and started climbing up onto the loft.

Johnny still couldn't believe that all this was actually happening. Ten minutes earlier he was having a quiet conversation with a man promising him a fortune. Now that man was dead, and Johnny was looking his killer right in the face.

Gripping the beer bottle tightly, he raced forward and smashed it over the head of the psycho. The psycho howled, hands groping for Johnny's legs. The ladder tipped back from the loft, though not enough to send it flying backwards. A stream of blood burst from the man's forehead and ran into his good eye. He squeezed his eye shut.

Now he was blinded.

Holding the jagged base of the beer bottle, Johnny drove it forward into the psycho's face. It tore open his forehead, and ripped into his shuttered eye.

The psycho gasped and squealed. He squeezed his hands to his face. Blood and clear fluid gushed out between his fingers. Johnny thrust the beer bottle at him again, pushing forward with his weight behind him. The ladder tipped away from the loft. The psycho
pinwheeled
his arms for balance, but this only lent to his backward momentum. This time, the ladder fell back, taking the psycho with it.

Johnny watched with terrible awe and fascination as both man and ladder slammed into the front wall of the barn. The psycho's head hit against the wood wall with a sickening crack, the top rung of the ladder pinning him there for a few awful seconds before he plummeted to the hard ground. Both of his legs went out from under him, and there was a fracturing-tearing sound that was amplified in the emptiness of the barn. His torso fell forward, head slamming against the ground. He remained in this position like a spent animal, surrounded in a cloud of dust, legs splayed out from under him in a yoga-like split. Blood cascaded from the back of his head like a fountain. Sickened, Johnny pulled his eyes away and saw a print of blood on the wall where the psycho's head came in contact.

Johnny waited, half-expecting the psycho to still be alive, to get up and come after him again. He listened to his own breathing, now racing in the aftermath of terror. The world spun around him. His anxiety culminated into an all-encompassing panic, causing the image of the man on the ground, and the ladder laying beside him, to bend and sway and swell. He clutched at his heart, felt himself teetering, and nearly toppled over the edge before backing up into the dusty recesses of the loft. He tucked himself into the corner, too scared to move, too scared to flee the safety of the loft. He stayed there for an indeterminable amount of time, standing motionlessly, staring at the moldering mattress and the assortment of empty beer bottles.

Flies flitted about his head. He struck at them, then scratched at his neck, feeling as if the psycho were now touching him with ghostly, blood-sticky fingers.
Your blood is mine Conroy!
the psycho had yelled, his hideous, cavern-eyed image striking Johnny's mind's eye like a flash of lightning.

Soon Johnny came to realize that he needed to find a way out of here, off the loft, then off this property forever and ever. He wanted no part of it—nor the money that came with it. As far as he was concerned, the mayor and his businessmen friends could have it for free.

He shifted his body.

The wood beneath him gave slightly.

Curious, he hunkered down on his knees. He stared at the floor for a few seconds. Then, using his palms, slowly began clearing away the thick layer of yellow hay dust.

A sudden, ghostly voice whispered:
Bryan...

He coughed as the dust flew into his face. "Hello," he called, immediately feeling foolish, and troubled. The voice…it had come from his own head, was nothing more than his traumatized mind playing cruel games with him. He shuddered. Tears of fear and uncertainty filled his eyes, and he wondered with great concern if this was what it felt like to lose your mind.
Hey, maybe the psycho's bed at the insane asylum is still available?

But then he saw something in the wood, something that brought hope to his fateful situation. He cleared away as much of the dust as possible, then ran his fingers along a thick dust-caked groove in the floor. He reached a right angle, wheeled around and continued to move his fingers along the groove, wishing madly for an
awl
or a screwdriver to dig out all the dust. The groove gave way to another right angle, and in less than a minute he came to realize that the ladder hadn't been the only access to the loft.

Thank God!

Here was a trap door.

There was no handle, but he was able to squeeze the tips of his fingers into the groove once he burrowed out most of the compressed dust.

The voice came again. This time it was louder, also joined by another forceful whisper:
Our dying souls…

"No…" Johnny said aloud, trying to shake his head free of the spine-chilling voices.
It's all in my head, It's my traumatized mind.
Sweat rolled down his face in streams. He yanked on the door. At first it didn't budge, but he pulled and pulled until his fingers bled and his hands cramped painfully.

The caked-in dust began falling into the dark recesses of what lay beyond.

He edged his fingers into the groove and continued to pull against the hard wood. The door creaked, came up an inch—enough so that he could wedge his fingertips onto the underside.

With a yell, he pulled the heavy door up.

Just then, the light reaching in through the barn's porthole dimmed, making it appear as if a dark sepia-toned cloud masked the afternoon sun. A gust of hot, stinking air bounded up from below, grasping the door and forcing it wide open; it thumped loudly against the wall, and remained perched open. Johnny cowered and shrieked as a chorus of whispering voices ascended up from the whirlpool of darkness below, like animals bounding from a cage.
Our souls are free!
they shouted, echoing one another,
touching
Johnny, penetrating his body like tiny charges of electricity. They swam in his blood and tasted his soul, and then, with a corporeal strength, yanked him down into the darkness beyond the trapdoor. He bit against the shocking pain as the steps splintered beneath his weight. He crashed down onto the rock-solid bottom with a muffled thud.

And there he remained, paralyzed, exploring the shifting darkness, suffering the penetrating voices inside his body that probed him like rootless hands. He tried to move his arms, his legs, his neck, but numbness gripped him tightly. All he had control of were his wide open eyes, looking out and somehow seeing in the surrounding blackness ghostly wooden crosses doused in blood, the bodies of four people crucified upon them, their pleading eyes chasing his conscious mind as it surrendered to the shifting gloom.

August 24
^th
, 1988

7:27 PM

E
ddie Carlson stood in the kitchen of the Conroy house, the scream he'd heard now a muffled memory, fading across the few seconds it took for him to race inside. He looked around, saw no one. There
was
a foul smell, however, and when he circled the butcher-block table and peeked into the sink, he saw a tapestry of old vomit coating the white porcelain.

From somewhere in the house came another scream, louder than the first. He gripped the counter and stood there, tense and white-knuckled, glimpsing into the living room, but seeing no one.

"Hello?" he called. "Elizabeth?" How long he would have stood there, waiting for Elizabeth to come waltzing down all clean and rosy and assuring him that everything was fine, he did not know; it was the muffled thud upstairs—as if someone had fallen to the floor—that eventually set him into motion.