ground.”
Chad turned to Zoey with a raised eyebrow. “That thing you told me about the hippies…?”
“What?” she responded with a shrug. “I showed you the article. Didn’t you believe me?”
“Of course I did, but…”
“Dudes! Beer! Getting heavy!” Mike cried hoisting the cooler a bit, causing the ice within to rattle.
The others started for the main entrance of the house, located near the southeast corner. It wasn’t exactly the front door, since that was on the porch on the west side of the house facing the rural dirt road (hidden by an overgrown forest of weeds and shrubs). However, it was clearly the most-used entryway of the abandoned home, as evidenced by the way the front edges of the old wooden steps had been worn smooth. White and yellow paint all over the exterior of the house was flaking off steadily, yet the wood was still surprisingly resilient for the most part. Mike, of course, jokingly advised Gina not to eat the paint chips. Zoey didn’t exactly hate Mike, but she would have much preferred if her friend had not invited her somewhat obnoxious boyfriend to come along.
Zoey remained behind for a few moments, watching them walk ahead of her. She seemed to be momentarily halted by something, some feeling within herself – conscience, doubt, whatever. She'd already had her doubts about this before coming out here. Now that she was at the site, she still wasn't convinced that this was something she either could or even should do. What if this accomplished nothing? What if this only made things worse? And even if she did succeed, was it something that had even truly needed to be done in the first place?
Surprisingly, the door was unlocked. However, the house had shifted upon its foundation a bit over the years in its degrading state of condition, so Chad had to shoulder the crooked-framed door open with a lot of effort. As Chad shoved and shoved at the door, Zoey again felt a swelling of something within her, a tightening knot of uneasiness inside her belly that told her to stop, urged her to leave, begging her not to follow through with this. She resisted it, fought against it, and silently urged Chad to get the door open. She was here for a reason. She had something to do. She would not back down, not now, and certainly not after all these years. She had waited and delayed and avoided it for long enough. But she was still afraid. How could she not be? In one sense, she knew exactly what it was she was dealing with here; in another, she hadn't even the foggiest idea what she was truly facing. It wasn't so much a matter of a lack of confidence in her own abilities as a question of whether or not the potential power of what she faced might crush her.
Chad tried kicking the door a couple of times, and it gave a bit more, and only when he began to ram it with his shoulder did it seem like it might finally surrender. Becoming frustrated, not only by the door but also by Mike’s continued whining about holding up the cooler full of drinks, Chad took a couple of steps back to the edge of the small porch in obvious preparation.
“Chad,” Zoey warned him softly.
“I got this,” he said confidently, and then he charged at the door with his shoulder.
Zoey could have sworn that, just before Chad impacted the door, it had actually begun to swing inwards on its own. Chad’s shoulder blasted the door open with a loud bang, and he stumbled through the doorway. He barely managed to catch the doorknob as his second step inside the house met nothing but empty air. He let out a yell of alarm as he clung to the door in sudden desperation. A giant hole in the old hardwood floor lay just inside the kitchen entrance, and Chad dangled precariously over the edge of what would have been a dangerous fall into the debris inside the cellar below.
“Chad!” Zoey shrieked, reaching for him.
Gina stopped her with a firm, one-handed grab of her wrist, knowing that Zoey might fall in with him. Zoey was forced to stand by and watch helplessly, already regretting this whole thing. Chad had managed to keep one foot upon the edge of the doorstep. With his butt hanging down toward the four-foot-wide hole in the floor, it wasn’t going to be easy for him to swing himself back upwards to safety. Mike finally dropped the cooler onto the porch with a thud and hurried forth to offer a hand, but Chad declined with wide eyes, insisting he could handle it. He tried once, twice, three times to jerk himself upright by the doorknob, not quite in danger of death but certainly at risk of falling to an unpleasant landing onto jagged bits of whatnot in the cellar.
His jerking motions to pull himself upright, combined with the weight of his body supported almost entirely by his two-handed grip upon the doorknob, proved too much for the hinges of the door anchored into soft, age-rotted wood. He was almost there, grabbing the hinge side of the door and pulling himself up. There was another crunching, creaking, crackling sound of splintering wood, and both Zoey and Gina screamed with alarm as both the door and Chad suddenly fell.
Chad spun slightly as he fell with the door, the instep of his right foot still hooked upon the edge of the doorstep. The door somehow hit the floor before he did, forming a sort of bridge over the hole with another bang. A large support beam running right across the middle of the hole was sufficient to sustain the impact and support the weight of Chad and the door. The small decorative panes of yellowed glass in the door shattered with the fall, tinkling into the darkness of the cellar space below as Chad found himself looking straight through that vanishing window. For a few seconds, he simply lay there, keeping himself propped up with just the tips of his toes and his frantic grip upon the edges of the door.
He tested the edges of the hole over which he was balanced, finding it to somehow be sturdy enough to support his weight. He pushed himself up to his knees upon the door and was able to back away with a chuckle, dusting himself off.
“Hey guys,” he said, “just so you know, there’s a big freakin’ hole right here.”
“Nice work, Hercules,” Mike said. “Next time Gina locks me out of the bathroom, I’m calling you.”
Gina ignored Mike as she turned to Zoey. “You think maybe this is a sign we shouldn’t be here?”
Zoey shook her head silently. It was a sign, sure, but she would not be turned away by this. If there was any kind of sentiment that could be attached to this, it was that they were on the right track and that whatever force(s) held influence over this place were making an effort to strongly discourage them. Call it a defensive mechanism, a forceful warning. It wasn’t trying to protect them. It was trying to protect itself. It was a territorial gesture.
Leaning in carefully through the doorway, Mike pointed to a matching hole in the ceiling above where plaster had fallen down. Water had leaked down through that opening, a soft spot between support beams, it had eventually weakened the kitchen floor underneath in the same way until it had weakened the wood and caused it to partially collapse under its own weight. Though she said nothing, Zoey knew what had caused the hole in the ceiling above, long before the following water damage had caused the second hole in the kitchen floor. She had watched Zach fall right through it.
The hole was about a foot away from the door, enough of a ledge for Chad to pull the fallen door over it and cover most of the hole. He cautiously stomped and then actually jumped a couple of times upon the door, testing its strength, and he found that it made an adequately safe bridge into the kitchen, aside from the smaller hole in the door where the decorative window had been.
Chad insisted that they wait until he had explored the house briefly, checking the floor throughout the place for any more weak areas. Zoey’s arms were folded snugly under her breasts and her hands were clenched tightly into fists as she waited uneasily for Chad to finish his cursory inspection, hearing his footfalls through the first floor, clumping up the stairs, and then creaking and thumping about on the second story.
“Whoa!” she finally heard him exclaim. “Guys, you’ve gotta come see this!”
“Is it safe to come in?” Gina called out.
“Yeah, it’s safe,” he said. “There’s just that one hole up here. Otherwise the floors are fine. C’mon and check this out, you guys!”
&n
bsp; “I hope we’re not planning on camping out up there,” Mike grumbled, hefting the cooler. “Getting this thing upstairs is gonna suck.”
Gina rolled her eyes and grabbed one handle of the cooler from him with a jerk. “Jeez! Instead of whining, maybe just try asking for help.”
“My, what strong arms you have, my dear,” he said with a grin, following her through the small kitchen into what was presumably a dining room.
“All the better to beat your ass with,” she replied with a giggle.
Again, Zoey lagged behind. Taking that first step into the house, she could feel the fine hairs upon the back of her neck and her forearms beginning to rise, as if she had just breached the veil of a protective ward that had been placed around the building. This was bad, so very wrong, and she knew it. She would have been wise to leave well enough alone, to have instead sought a way to deal with her past and her personal issues in another way, but there was more to it than that. There was more to this than just her. She had not started this. Someone … no, something else had started it. She was but one of several that had been affected by it. But she would be the last. She would make sure of it.
Whatever energy resided in this place had to be redirected, changed, and grounded. She was among the few