aware of a just how brightly-lit the scene had just become.
She had just taken a heavy drag from her cigarette when she halted in her tracks, seeing a strange but intense orange glow coming from the southeast corner of the property. Earlier, when they had first arrived, there had been nothing but the overgrown and barely visible remains of what had once been the tool shed that the farmer had set on fire during his homicidal meltdown. Now, as she quickened in her pace slightly to look past the overgrown trees, weeds, and shrubs, she saw that there appeared to be something there now. As soon as she saw it, halting in her tracks abruptly and standing just next to the doors leading down into the cellar, she felt something inside of her chest draw tight and hard and cold. She stared at it, stared and tried to convince herself it wasn't there. She pinched herself, then looked again. She slapped herself, then looked. And she very nearly moved to touch the ash of her cigarette to her palm, still not believing in what she saw. Then that sight was joined by a second one, something even more horrifying than the first.
And in that moment, she knew that they had, indeed, accomplished something that night with the ceremony. Unfortunately, whatever they had accomplished was clearly something unintended … something very, very, bad.
She turned away from the sight of the tool shed – now standing, now complete, and now burning brightly with a freshly-lit fire inside – and her wide eyes darted over to the second flash of bright orange light that flared into being with an audible whoosh. She trudged forward slowly, awkwardly, as if her boots were now suddenly filled with lead, nearing the porch by the door leading into the kitchen. There it was, the barn that had once been nothing but a shapeless pile of burnt and weathered and weed-consumed wood and rusty steel things. It was there. It was standing whole. It was now beginning to burn again, flames quickly climbing its walls and beams to devour it hungrily.
And there he was, too. She saw him, instantly knowing who and what he was as soon as she saw him, even though she had never once seen his image before in her life. She heard him, too, heard him shouting over the swelling roar and crackle of the fires. He was yelling what sounded initially like angry gibberish, but what she soon began to realize was German. She had no idea what he was saying, only that his body language clearly expressed an extreme amount of rage and panic, flailing his arms about and punching at the air. He picked up what looked like a large can of something and then pitched it into the burning barn, swearing incoherently and hatefully for a few moments before the can burst within the barn with a deep poof sound.
And then he turned around.
What she saw as the farmer faced her was truly the stuff of nightmares. There was no gore, no blood. And there were also no eyes. He was middle-aged, tall, slender, dressed in overalls, wearing a button-up shirt underneath with its sleeves rolled up past his elbows. He had dark, short hair that was a wild, tangled mess, and a thick mustache that flared out on either side of his thin-lipped mouth. But his eyes … his eyes just weren't there. They hadn't been plucked out, nor were they just missing. His entire eye sockets were just gaping black holes of infinite blackness, twin abysses that stared at her from across the barnyard. There was a sort of blurriness, not just around those empty holes that he had for eyes, but over the entire sight of him. He looked sort of gray all over, like an animated image from a black-and-white movie, and he looked smudged, as if someone had taken a very large thumb, pressed it over the sight of him, and smeared him slightly like a drawing made of charcoal upon paper. The sight of him might not have been terribly clear, but his voice was as real as the crackle and roar of the fires that raged behind him and the sound of Zoey's shuddering breath escaping her lips as she exhaled a plume of cigarette smoke.
He pointed at her. He yelled something. Zoey stood in place, transfixed by the sight of the farmer and the start of his rampage. He started walking in her direction. She tried to force herself to move, but her feet felt as though they had frozen into place upon the ground. He shouted more angrily at her, spouting off a long, angry line of something in German that sounded accusing, outraged, and wholly unpleasant. He kept advancing in her direction. And then he reached for something at his waist. He pulled it out with a jerk, holding it at his side. While the rest of him was a grayed blur of sorts, the thing he held was sharply in focus and glinted brightly in the glare of the fires. It was a well-worn field knife.
Zoey finally began to run. She let her cigarette fall from her fingers as she dashed for the door leading into the house, screaming for Chad and Gina. She stumbled slightly as she ascended the stairs. Her boots may have been made for walking, but definitely not for running. She glanced back one last time over her shoulder toward the farmer. He was walking directly for her with long, fast strides, holding that knife out by his side with every intention in the world of burying it within her torso just like she had shoved her athame into the floor upstairs.
The turn to look back had been a mistake, of course. It wasn't a mistake that she could have foreseen, of course. She had counted upon the door being there, still laid across the hole in the kitchen floor. She had not, however, expected to find herself stepping into empty space, her first step into the house meeting nothing but dark air and pitching her forward. She gasped sharply with surprise, and she struck the far edge of the broad hole with her upper body, slamming her torso against the very hard and jagged edge of the gaping chasm as she fell down into it. In reality, the fall was very brief, perhaps not even ten feet, but it seemed to last for ages, long enough for her to let out just a brief scream that was cut abruptly short as she landed upon her back, fully knocking the wind from her. Her legs slammed down after her back and side took the brunt of the impact, making a surprising splash as she realized she'd fallen into some shallow pool of water, and she instantly felt a sharp pain in her right ankle. The agony was intense enough that she wanted to shriek loudly with all that she had, but her lungs seemed momentarily paralyzed by the fall.
Immediately, she became aware of the cold, chilling wetness that surrounded her as she stared up at the hole in the kitchen floor through which she had fallen. The light of the fires outside filtered in through the open doorway, illuminating the interior of the house with an eerie reddish-orange glow, while the cellar was very, very dimly lit by the flashlight that she had dropped somewhere nearby in the water during her fall. Zoey lay there for several seconds, just struggling to draw her first breath. It took a lot of work, but at last she was able to draw one half-breath, gagging and coughing until she was able to then draw another more complete breath, exhaling it with a pained groan.
As she lay there, still unable to move for the moment, she watched as she saw the farmer step into view. He didn't simply step over the hole. He actually stepped into the hole, his foot landing upon nothing and resounding with the same thud as if he'd just stepped upon solid wood. She was looking up at him as if she were a fish looking up at a glass-bottomed boat. And just as quickly as he'd appeared, he then moved out of view with his next step, the last visible part of him being that awful, vividly real-looking knife that he still held at his side.
“Oh God,” she croaked, finding her voice at last with increasing intensity. “Chad. Chad! Chad! Gina! Chad! He's coming! He's … ow!”
As she tried to sit up, her warning was cut off by a need to scream in pain when something within her ankle felt like it was grating upon her bones. She flopped back down and her legs splashed within the stagnant, foul-smelling waters of the lightly flooded cellar. She turned and found the glow of her flashlight, her eyes adjusting somewhat to the darkness enough that she could spot its muted glow under the surface of the filthy water. It was just barely out of reach, but a bit of squirming soon brought her fingertips around it. Thankfully, the light was waterproof, and so it was still shining brightly enough when she grasped it that she was able to shine it down at her ankle and see just how badly she had been hurt by the fall.
She had expected to find her ankle twisted at an odd and ugly angle. In a way, what she saw w
as better than than, but also somehow more horrifying. A broken-off board with several nails on the end, apparently a piece of the collapsed floor above, had more or less impaled her ankle laterally as she'd fallen upon it, the rusty old nails having been thrust right through her boot, jeans, sock, and even the bones of her ankle. Already, she could feel her boot filling up with a wetness. She hoped that it was just the water of the cellar and not just blood … and in the same moment, she then immediately worried about that nasty water causing a horrible infection, not to mention the risk of tetanus from the rusty nails. But if that farmer came back and found her, then none of that would matter, anyway.
She reached for the remains of the board that was now nailed to her ankle. Her first instinct was to yank it out. That proved to be a bit more of a task than she had expected, as the rotten old board easily crumbled within her grasp. She hurriedly tossed away piece after piece of the board as she broke each chunk off, trying desperately to get it out of her before the initial shock of her injury wore off and the real pain of the wound began to settle in.
“Zoey?”
The sound of Chad's voice was enough to make her halt in her efforts and look up. The beam of another flashlight was shining down through the open hole in the floor that had delivered her to the cellar. After a moment, when the light wasn't shining directly at her face, she saw Chad standing over the hole and looking down.
“Oh God, Zoey! Are you all right?”
Wait, how was he able to be standing there in that moment? The farmer had just walked by, hadn't he? Surely, he would have encountered Chad on his way through the house. Or had the farmer doubled back and walked outside again? Had the farmer simply been a repeating image, a spectral image that was like a stain in time and not an intelligent entity? Maybe the image had lost its energy and faded out of existence already? And where the hell had the door gone?
“Did you fall down there?”
“No, I rode a friggin' broomstick! What does it look like?” she barked thoughtlessly through her clenched teeth. She was not angry with Chad, but rather at the remains of the board she was still attempting to extract from her ankle. With a sickening, crunching and scraping sensation, she finally grabbed a solid bit of the wood and felt the nails beginning to be pulled free of her limb. “Oh God … come on … there!”
She tossed aside the offending piece of debris as Chad cursed softly in response to the sight of her injury. “What happened to the door we had covering the hole?”
“Don't know, don't care!” she responded, still wincing at the pain in her ankle. “Just get me the hell out of here!”
“Okay, just let me…”
Chad's words halted suddenly at the sound of a blood-curdling scream from somewhere above. Without a doubt, it was Gina. She screamed, over and over again, in short, pained and panicky shrieks that devolved into something like sobbing, then wailing, and finally … gurgling.
“Gina!” Zoey and Chad both cried, and Chad disappeared from view, his feet thudding across the floor as he hurried to her aid.
Zoey didn't fault him for leaving her in the cellar. Her only crisis was finding a way out of the cellar and then cleaning and dressing her wounded ankle. Gina, however … oh God, poor Gina sounded as though she were being torn to shreds by someone or something. And then Mike began to scream as well, not exactly in pain so much as just sheer terror, the full-on sort of screech that a grown man would only make if his insides were being torn out, or if he was reacting to what was presumably the most unholy of all possible sights in this mortal realm.
Realizing that it was up to her now to manage her own escape from this place, and possibly to even try to help her friends upstairs, Zoey finally managed to sit upright and shine the flashlight at her surroundings. It was a tangled mess of random junk, very thick spider webs, and … and…
“Oh God, no,” she murmured. And then, “Oh, blessed Goddess, no.”
Her flashlight found and then fixated upon the sight of a boy cowering in a far corner of the cellar. He was very young, perhaps only four or five, and his hair was a tousled mop of blonde. His clothes were filthy and worn, and clearly of a design that was nothing even remotely modern. He had shoved himself down into a corner underneath a heavy wooden work bench, his knees drawn up to his chest and his arms wrapped tightly around them, burying his face against his knees. Like the farmer, he was a grayed, blurry smudge of an image. But similarly, she could very clearly hear him crying and sniffling, seeing his little body heaving with the sobs that he struggled to muffle. The little boy looked and acted every bit as terrified as Mike sounded from upstairs … up until Mike's scream suddenly became very intense for an instant, then rapidly faded and suddenly cut off all at once.
“This isn't happening. I'm not seeing this,” Zoey told herself even as she stared at the boy. “None of this is real. I'm freaking out. This isn't real. I'm having a nightmare. I passed out, and I'm just…”
A loud banging sounded from her left, wood doors clattering open partially and then smacking shut loudly, over and over again. She shined her light in the direction of the noise, finding that it was coming from the stairway leading up to, she assumed, the outside entrance to the cellar. She wasn't sure if there was another way to get into the cellar from within the house or not, but if there was, it was most likely behind that impassible wall of junk and debris to her right. There was no way she could somehow spring up and pull herself back up out of the cellar through the hole in the kitchen floor. She could never have jumped that high, even without a wounded ankle. In short, she was trapped. The only thing she could hope to do was resist … and to pray.
Momentarily ignoring the growing pain in her right ankle, Zoey forced herself upright to feet, limp-hopping over toward the stairs with loud, messy splashes of the disgusting water. She hopped up a few of the stairs and then clumsily banged her head upon the underside of the doors, feeling her teeth clack shut painfully from the impact. She took one brief glimpse with a wave of the flashlight at the doors, saw that there were handles on the inside, and she promptly grabbed hold of them, holding onto the doors and pulling with everything she had. She felt someone on the other side of the doors pulling upon them with a great deal of strength. Zoey leaned back with all of her weight – not much, considering that she was actually rather petite – and the force on the other side actually lifted the doors as well as the weight of her body with what seemed to be relative ease.
“Help! Chad! He's here! He's trying to get in the cellar!” she yelled, clinging to the doors desperately and feeling the grip of her right hand beginning to slip, as she was also using that hand to attempt to hold the flashlight. The force, presumably the farmer, jerked hard upon the doors another time, and Zoey heard things beginning to creak and crack. “Hurry! Oh God, please!”
With one final, sudden, and violent movement, the door in her right hand was yanked from her grasp, causing her to fall backward and tumble down the short but very hard set of concrete stairs. She splashed back into the bone-chillingly cold and foul-smelling water, and she heard the boy's crying suddenly intensify with a swelling sense of terror and imminent doom.
Zoey looked up through the opened doors of the cellar, her eyes wide with fear. Far beyond, she could see the bright glow of the raging infernos outside, a hellish backdrop to the impossible thing that she saw beginning to move through the opened doors. It was a sight she had previously thought to only be a part of her nightmares, something she had imagined, but something she now realized had actually been a genuine memory. She had seen this before, this animated black mist. It began as something vaguely man-sized and somewhat humanoid-shaped but rapidly melted into a formless cloud of darkness, twisting and writhing with countless thin, wispy tendrils in all directions. It slithered along soundlessly down the stairs, part of it hanging within the air like an evil cloud and part of the drooling down the stairs with an almost liquid sort of motion. Zoey scooted away from it frantically, backing away toward the place where she had landed a
fter her initial fall. The boy wasn't just crying now; he was screaming, shrieking in an even higher-pitched version of the same horrible, terrified sounds that Mike had made not long ago.
“No. No! No!” Zoey cried as the darkness crept towards the boy. “Leave him alone! Stop it! Leave that poor kid alone!”
The kid was wailing breathlessly now, sensing the approach of that vile mass of what she could only presume was either a manifestation of purely negative energy or something from the bowels of Hell itself. She felt even more helpless than the child probably did. If she was watching a ghostly echo of past events, a sort of looping sequence in time, then there was nothing at all she could do to stop this from playing itself out yet again. How often did this happen? Every night? Every so many years? Or only when provoked by a stupid wannabe witch meddling with forces she neither fully understood nor adequately knew how to control? It wasn't bad enough that her foolishness had led the spirit of that poor boy to relive his own demise yet again; somehow, her attempted consecration had changed this repeated image into an intelligent, violently capable entity, one that had apparently lashed out at her friends.
Spells were out of the question. Prayers seemed woefully inadequate. And considering that the thing threatening the boy appeared to be nothing but a malicious but shapeless mist of blackness, she couldn't think of a single thing that would be effective against it. She couldn't punch it, kick it, or hit it with an object because it was hardly even a tangible thing. It was there, but … not … and it was going to kill that boy, it would, she knew it, because she had seen this happen before. She couldn't remember how she had found herself in this same cellar ten years ago, but she distinctly remembered it now, and she remembered actually trying to hit it, swinging her fists at it and accomplishing nothing beyond making the darkness swirl and flow around her arms like black steam. There was nothing she could do for this boy, nothing she could even do for herself, nothing but…
Something wrapped around her waist, jerking her off of her feet and flinging her over its shoulder forcefully as she screamed. Zoey flailed for just a moment, fighting for only a brief instant before she realized that she had been abruptly picked up and was being carried out of the cellar by Chad, slung over his shoulder