futility.
Delcie spoke slowly, a slight tremble of anger as much as fear in her voice. “It knows our names. How the fuck does it know our names! Our real names that nobody knows!?” Her voice rose at the end, and there was true fear in it.
Tanner reached under his seat. “I borrowed this from my dad.” He said, pulling out a jet-black shotgun, cut off short at the barrel.
“Oh, Tanner! I hate guns! Please put it back. Please?”
Tanner looked at her.
“I do, too, Jen. But I also believe in staying alive – and keeping you safe.” He grabbed her hand.
Delcie didn’t seem to have the same problem. “What’s it loaded with?”
“Deer slugs, with the magazine fixed to allow 12 shells. It’s all business.”
“12 gauge tactical, looks like a Remington 870, yes?” she said. Jen turned and looked at her with a look of amazement.
“Know your guns, don’t ya?” she said.
“My daddy collects “fowling pieces”. I think he’s got an Italian side-by-side grouse gun that he paid 12 grand for. We all had to learn how to shoot. It’s kind of fun, really.”
“Still waters!” Tanner said, looking somewhat puzzled at Delcie. She shrugged and looked out the windshield.
He pushed the shifter into first and eased along the road.
“Let’s split this up. I’ll look dead ahead, Jen you look over my shoulder out the left window, and Delcie, you out the right, ok?”
“Velma, you and Scooby take the old abandoned mine shaft…” Jen joked, though no one laughed.
“I just want to make sure nobody sneaks up on us from any direction.” Tanner said.
The sun, leaning towards evening, still held a couple of hours of daylight out on the lake, but in the deep pines, the height and density of the trees brought twilight on prematurely. It was never terribly bright in the deep woods, but late afternoon become evening very quickly, followed even more quickly by night.
They rolled along the winding road slowly, each of them jumping at shadows, the occasional squirrel, even a young raccoon. The silence, profound, combined with cool temperatures in the trees, making for an almost tomb-like atmosphere.
”Why don’t these woods look pretty and green like normal trees?” Delcie asked
“I don’t know. I’d like to know how they move around…” Jen added.
“It’s like we’re being watched, all the time.” Tanner said, voicing the feelings of all three of them.
The quiet slushing noise made by the tires crunching the pine needles which nearly covered the road was the only sound save for the low rumble of the truck’s engine.
“I don’t remember how far back it is.” Delcie said.
“It seems like it kind of jumped out at us in a hurry that night. But time is weird here. Time and distance.” Jen added. Tanner said nothing but stared ahead. He could just make out a slightly lighter green patch in the wood ahead indicating they were nearing the lake’s edge, or a clearing, and he peered through it searching for signs of the house. They had nearly passed it when Jen shouted “There it is!” pointing over the steering wheel out Tanner’s window.
Just barely visible through dense greenery was the dilapidated clapboard siding. The forest seemed to try to hide it, and even as they watched, branches of smaller under story trees blew across to block any view of the house.
“It’s playing hide and seek.” Delcie said.
“I don’t remember the back of the house being like this at all.” Tanner said. “That day we came out here by boat you could walk all the way around the house. Now it looks like it would take a machete just to get at it.”
He stopped and backed up a little looking for any trace of a driveway leading to the property, but there was none. He nudged the truck slightly to the side of the road and killed the engine. The three sat just listening. No one seemed anxious to get out.
“Well, here we are.” Tanner said, popping the door open.
“God. I don’t want to get out of the car.” Jen said, her voice sounding small and childlike to her own ears. Her head began the familiar low throb.
The house looked so different – so hidden. Tanner looked at them, saw the fear and looked back at the house. He grabbed the sawed off Remington. Neither girl objected to the weapon now.
The three approached the rear of the house, Tanner first, then Jen, then Delcie, very slowly as they had to push lush thick green weeds and brush out of the way with almost every step.
“God, I’ve never even seen this weed before!” Tanner said, brushing the clinging stems aside. “Where did this stuff come from?” It was a sickly, thick, lush green, the color of the scum on a stagnant pond, and it smelled like a combination of burned wood and rotten eggs.
Eventually they did make it to the back of the house, which - despite the mysterious lush growth - looked much like Tanner had seen it last time. There was the window and the door just as he remembered them. He approached the door, but turned first to see both girls nearly in tears they were so frightened.
“I think we’re good. It’s full light still, and I’ve got enough lead in this thing to cut down a tree.” Tanner said. This didn’t seem to have much of a calming effect on the girls, but they did follow slowly.
“I don’t know if guns are of much use here…” Jen said quietly.
Tanner tried the door. It was pulled to, but not latched. It took only a slight push to open it. He entered shotgun first, followed by Jen, then Delcie, who was looking behind her expecting the horrible shapes from the previous night to spring out at any minute.
Sun streamed in through the holes in the roof and second story windows, creating shafts of light, illuminating spots here and there, but generally the building was well lit, not foreboding. In fact, each of them – although they didn’t say it to one another – felt somewhat relieved to be inside. The house was just as Tanner and Jen had left it. Delcie was seeing most of it for the first time, and her wide brown eyes swept the rooms, the skeletal walls, table, chairs, and the stairs leading to nothing but the framework of a second floor.
“Has anyone ever lived here?” Delcie asked. “
“I don’t think permanently, but for weeks at a time, yeah, I think so.” Tanner said. “At least that’s what Janet said. A weekend place, kind of.”
Tanner walked towards the fireplace. Everything looked as if it had been coated with grey paint – a dull steel toned patina blurring all detail. Delcie stood at the table, looking at the playing cards lying there. Jen walked up behind Tanner, looking over his shoulder as he approached the mantle. The pictures lay half in shadow, half in light. Light trailed in shafts, wavering over the picture. Here was an arm, then a hand, some fish on a stringer. There a wisp of tussled hair. Then a hand holding a fishing pole. Then a stray beam across a boyish face. Dark eyes. Concealed eyes. A smile, the goofy grin that a child makes when told to smile for the camera, but there was something wrong. This child was not a child’s size. The arms were too long. The legs protruded too far from the pant legs. The grin was wrong too. The face – the grin when fully illuminated in combination with the eyes were wrong. Dead. Not happy, not mirthful at all. Not there. There was no one behind the eyes. It was him. In some form, at some age hard to guess, it was him. Jen took a step back at about the very same time that they heard the chains.
Terror in the Daytime
Tanner spun on his heels. Delcie and Jen grabbed each other. At the top of the stairs, the slight rustle of metal clinking was followed by a dusty wooden sound. Time stood still. Jen’s heart beat was the only thing she could hear as she struggled to make out the light clinking sound. They could see nothing in the gloom at the top of the stairs at first, but as the background shadows shifted slightly, something moved. Then, the sound again, slightly louder. Then a shape, a human-like form appeared, mostly hidden, but emerging slowly into shafts of light. A pant leg, an arm, a bare ankle, then a shoe. Then a loop of chain swung slowly into view. I
t draped from the waist of the figure looming slowly into view at the top of the stairs. It was the boy. A boy, but not – something more. A boy-man, leering, grinning at them as the face came sickly into view. Half real, half the boy that Delcie had seen in the store, that Jen had ridden with in the Jeep, but half something else. Something of the darkness. Something of the night. It was a thing of rot, of decay. The grin, or the leering expression on its face that passed for a grin, faded slowly. Its power was growing in the gloom. It was twilight outside. The pines brought darkness quickly.
“Oh, my God. It’s him!” Jen hissed. Tanner stood transfixed, arms limp at his side. An eternity of moments seemingly passed. Tanner spoke.
“What the hell do you want!”? He had become angry. He realized the thing at the top of the stairs was the “boy” who had menaced Jen. In a half second he had raised the shotgun, advanced a shell into the chamber and thumbed the safety off. A voice issued from it, dusty as a tomb, dry as sandpaper, throttled and gravelly. Sepulchral.
“Hi, girlies.”
It had advanced downwards a step. Not walking, just descending – gliding. Hideous, soundless gliding, floating. Delcie made a pitiful sound in her throat; The sound of a frightened child near tears. One more step descended and it crossed a beam of light. Now it was revealed as half human. A shaft of light shone through a hole in its half rotten jaw. Its face was not entirely there. Jen stifled a moan of