Once upon a haunted time: a Halloween fic
Chapter 3. Who's there...?
Suddenly a scream tore through the silence of the night. A shrill shriek echoing inside them as if it were coming from everywhere.
The scream seemed to come from the kitchen. Stuart and Tiffany ran there, because it was what their training dictated. Tiff knew something was wrong as soon as she cracked the door open and the smell of blood assaulted her nose.
The fluorescent lights in the kitchen flickered like a strobe light. On a wide center table a woman was savagely stabbed. The flashing light showed blood splatter everywhere. A huge kitchen knife was still stuck in her belly. Tiffany heard Stuart let out an expletive.
They both looked around, reflexively reaching for their own hips, searching for their weapons, but naturally found only air. Tiffany felt terribly naked. She grabbed a broom propped up next to her and went around the room, but there was no one else there.
"What the f-" she blurted out.
"Is this a joke?" Stuart wondered aloud, pissed off. "Because it's not funny at all."
Tiffany remembered the scene looked a lot like the dirty trick which, he told her some time ago, some college classmates played on him on Halloween. The reason he hated the holiday. But then, Stuart took a closer look at the woman on the table, and his face paled.
"Good God, Tiff..." he gasped, covering his mouth to control a retch, "...someone ripped her heart out!"
·~·~·
"Which is your mother's room, honey, do you know?" Isobel asked the girl.
Ariadne pointed to a door at the end of the hallway.
Jubal walked beside her, apparently making an effort not to look at her legs. She saw him shudder violently out of the corner of her eye at the same time a shudder made her shiver too. She looked around uncomfortably, feeling watched.
The storm was still rumbling and flashing around the house.
At the door, Jubal knocked softly with his knuckles.
"Hello? Excuse me. Your daughter Ariadne is looking for you. May we come in?"
Silence.
Jubal insisted with a few more knocks.
"Hello?" Isobel called too.
Jubal tested the handle. The latch was not closed. Isobel motioned 'go ahead'; he opened it. The door blade made a plaintive moan as it opened.
Inside lurked the blackest darkness Isobel had ever seen in her life. Not even the gleams of lightning from the storm were visible. Something nasty could be heard crawling inside, like a myriad of bugs. And it stank. It stank of dead flesh.
"Stay here," said Isobel, leaving Ariadne behind her and peering into the room.
Jubal tried to shine light, but the beam could barely penetrate that stark darkness.
They went a little deeper.
Jubal's light hit on something. A pair of bare feet. Hanging three feet off the ground.
·~·~·
The old wood of the steps creaked under OA's weight as he followed Maggie up the stairs. He hurried, thinking he'd better get it over with and get her out of there, but he didn't catch her in time for her to reach the attic loft. Hardly anything was visible but he could tell from her white nightgown, Maggie stopped in the center of the room looking at the far wall. It was cold. OA approached slowly, and not just because of the uneasy feeling growing inside his chest. The floor was sticky and it was difficult to walk. An unpleasant smell surrounded them.
A flash of lightning threw light through the skylight in the high ceiling illuminating, for a chilling second, haggard faces stuck to the walls. OA gasped. No. He saw wrong. The darkness and the glare played tricks on him. He moved a little closer to one of them in a somewhat sickly attempt to dispel his unease.
His stomach contracted violently.
There were bodies stuck to the walls, covering them everywhere, wrapped in a whitish viscous tissue of all-too-familiar biological appearance. Faces were consumed, yet twisted into a grimace of dread. OA looked down at the floor. It was completely upholstered in the same substance. It's another nightmare, he thought, trying to control his fear. Just another nightmare. He shook his head, pinched his arm. But he didn't wake up.
·~·~·
Approaching, Tiffany examined the victim. Her face was contorted in a rictus of pain and panic. It was not Persephone; it was a woman at least thirty years younger, although there was some resemblance... Stu was right. In addition to a multitude of other stab wounds, the torn white nightgown soaked in red showed her chest open and the hole inside it. There was no point in even taking her pulse.
Tiffany swallowed hard, a disturbing restlessness gnawing at her insides. During the night they'd spent together, she thought she'd felt something with Stuart she hadn't felt for anyone in a long time. Intense, deep. It seemed *real*. Leaving that way that morning, without explanation, felt like Stuart ripped out her heart. That was the last thought she had before the scream was heard.
"I'll call 911," he said in a muffled voice, taking out his cell phone, but his expression soon became even more alarmed. "My cell phone is dead."
Tiffany reached into her pocket for hers before Stuart even asked, but found it turned off as well. When she tried to turn it on, the device didn't even make the attempt, as if the battery was completely dead.
Stuart then picked up the old telephone in the kitchen, a screw-in model surely over fifty years old.
"No signal," he reported. "What the hell is going on here...?"
"Let's wake up the others," Tiffany decided, firmly pushing her anxiety aside.
They were walking out of the kitchen with a determined stride when Tiff saw it. The victim's eyes were rolled back in one flicker of the fluorescent tubes, and in the next, they were staring at them.
Tiff froze and Stuart bumped into her back, grabbing her by the waist to keep from pushing her over.
Wrenching the knife from her body, the victim rose suddenly to her feet. She hurled herself at Stuart with her face distorted, the incarnate blade glinting malignantly in her fist, straight at his back.
·~·~·
Next to those bare feet, a little higher up, was another pair. Jubal raised the light higher. Isobel heard him swallow hard. Hanging from a ceiling beam was a middle-aged couple. They were in their nightclothes, a white nightgown and old-fashioned striped pajamas. Insects and maggots were crawling in and out of their noses and mouths.
They had been dead for a long time but their eyes moved unnaturally and suddenly stared at them. Jubal and Isobel took a startled step backward.
Behind them, the door creaked again. Isobel turned around just to see Ariadne yanking the door shut with a slam, her little face disfigured by the most evil expression Isobel had ever seen on a human face.
The door closed at the same time a thunderclap shook the house. Jubal's cell phone suddenly turned off, plunging them into the putrid blackness. The temperature dropped. Isobel frantically searched for Jubal.
"Isobel!" he called after her.
There was a thump and she thought he heard him grunt.
Before she could find him, hands grabbed her and threw her to the floor, onto the old, dusty carpet. Someone or something crawled up her body to pin her down, like when David Owen attacked her in her own home. The stench became unbearable. The darkness was like going blind.
"Jubal!" she shouted for help.
She writhed, struggling and kicking desperately to get rid of the prey holding her down with superhuman brutality.
But it didn't look like a single pair of hands and she couldn't hit anything. Jubal was calling out to her from somewhere in the darkness. Suddenly, an icy pressure encircled her neck and squeezed.
"Jub-!"
It squeezed with irresistible force, preventing her from screaming. Preventing her from breathing. Terrified, Isobel threw her hands around her neck, trying to stop whatever was strangling her. But there was nothing there.
·~·~·
With his heart pounding wildly, OA went to Maggie determined to grab her and get out of there. He took her around the waist with one arm.
"OA," he heard a hoarse whisper from the back of the room.
The hair on the back of his neck stood on end. One of the faces on the far wall was speaking to him...
"OA, help me," she said in a voice as desperate as it was weak.
The voice was Maggie's. And so was the face.
His mouth suddenly dry, OA turned very slowly toward the Maggie in the nightgown.
She was now looking directly at him, but in her eyes he found an inhuman, abysmal hunger. She began to smile and her features started to look strange, off.
Moving away, OA watched in horror as Maggie's mouth opened disproportionately. Slowly, two thick, dark, pointed appendages emerged from inside her mouth. OA could not believe what his eyes were seeing. But he couldn't stop looking.
"Oh, yes..." Maggie's deformed mouth emitted without taking her feverish eyes from his, which began to give off a constant yellowish, ghostly glow.
OA took two hesitant steps away.
With a sickening, wet crunch, that Maggie's body bent at an odd angle, her abdomen expanding. Four pointed legs covered with spikes and ending in serrated claws emerged violently from her sides, tearing the fabric of the nightgown. Her limbs mutated into two more pairs of very long legs, giving her enormous height. Her face was morphing into Persephone's... until it was no longer Maggie's at all. She leaned heavily on six of them, hovering over OA from above. The chelicerae in her mouth clicked, oozing a thick, poisonous substance.
"OA! Get out of here!" the Maggie on the wall screamed, almost out of breath, "Run!"
Wild-eyed, losing his grip on his sanity, OA was completely unable to move.
~.~.~.~
