The Corbitt house along Hill Street seemed to be innocuous enough. Made of brick, this two-story bungalow fronted a quiet residential road but it nevertheless impressed me by the way the house seemed to withdraw into the shadows cast by the small hillock behind it. Looking at it from the road beside it, I could feel a sense of foreboding as I looked upon the blank curtained windows and the earthen colored brick walls and yet I could not quite place where the dread was coming from.
I remember it quite clearly as if it just happened yesterday. After locking up my car I pushed open the rusting, waist-high fence gate and strode around the grounds before coming inside. Since the property was abandoned several months before, the grasses and weeds had overgrown into an unnatural pattern. The grounds itself were surrounded by a low, waist-high wire fence. It also seemed strange that on this street in particular there were no residential houses, rather the rest of the street consisted of abandoned tenements or nondescript warehouses. To the rear of the property was a hillock with stunted trees that strangely no birds sang from and cast a long shadow over the house itself, as if to shield it from the purifying rays of the afternoon sun. Walking around, my foot bumped into something that was hidden in the tall grass. I bent over and picked it up. It originally looked like a doll's head. But upon closer inspection I realized that it was a head from a statue of the Virgin Mary, one of its glass eyes was missing, as if it was violently torn out by some hideous claw.
With the keys provided to me by my benefactor, I unlocked the padlock that was bolted on outside before I placed the residential key into the doorknob. The door seemed to resist my slight shove until a second, more forceful thrust finally opened it.
It seemed that the house was hurriedly abandoned in the wake of the incident. Small quantities of dust had begun to cover the floor and the furniture. As I strode on past the anteroom and into the narrow corridor, I began to take stock of the ground floor itself; in addition to the anteroom there were four other rooms on this level: a storeroom parallel to that of the anteroom and three other rooms separated by the corridor: the living room, dining room and kitchen. There were also two flights of stairs at the end of the corridor; one going up to the upper story and another descending into the basement.
After taking stock of the rooms on my initial observations, I began a more thorough search of anything that might be useful to my investigations into this baffling case. The anteroom in which the main entrance to the house lay had a closet that contained galoshes as well as raincoats with a dry mop behind several cardboard boxes. Since I didn't find anything unusual, I then opened an adjoining door into the storage room. As the next few hours languished by, I rummaged through several dusty boxes only to find junk and unused furniture. The sun began to set as I pulled out my flashlight from my coat pocket and did a cursory glance at the other main rooms on this level. The dining room had a long mahogany table with four matching chairs; this was evidently a heirloom of the Macario family, the previous boarders of the house. Striding into the kitchen, I noticed that there were still a few canned goods left in the meager larder and a slight rotting smell confirmed to me that the refrigerator had rotting food inside of it. The living room itself also seemed nondescript at first glance, with a sofa, easy chair, TV set and DVD player occupying most of the space. But I soon realized that as I observed the room with the dying rays of the sun, I noticed that there were unusual quantities of crucifixes, crosses and images of the Virgin strewn all around the place. It was as if they were placed there to protect them from something.
What confused me was that as I took out the head of the statue that I had found on the grounds earlier that afternoon; I could not find the matching statue with which to place the head back on.
As night descended at last upon the place, I made my way up the stairs with the bright shaft of my flashlight leading the way. The utility company had already turned off the electricity to the place since that incident with the Macarios and therefore I had to make do with what I was carrying. The upper story was definitely smaller in scale than the ground floor with three bedrooms facing the street. A door leading into a typical bathroom for four was at the end of the upper corridor. I turned on the tap and was quite surprised to still find it running. The first bedroom I went into seemed to be the master bedroom; it had a large bed and a bookshelf that also contained a dusty TV set. This was evidently the room of the parents, Victor and Gabriela Macario. More crosses as well as a rosary and a breviary rested on a night table beside the bed. From my knowledge I knew the Macarios to be an immigrant family from South America and so I dismissed the inordinate amount of religious artifacts I found that night to be nothing more than coincidence. How wrong I would be in the days to come.
The second bedroom had two small beds as well as toys and posters of fighter planes. This was evidently the bedroom of the two boys. The third room was the curious part of the whole house so far. Even though the Macarios had two boys, they chose them to live in one bedroom yet the third bedroom was completely empty except for a bed frame and an empty dresser. It seemed to me that it was as nondescript as the other rooms in the house. As I sat on the bare bed frame, a scratching noise seemed to come from the ground floor.
I quickly got up and ran down the stairs, hoping to find the source of the persistent scratching but the noise seemed to have died as soon as my feet touched the ground floor. Since I was already there, I then proceeded to go down the other stairway leading to the basement. As I ventured down the creaky wooden steps, my flashlight began to dim. I cursed silently because I had just changed the batteries of the flashlight and already it was giving me trouble. Once or twice I nearly slipped down the steps, as the wooden steps themselves seemed to be slippery with rat droppings. As the dimming light of my flashlight shone around the smallish room, I did not find anything unusual. The sidewalls were brick with the exception of the east wall that was wood. There were scattered tools as well as pipe and lumber strewn all around; it looked like this room had not been used in ages. The flooring was solid concrete and seemed to serve as a rock solid foundation to the house itself. As I walked back up the stairs, I noticed a peculiar stench that manifested itself as soon as I got back up; it was a stench unlike no other, a putrid, rotting smell that had the characteristics of rotting flesh, maggot infested fruits and excrement. I quickly fathomed that I might have stumbled upon dead rats and quickly got it out of my mind.
As the night wore on, I resolved that I would stay there for the night in case I would bear witness to anything unusual. I immediately chose the spare bedroom on the upper floor because I had a sense that there was a presence in that room that I could not place. Looking down from the bedroom window into the deserted street below, I was comforted by the glow from the streetlamp that cast long, dim shadows across the sparse room I was in. As the minutes dragged on into hours, the blanket of drowsiness began to overcome me and I fell into a catatonic slumber upon the bare bed frame.
That night, I had dreams of no other. As I imagined myself transported across vast gulfs of unfathomable lands, rotting graveyards and vistas of strange, alien worlds until at last I came face to face with a figure in shadow but with burning eyes.
As the nightmare ended, I woke up with a start. As my eyes opened I realized that I was back in that spare bedroom and the light of dawn had filtered into the room. Did that dream have something to do with this case? If so, what did it all mean? This case had me thoroughly baffled and confused now, and I needed help. It was then that I knew I had to talk to Augustine. He would help me.