Late at Night (15 page)

Emily seemed finally to hear her.
“Shut up!”
she said viciously. Her face looked surly, animalistic, alien. Joanne thought the girl was on the verge of actually snarling at her. “We’ve come this far,” Emily continued in a softer, more natural tone. “I think I see a chamber up ahead.” She looked into the darkness before them, holding the light up high. “Maybe a cavern. More likely the basement.” She looked back to Joanne and spoke to her as if she were a teacher instructing a slightly backward child. “We’ll find our way up from the basement and sneak through the house until we spot the others. And then…”

“Emily!”
Joanne’s eyes had strayed to the tunnel wall again. Emily’s face had looked so strange for a minute there, it had scared her. She had turned away from Emily, and her eyes were caught by the tiny crevices again, the movement within them, and then she took a good hard look and felt sick deep down inside. The crevices were filled with little squiggling worms, their tiny white bodies rubbing and twisting and squirming through the collected mass of the others as if they were feasting maggots. “Emily. Do you see?”

Emily had seen and she seemed temporarily unnerved. Joanne didn’t know which would be worse, going back through the passage
knowing
they were surrounded on all sides by worms, or going ahead into the cellar to face whatever horrors were in there.

Emily made the choice for them by stepping forward.

“Wait for me,” Joanne said, terrified that her friend should leave her behind. Having someone else down there with her was the only thing holding her together. Without Emily, she was afraid her heart would just stop on her and she’d plummet dead to the passage floor.

Several yards beyond they did indeed step out into a rather large enclosure. It was a sub-basement with a dirt floor. Joanne felt relief. It looked harmless enough, just a vacant cellar with large mounds and small bumps of earth underfoot. Surely there’d be a staircase leading upwards, and they’d be out the front door in no time. She prayed that the others had not yet left. Emily could jump out and scare them;
she
would run to them and beg them to take her back to the guest house—or she would go alone, risk getting lost in the woods. Anything to get away from
here.

But then she turned back to look behind her as they stepped out into the cellar. And in the light from the fiery torch she could see that the walls had come alive, that hundreds, thousands of the bugs, those slithering, sickening white worms, were dropping out of those crevices, filling up the tunnel and blocking off the exit.

“Emily!”

Emily was walking around the enclosure, looking for a way to get upstairs. She did not look happy. “Joanne, I can’t find—”

Some kind of flying bug flew into her face, mashing into her lips. Emily dropped the torch, and rubbed her mouth, spitting again and again on the ground. The torch had landed near one of the walls. Joanne looked at the section of wall illuminated by the torch’s light, and saw that it, too, was full of worms, squeezing out of their holes as if attracted by the fire.

Still, Joanne would
not
extinguish the flame. She would not stay down here in the dark.

“Something hit me,” Emily was saying. There was blood on her mouth, her fingers, smeared on her grotesquely. Joanne said helplessly: “This place—it’s full of them. We have to get out.”

Then something was in her hair, and Joanne was screaming, her hands up in the air trying to pull whatever it was out of the tangled locks. Emily was screaming, too. Little brown shapes were skittering across the ground, running towards them. There was some kind of grating in the far wall, she could see it now, and the little brown shapes were coming from in there.

Emily stepped back in alarm as one of the things scampered over her foot. Suddenly she was tangled in a bunch of wooden boxes, packing crates covered with cobwebs. The sticky webbing adhered to her face, her hair. Trying to untangle herself she began kicking the boxes aside, then tripped and fell on top of a large open one on the bottom.

The crate was full of thousands upon thousands of tiny, scattering spiders.

Emily tried to step back, to get away from the eight-legged creatures even now pouring out of the box by the hundreds, but it was too late. Even as she was trying to pull herself up off the ground, dozens of the arachnids were crawling all over her face, getting in her hair, popping into her mouth as she opened it wide to scream. Her vision was blocked by the things as they covered her eyeballs, eating through the eyelids to get at the round juicy morsels below. Her skin was on fire from a hundred little bites, and she felt the spiders wriggling up her sleeves and down the inside of her clothes. Within seconds, she was a shaking, frenzied mound of living organisms, entirely smothered in the devouring vermin as they feasted upon her. Within moments, the mound lay still on the cellar floor, still but for the voracious bugs as they dug into the skin of the girl and began eating their way down to the bones.

Joanne would have looked on this spectacle with horror were it not for the fact that she was too busy trying to stay alive herself. The brown things, rodents, were filling up the basement now, running to and fro as if driven into madness by a maniacal Pied Piper. There seemed to be no sense to their movements, as if they’d lost their equilibrium or had no idea of which direction to go. Joanne lowered her torch and could see that the floor was now a living carpet of writhing worms— perhaps they were responsible for the rodents’ strange behavior. Out from every hole in the house they came, the white squiggling larvae-like creatures, all of them moving with—Joanne suddenly realized—some determined purpose, as if by part of a grand design. From the tunnel behind her, from the floor, from the walls, they seemed to be gathering together at one specific spot.

Joanne’s blood froze as she realized what that one specific spot was.

It was the spot she was standing on.

There were worms on her shoes, worms on her legs, worms on her clothes, and worms on her arms. They were crawling up her jeans, sliding across her neck, burrowing into her skin wherever they touched. Joanne began to slap and scream, squashing as many of them as she could. But there were so many—too many. Before she knew it she was covered with them, and felt her whole body stinging from blistering, scabrous sores where the boring creatures had made entry into her very flesh.

There were worms eating her lips.

Joanne tumbled onto the ground, insensate from horror. As she fell she crushed scores of the worms under her body. Her hands and knees were sticking in an ungodly mash of gray and red viscous matter. If her eyes had been able to understand and accept what they were seeing, capable of sending messages to her brain, receiving them, she would have seen that there was no flesh anymore—only worms.

Now that the two young women were dead, the rats seemed to have recovered from the frenzy they’d been caught up in before. They were hungry, but there wasn’t enough left of the girls to provide a satisfactory repast—not at all. The spiders, still not satiated, turned on the worms and began to consume them. The rats, gathering by the grating in the wall, waited patiently for their turn to consume the spiders.

And when they were done, the bats would come down from their perches above, and put an end to the mangy, fattened rodents. Human flesh had been but one link in a strange and supernatural food chain.

The grisly bones of the two young women glistened in the flickering light of the torches.

Finally the torches went out, leaving the whole sub-basement sheathed in a cold and impenetrable darkness.

Chapter 28

“I don’t think you’re funny, that’s all!”

Ernie and Andrea walked out of the ballroom to see what the commotion was about at the end of the hall. Cynthia was kicking up a row about something. Jerry was standing next to her looking sore and disgruntled, and both of. them were addressing their verbal shouts and glowering stares at Anton. Betty stood off to one side, looking vaguely astonished. Lynn and Everson were coming down the front stairs from the second story, holding hands like school kids.

“Something the matter?” Everson asked as he reached the bottom of the staircase.

Cynthia looked at the lawyer impudently, both hands on her waist. “This—” she referred to Anton, “this two-bit ivory tickler played a really rotten trick on us.” She looked back at Anton. “I must have lost five years’ growth because of you.”

“What did he do?” asked Andrea. Ernie thought it better to keep out of it. He could tell Cynthia was the type who, if you didn’t take her side, would be your enemy for life.

“It’s all right, Cynthia,” Jerry protested.

“Let’s not go into it.” Ernie noticed that Jerry’s zipper was open, and wondered if it had any significance.

Cynthia ignored the beachboy and went right on explaining. “Jerry and I were upstairs.” Jerry seemed to be holding his breath. “Looking around.” Jerry exhaled. “We were on the fourth floor, the back hallway. Suddenly somebody started banging on the wall and making these spooky noises. I mean, it really freaked us. What could possibly be behind the wall, we thought, and on the fourth floor yet!”

Anton sighed dramatically and interrupted before she could go any further. Clearly he thought he could explain things better than she could.

“I went into the west wing on the first floor. There was an entrance to it through the ballroom. I discovered a narrow flight of winding stairs and being intrigued, followed it to the top. Apparently the wing has been walled off from the main section of the house on all but the first floor. I walked along a corridor on the fourth story until I came to a wall, a barrier. I knew the house was wider than that. Imagine my surprise when I suddenly heard these grunts and groans coming from the other side of the barrier, like two spirits in the throes—”

“That’s enough, mister,” Jerry said. “What are you-“

“Two spirits in the throes of what?” Ernie asked, amused by Jerry’s irritability and discomfort. He knew Cynthia could care less about their activities being uncovered, but Jerry was another matter.

“Oh never mind that,” Cynthia snapped. “We were necking, all right?”

“Necking,” Anton whooped. “Come now. You were much farther along than that.” Jerry lifted up a fist in Anton’s direction, but the pianist only found his actions amusing. Lynn and Everson looked uncomfortable with the subject, and started to walk out the front door, muttering something about needing some air. Betty’s face was blushing bright red. Andrea appeared to be bored with the antics.

“Irregardless,” Anton continued. “I wondered who could be making these noises, and wondering if there there a way into the main part of the house without having to go all the way back downstairs. So I knocked. Loudly. And called out. It’s as simple as that.”

“Bullshit!” Cynthia roared. “You knew who it was and you were trying to scare the daylights out of us. You were going
whooo whooo
and you know it! I could recognize your voice anywhere.”

“Talk about coitus interruptus,” Andrea jibed. Ernie was surprised at her bluntness. She poked her friend playfully in the ribs. “That’s what you get for making love in strange houses.”

“We were not making love!” Jerry whined, a dismayed expression on his face.

“Oh relax, Jerry,” Cynthia said, rolling her eyes towards heaven. “No one’s going to tell the Glo-worm on you. Come on. Let’s get out of this dump.”

“What was it like in the other wing, Anton?” Betty asked shyly. “I was worried when you disappeared like that.”

“Now, now, my dear. Anton Suffron is one man who can take care of himself. I am not at all threatened by imposing old houses, haunted or otherwise. Anyway, the other wing is more of the same. Lots of dirt, many rooms, rotting antique furniture. Dust, dust, dust. And the overpowering, omnipresent aroma of death, doom, and decay.”

Betty giggled, took his hand impulsively. Anton gave her a warm smile.

Or was it a sneer? Ernie wondered.

They gathered outside the entrance to the house, and shook off the dust and smell of the mansion like dogs expelling water. The sun was high in the sky now; it was noon or later. Everson started calling for the housekeepers, who were nowhere in sight. “Emily? Joanne? We’re going back now. Where are you?”

“Do you think they went back to the guest house?” Ernie asked.

Everson shrugged. “Would they have gone by themselves? Do you think they could have found their way back alone?”

“I don’t see why not. The trail may be overgrown, but if they were observant they could have followed it easily enough.”

Everson ran a hand through his hair, rubbed his brow with thumb and forefinger thoughtfully. “Let’s wait awhile and make sure they aren’t somewhere around here. You’re probably right. But I’d rather they didn’t have to go back alone if we left without them.”

The others began calling out the names of the girls while Ernie went around the side of the house, past the east wing and over to the back. When Andrea had freaked out on him again in the library, somehow he had expected stranger things to happen than Anton banging on the wall while Cyn and Jerry were making out. Before he’d had a chance to ask who “Horatio” was, to tell her what she’d said, Andrea was back to normal, taking him by the hand and chattering a mile a minute as she led him around the first floor.

The weeds were really high in the rear of the house, long green stalks the size of a small man’s body. He pushed his way in, calling for the girls, but it was clear there was no point in his investigating further. He took a look upwards at the back of the mansion. It was a sinister-looking thing, all right. Gave him the creeps when he was outdoors more than it did when he was inside.

He heard someone call out his name and saw that Andrea had followed his lead and gone round to the back from the other side. She waved to him, her hand barely visible above the overgrowth. Then she stepped back out of view altogether, heading toward the front. Ernie was just about to do the same when he looked at the bottom of the back wall and noticed a window or opening of some kind at ground level near the corner. Then he remembered: the house must have a basement. No one had thought to look down there. Still, did it matter? No one had gone into the attic either, had even bothered to look for the entrance to it. A half an hour in the hot, musty confines of that evil breathing house was all anyone could stand. Yet for some reason he thought there was something important about the cellar.