SHUDDERVILLE THREE (7 page)

Gripping the knife, she moved down the hallway and headed up the stairs, the hardwood treads protesting underneath her weight. The banister felt loose and wobbly in her hand. Water stains metastasized on the ceiling. The afternoon light cast eerie shadows on the walls, and soon she realized the strange noise was coming from the attic.

The attic stairs were narrow and slippery. A spider web drifted across her face, and she batted it away with her hand. Every third tread made a cracking sound beneath her boots. She could hear wasps buzzing lethargically overhead in the attic eaves.

The old Victorian had a square rooftop, and the attic was wide and long. She spotted an isolated room on the far side with a closed door. The strange sound was coming from in there. An electric hum, like an old cathode TV set tuned to nothing.

She held the butcher knife in front of her as she navigated past decades of accumulated junk. The rough-hewn timber floor was covered with insect husks. She rested her head against the door and could hear that weird, toneless buzz. She reached for the doorknob, flung the door open and stood in amazement.

The room was all lit up. She could hear people breathing inside but couldn’t see a thing because it was so bright. She had to shield her eyes, since she was afraid she might go blind. Somewhere inside all this dazzling luminescence was Ryan.

“Ryan?” she cried, trying to enter the room, but a powerful force prevented her from putting her foot inside. It was like trying to push her way through a tornado. Impossible. She braced her shoulder against the centrifugal force, and all she could see was a swirling dense light. All she could hear was a steady, cascading roar. She tried to bully her way into the room but failed again and again. “Ryan, where are you?” she wailed, reaching out her hand.

But then, before she could prepare for it, everything ground to a halt. The invisible force released her, and she nearly fell over. She regained her balance, picked herself up and looked around the room. It was filled with a dense heavy mist. The sudden silence was suffocating. A single window cast a dim light through the fog, and she noticed a four-poster bed next to a nightstand crowded with pills and medical supplies, and a bureau off to one side. She could hear a child breathing at the center of the bed. She could see the small outline of a girl’s body. Isabelle was smaller than her sister and wore a long white nightgown patterned with tiny pink roses. She looked about ten, same age as Olive. She breathed and behaved as if she were living inside a cloud—it was hard to describe. She appeared to be floating, although Cassie could plainly see that she was lying on the bed.

Now Ryan stepped out of the mist like a ghost and looked at her with tender, forgiving eyes. Cassie felt her worries beginning to slip away. She began to lose the tension in her body. It was the exact opposite of what she expected to happen. What she wanted to happen. She wanted to prevent this. She wanted to fight for him with every fiber of her being. She reached for him but couldn’t get any closer. Something was preventing her from moving any further into the room.

“It’s okay, Cassie,” he said. “Let it go. Let it be.”

The little girl on the bed didn’t wake up. She slept soundly, her ribcage moving up and down. It was hypnotic, watching her sleep. Cassie kept expecting something to happen, but all was silence and cottony stillness as Isabelle breathed softly in her sleep.

“Ryan, don’t leave me,” Cassie pleaded, trying to grab hold of him and pull him out of this room, an impossible task.

With a sickening crackle of static, the mist began to gather momentum, at first swirling around their ankles and gradually moving up their legs. She could hear other people breathing inside the room. She could see vague outlines—Olive and Andy and Delilah. They were standing inside a cloud, small jewels of mystery and power. They appeared to be floating and simply breathing. Just floating and breathing and watching her from the dense whirling haze.

She shifted her position in another effort to get closer to Ryan and heard something crunch underfoot. Dead flies. Isabelle had a round unblemished face and pale unscarred skin, but she wasn’t as pretty as her twin. She had the same delicate features and dark hair as Olive, but Cassie couldn’t see her eyes. They were closed. She had a low forehead that made her look slightly ugly or deformed, and a severe mouth with thin lips.

Fear tightened Cassie’s chest until she almost choked. Why was she so scared of this little girl? She reached for Ryan and managed to grab hold of his hand. His eyes were shiny bright—he felt deep empathy for her, she could tell. She tried to drag him out of the room, but the swirling mist pushed her back with such force, she felt her arms almost pop out of their sockets as she slammed to the floor and hovered on the brink of consciousness. She fought off the encroaching darkness and sat up just in time to witness what happened next.

The mist began to thicken around Ryan, absorbing him like a meal tucked inside the belly of a whale. It was as if he were caught in a rain cloud, and the cloud kept edging further and further away. She could do nothing to save him. She was powerless. It had caught him and trapped him, and now it was slowly pulling him apart, molecule by molecule. She screamed as she reached for him again. The sounds became unbearable, like amplified shovelfuls of dirt tumbling on top of a wooden coffin. Loud, clumsy, roaring sounds. Thunderous, low-frequency sounds.

Delilah said, “Don’t go near him again, or worse things will happen. Horrible things. You can’t even imagine.”

“Ryan,” Cassie cried. “I love you!”

His mouth moved silently, forming words she didn’t catch.

Delilah said, “Now, girls. Now!”

The mist turned into a milky whirlwind, spinning around faster and faster. Cassie dropped the knife between her feet, and the tip of it dug into the wood with a
twang
. Edges of swirling mist caught on her face like cobwebs, and she brushed them off with frantic fingers, terrified she might not be able to look into those beautiful, wonderful eyes of his.

Now a bright light emanated from the mist—a glow so fierce she had to squeeze her eyes shut again. She felt an intense numbness throughout her body. She couldn’t move. She heard high-pitched screams, like a dozen teakettles going off at once—and then she realized the screams were coming from her.

Ryan glowed red-hot. He was blackening around the edges. His eyes became two holes into which the rest of him funneled, his smooth warm flesh melting and dissolving, his prominent cheekbones and broad shoulders sucking and twisting and disappearing into those double voids.

“No!” she shrieked with an agony she would never be able to comprehend.

Then darkness came and whisked him away, leaving nothing behind but a sifting of embers that drifted down like feathers. Ryan was gone. There was nothing left of him.

Pain. Raw pain ripped through her body. Late afternoon sunlight streamed into the room. The little girl in the four-poster bed wasn’t moving. There was only that steady gentle breathing. The rest of the Kincaids were staring at her—Delilah and Andy and Olive.

“What did you do to him?” she gasped through her tears.

Just then, the little girl’s eyes popped open. At last she could see them—shiny black as death. Mulchy wet as death. Isabelle Kincaid didn’t move, she just stared at Cassie with two rotting blobs of reptilian eyes.

Cassie was seized with a quaking terror she’d never experienced before. The pounding of her heart drove her entire body forward and back. She plucked the knife out of the floor and waved it at them. “Stay away! Don’t come any closer!” She backed out of the room while brandishing the knife like a sword. Then she turned and ran for her life.

*

Minutes later, Cassie’s hands were gripping the wheel of the Range Rover—she was driving. She stomped on the gas and sped away from Hope Hollow, her throat raw and sore from sobbing. Her vision was blurred. Something darted across the street. She could’ve sworn it was the boy. Andy Kincaid. A blur of plaid. A blur of orange. She stomped on the brakes and the Range Rover veered across the slick asphalt and hit an outcrop of boulders, and Cassie went airborne.

She landed in the dirt, while the Range Rover rolled over and burst into flames. She woke up to the roar of the engine fire and managed to crawl away from the wreckage without choking to death on the toxic fumes.

She got to her feet and stood in the burning twilight, muscles sore and achy with a flu-like intensity. She looked around at the rolling fields and pastures easing off into the distant woods. The country road was deserted. The sun was slowly setting. The exhausted sky was coming alive with stars. How long had she been standing there on shaky legs? She had no idea.

It was nighttime now. The moon was full. The sky was starry and mysterious.

She looked around. There was nothing on the road. No bodies, no deer carcasses, no lost little boys. Just the smoldering wreckage.

She bolted away from the scene. She ran up the road, while the night amplified the sound of her footsteps. Clomp-clomp-clomp. After awhile, breathless and exhausted, she slowed to a frightened trudge past vacant houses with
For Sale
signs stuck in the yards. Hope Hollow was out of hope. A virtual ghost town. There were no glowing porch lights anywhere, no welcoming signs of life. Nobody wanted to live here anymore. They’d all moved away, terrified of their creepy neighbors. The Kincaids. Welcome Street was deserted. Welcome Street was no longer welcoming. It was desolate and scary, a place of death and destruction.

She slipped on an oily ribbon in the middle of the road and fell hard, banging her kneecaps and scraping her palms. Little bits of gravel embedded themselves under her skin, and she sat on the asphalt, confused and exhausted. She drew her knees to her chest and sobbed. She couldn’t move. Through grief and hot shameful tears she felt a gradual awakening, a bitter revelation—he was gone. He would never be back. She would never see him again. She would never hold him again. She would never be able to smell his breath on her lips, never get to kiss him again. Never get to love him again. She cringed and reddened and began to scream. She would lose her mind to grief.

She saw a flaring pair of headlights through the trees. A pickup truck was coming her way. Speeding along the street. She didn’t care. She sat like a lump in the middle of the road and dared it to run her over. Let it smash her to a bloody pulp and put an end to her misery. Good-fucking-riddance. Maybe they’d veer out of the way and hit a tree and somebody else would die? Wasn’t this a great day? She didn’t care. Life was horrible. She fought off a sickening wave of nausea. She closed her eyes and prayed.
Please help
.

At the very last moment, she let out a wail of despair as her survival instincts took over. She jumped to her feet and yelled, “Stop!”

The white pickup truck screeched to a halt, and the driver pulled over to the side of the road and parked, engine idling. A man got out. He was handsome and rugged-looking. He had calm blue eyes. Benjamin Pasternak stood in the middle of the road and said nothing. He met her grief with his steady nerves. He was deaf, but he could read her lips in the moonlight. She wondered if he could read her thoughts.

Cassie felt an unpleasant throbbing in her chest. She took a few ragged breaths and gasped, “Benjamin?”

“Are you okay?” he asked, moving his hands in the moonlight.

“No. No!” She shook her head. All her grief came loose with a tearing sound. All her emotions unraveled and spilled like guts to the ground. She clung to him sobbing, “Get me out of here!” She scrambled into the pickup truck without knowing anything about him. She buckled up, feeling compressed into flatness.

He got in behind the wheel. Accepting everything. “Are you okay?” he said with deep concern.

“Yes. Please, just go,” she begged. “Get me out of here!”

He swung the truck around.

They drove out of Hope Hollow.

The terror sat trapped inside her belly. She took a few unsatisfying breaths.

He touched her arm with gentle fingers. “Where are we going?”

Where are we going?

Nobody knew the answer to that question.

Nobody was supposed to know.

She cringed and reddened and began to cry. She clung to him, sobbing. The road stretched into eternity before them. A ribbon. An endless loop. They drove and drove, toward no particular destination, while the night swallowed them whole, and she clung to him, absorbing his warmth.

YOU ARE LEAVING

NEXT STOP

If you enjoyed this ebook, then I’d be grateful if you would recommend SHUDDERVILLE to your friends and family, through social networking sites and in reader’s reviews on Amazon. I’m currently working on the next six episodes, and Shudderville 4 is now available on Amazon Kindle.

To find out more, go to

http://mia-zabrisky.blogspot.com

SHUDDERVILLE

THREE

Mia Zabrisky

Copyright © 2012

All Rights Reserved.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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find out more
:

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