told her to find this house.
The house came into view much as she expected it – suddenly seeming to leap out of the woods as if it had laid in wait, intending to surprise; to catch you off guard. The officer cruised as silently as possible to the side of the road, 20 yards from the house. She probably didn’t have much of an element of surprise, but she hoped to maximize this.
The house was pretty much as she’d imagined it; derelict, decrepit – a fire hazard. She’d be doing the county a favor by setting fire to it, but for the chance of it catching the pines that surrounded it. It was choked with brushy vines that covered the porch and windows in thick, serpentine twists of a sickly green. It was still light out, but a combination of the encircling trees and an oppressive haze that seemed to cling to the place made it seem darker and more sinister than it should have. The closer she got to the house, the more aware of this she became. The forest around her pressed in on her, it seemed, and the air seemed pressurized. The stillness was unnatural. “Where are the birds sounds?” She thought. There were no sounds. It was as the woods and the house itself were watching, on guard, expecting.
She heard screaming. It was not a girl’s voice, nor was it that of a young man’s. It was the scream of a mature male. She rushed to the only door she could get to because of the vines; a door standing open at the back of the house, seeing first the large figure of Jay Atherton backing across the room, face lit with terror, screams pouring from his mouth, and then the thing that followed him, pressing him into a corner. It was an abomination that Janet had no preparation for. For the first time in her professional career, she froze dead on the spot. To the last of her days, she would remember this moment and shudder.
The thing was gliding; hovering. It was dead and not. It was child and man. It was corpse and rot. It was a thing of nightmares, and it was talking.
“I knew you’d come. You have to die now. Dead. Like me.” Its voice came in a dragging gravelly grave sound, like dead earth sliding across a rusty shovel. Oh, God, she had to do something, but what? Her legs were molten lead, pouring slowly into the earth around her, rooting her to the spot. Then she saw Jen. The sight of the terrified girl sparked her into action. Janet ran to the girl, still trapped in the rotting staircase.
Jay stumbled backwards, eyes wide with disbelief and horror. It was only then that Janet heard Jen shouting from the stairs. Janet saw this as her first and most important task – get the girl to safety – and ran to her.
“God, Janet, please help me!” Jen shrieked, still staring at the thing in the middle of the room. Janet grabbed the girl under the arms, lifting with strength she didn’t know she had, while hearing a small frightened sound come out of her own throat. This was a new kind of fear for Janet Littlehorse. She’d stared down drunks waving guns at her before. She’d gone into bar fights between two men a foot taller than her, but that sort of fear was manageable because it was known. This was entirely unknown. The teen age girl came out of the stairs only a little scratched up, and together they stumbled backwards towards the door. Once outside, Janet began to master her fear just a bit; enough to know that she had to get the girl to safety and do something – God only knows what – about the situation inside.
“Get in the squad car and lock the doors!” She told Jen after a quick look over to make sure the girl wasn’t badly bleeding. Just then, both of them heard shouting from the back of Jay’s car. The trunk stood open, and Tanner could be seen struggling to get out. He was bound in some restraints and struggled against them. Jen ran to him as Janet stood staring at the car. She followed Jen, and both of them were able to lift Tanner out. He was bound and gagged, but the officer soon had the restraints off him, and had removed the gag from his mouth.
“You ok?” she asked, still out of breath.
“Yeah, I’m OK. What the hell is going on in there?” Tanner pointed to the building. Janet didn’t answer, and barely heard the question. She knew she had to act, but was still fighting with her own disbelief.
Janet Littlehorse stood for a moment – only a moment – staring at the house. Jay’s screaming sounded dully through the walls. Overhead, night was falling giving the scene an increased sense of ominous dread. She had to act and soon. She drew her service revolver and approached the open doorway slowly peering into the gathering darkness attempting to make out shapes. It was if a spell had dropped on the entire scene. It was too dark for the time of day, but it wasn’t merely darkness that prevented her from seeing. A sort of dirty blackish grey pall hung on everything as if she was watching a deteriorating old black and white movie. Even the sounds that came from the house had an unreal quality to them, suspended too long in the air, ringing flatly against the walls and the trees around the house. Her head throbbed, and her ears started to ring. The atmosphere was somehow increased and electric. Her hands shook as she approached. She had no idea what she was going to do, but she was going to do it.
In later years she would have trouble remembering exactly what happened next, partly because it was painful to remember, but also because the memories tried to hide from her, burying their tracks behind them. Time was changed somehow. Distance, space, light, all things in nature seemed to have been shifted from their normal predictable states. Living things seemed dead, and dead things seemed alive. The house itself seemed to be alive. Rooms, angles, doorways, all were distorted slightly, producing a dizzying, nauseating effect. Reality bent in a way that it was just better to not remember, and so much of it faded soon after the event.
She saw, as she entered, the thing from the back. It was solid and real enough, but it seemed to be caught up in the unnatural pall cast on everything, or perhaps it was the source of the distortions of light, sound, time, space. She stopped and leveled her service revolver at the back of the thing’s head and spoke, or tried to.
“Stop and turn facing me, hands in the air.” But the words seem to fall around her in the dust. To her own ears, her voice sounded like that of a frightened child calling from the bottom of a well; pitiful, forlorn, abandoned and hopeless. She felt weak, and almost dropped to the floor as she spoke the words. Her gun arm dropped slowly to her side, and she felt tears of helplessness fill her eyes. She no longer felt anger at all, the adrenaline having been drained from her entirely. She felt her feet shuffle beneath her as she backed into a corner.
The thing, if it had heard her words, made no reaction. By now, Jay had stopped screaming. His expression went from horror to one of wonder, like a child watching dangerous lions in a circus perform tricks. His jaw was slack in wonder. Tears ran down his cheeks freely. The thing’s dreadful arms that were at once both decayed and powerful in appearance reached for him, and a sound that shook the house emanated from its mouth. It was a howl and a scream and a cry of both anger and terror all at once. It was the sound of other worlds peeking into ours – insane worlds where the rules were very different. Where madness was sanity and life was meaningless. Janet felt herself slip slowly into unconsciousness as the walls of the house reverberated with the sound.
Jay screamed one last time before falling to the floor, paralyzed with fear. He was transfixed, unable to move, to resist, as the thing, reaching down, grabbed him by the ankle, smiling all the while; a dead, grey horrible rictus. It began dragging him to the door leading to the deep woods behind the house. Frozen with fear, Jay was just coherent enough to notice a deep, freshly dug hole in the rich black forest floor as he was roughly dragged over the threshold. Some primitive animal instinct for survival kicked in for a moment, and he struggled to reach the clawing dead hands holding his legs. The thing turned, it’s eyes lit with the fire of hell, and descended on him with a horrible ferocity. He knew nothing more in this life. Limp and lifeless, his body fell into the hole. Horrid shapes emerged from the woods, slavering maws, green sick eyes, moaning, whispering to one another, on all fours like dogs, but not dogs. They started digging at the mound of loose earth, filling the hole and covering the lifeless man’s body.
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nbsp; Janet came to, and felt strength return. She saw the nightmare transpiring around her, and ran in terror. She’d dropped her service revolver when she swooned, and it was lost to the unnatural darkness of the house. She had to get out. She had to get those kids out of there.
Once outside, the pall cast over the house lifted almost immediately, and Janet Littlehorse, police officer, kicked back into gear. She saw Jen struggling to free Tanner from the ropes he’d been bound in and ran to the two, just as a flash of lightning lit the scene, followed by the sizzling electric noise that preceded a lightning strike. A bolt struck a pine nearby that shuddered from the force. The sound was deafening. Then another, and another. The woods were under attack from the heavens, but the lightning was unnatural, garishly green stripes of light smashing against the pines. The wind, too, had picked up, and was building in intensity. The greenish flashes of light saw Janet in a dead run towards the two teens who stood stock still in terror.
“Get in the car!” she shouted as she piled into the front and fired up the big V6 in the cruiser. She tore the road up speeding off as pine needles whipped