Christmas Eve on Haunted Hill (5 page)

          Simone moved back a step
and shook her head.  “And sometimes there are things you’re just not meant to
have.”

          She felt a little stab of
guilt as she saw Terry’s face crumple.  The feeling intensified as she replayed
the words she’d uttered in her head.  This was a slightly cruel thing she’d
just done.  Maybe more than slightly.

          She frowned.  “I’m
sorry.  I don’t know why I did that.”

          There was another brief
silence.  Then Terry sighed.  “It’s okay.”

          Simone shook her head. 
“No.  It’s not.”  She decided she should change the subject, and quickly.  “Do
you think the stories we heard as kids are true?”

          “About the ghost of Silas
Herzinger?”

          “Yeah.”

          Terry shrugged.  “I don’t
believe in ghosts.  Not really.  I mean, I guess it’s possible that what we
think of as ghosts is just some kind of unexplained scientific phenomenon. 
But…”

          “In other words, you’re
not sure.  Meaning it’s possible.”

          Terry frowned.  “Is that
what you think?”

          “Do you think I’m
stupid?”

          “No.  Of course not. 
Jesus.”

          Simone smirked.  “Stop
being so sensitive.  I’m just playing with you.  I don’t know what I really
think when it comes to otherworldly crap.  I mean, I tend not to believe, but
anything’s possible.  We don’t know everything.  You know?”

          She moved away from
Terry, circumventing the couch as she headed for the far end of the living
room, where she encountered a staircase leading to the second floor.  Past the
staircase was a dark hallway.  More pictures adorned the walls there.  The kitchen
was somewhere in that direction, maybe also a laundry room or office.  Upstairs
were the bedrooms where so many of them had died.

          Simone raised the phone
and aimed the light up the staircase.

          Terry stood at her side
and stared up there, too.

          They could see the stairs
up to about the halfway point.  The light from the phone was too weak to penetrate
much farther.  As they stood there in silence another few moments, Simone was
struck by the utter absence of sound emanating from anywhere else in the
house.  Until now she’d been too fascinated by her exploration of the living
room for this to register.

          Spence and the others
should be banging around somewhere in here, whooping it up as they chugged
beers and made a wreck of the place.  Her boyfriend was too much of an
obnoxious fuck to stay this quiet for this long.  She felt her first real
prickling of fear as this notion solidified in her head.  Any lingering
resentment she still felt toward Spence for his rude behavior dissipated at the
thought that something bad might have happened.  Okay, maybe there were no
ghosts here, but that didn’t mean there weren’t other dangers.  This was an old
house.  Nothing had been done to maintain it for a long time.  Maybe some
rotting floorboards had given way and they’d fallen into…something.

          Fuck, she didn’t know
what might have happened.

          But some kind of accident
was definitely possible.

          She switched the phone to
her left hand, braced her right on the bannister, and started up the stairs.

          Terry gripped her wrist,
stopping her on the first step.  “Hold on, we don’t know if it’s safe up
there.”

          “I’ve got to look for
Spence.  Isn’t this total fucking silence freaking you out even a little?”

          “Just hold on a second. 
Let’s try calling out for them first.”

          Recognizing this as a
sensible suggestion, Simone cupped a hand around her mouth and raised her voice
to shout:  “
Spence!  Where the fuck are you!?
”

          Terry added his own, even
louder contribution.  “
Karen!  Bradley!  Stop playing around, you assholes! 
We know you’re fucking with us!
”

          They stood there and
waited a while.

          No response came from
upstairs or anywhere else in the house.

          Simone let out a breath. 
“Fuck this.”

          She twisted free of
Terry’s grip and started up the stairs again.

          Terry hesitated a moment
and then followed her up the creaking stairs and into the deeper gloom of the
second floor.

Luke learned some interesting
things over the course of the next hour or so as he continued to drink and talk
with Greg Lancaster and the regulars at Sal’s Place.  As so often happens with
conversations fueled by copious amounts of alcohol, the rambling,
multi-participant discourse occasionally veered off into some far-ranging
tangents.  However, it always returned to the subject of the tragedy that had
befallen Luke and his family ten years ago.  At first this made Luke as
uncomfortable as it usually did, but his reluctance to discuss the matter soon
evaporated in the face of Greg’s unrelenting ebullience.

          Among other things, he
learned that the Herzinger house on Crandall Hill became a focal point of local
lore in the years following the tragedy.  It hadn’t been long before everyone in
Rayford was referring to the location as Haunted Hill rather than by its proper
name.  Stories of a haunting first began to circulate widely about two years
after the murders.  It was said that at night screams and other disturbing
noises could be heard emanating from the supposedly empty house.  Some visitors
swore they heard what sounded like the blade of a heavy axe plunging into flesh
or wood.  Police ventured into the place now and then to check it out after
receiving particularly hysterical calls from people who’d trespassed on the
property, but they never found any evidence of ghosts or new murders.

          The tales nonetheless
persisted over the next several years, with elements of the basic story shifting
and mutating along the way.  At some vague point, it became an accepted part of
the lore that the ghost of Silas Herzinger could be spotted wandering around
the house at night every Christmas Eve.  The ghost was always there, so the
stories went, but on that one night each year it became corporeal, gaining
physical substance and form.  Those who claimed to have seen the ghost usually
described it the same way, saying it wore a bloodstained Santa suit and carried
a large, heavy-bladed axe. Greg attributed all this to rumors and outright
falsehoods told by local kids who were just trying to scare each other.

          Luke’s mood darkened
considerably when told about this.

          Greg noticed and
attempted to steer the conversation in another direction.  “You ask me, though,
there’s no ghost as scary as some of those clowns running for president this
time around.  Just imagine one of those narcissistic maniacs actually making it
to the oval office.  This country would go down the toilet faster than a blast
of explosive diarrhea.”

          Dave Wannamaker and
Virgil Alston chuckled dutifully at this, both men clearly sensing what Greg
was trying to do.

          But Luke wouldn’t be
distracted from the story.  It disturbed him that the night of horror he’d
endured ten years ago had morphed into a source of spooky entertainment for
local youth, but hearing about it awakened an insatiable morbid curiosity.  He
needed to know more and pressed Greg for additional details.

          Seeing that his friend
wouldn’t be dissuaded from hearing the rest of it, Greg sipped from his whiskey
glass and gave Luke’s anxious expression a moment’s thoughtful consideration
before setting the glass on the bar.

          The look on his face was
somber as he told the rest of what he knew.  “Okay, here it is.  For a while
there, a stretch of about five or six years, it became a kind of rite of
passage among the older kids to visit Haunted Hill on Christmas Eve.  Partly it
was to show how brave they were, but at heart it was really just another excuse
to get away from the adults in their lives and party.  You know how it is.  We
used to do similar things.  Well, some of these kids experienced mysterious
injuries while they were at your old house, a few of which were serious enough
to require medical attention.  One boy had to be hospitalized for a gaping
wound to his abdomen.  He told the hospital staff he’d narrowly avoided being
chopped in half by the ghost of Silas Herzinger.”

          All the color had drained
from Luke’s face at this point in the tale.  “Jesus.  What really happened?”

          Greg shrugged.  “No one
knows.  And that was the last incident.  The police went out to investigate
again and again found nothing.  No evidence of squatters or intruders other
than the trespassing kids who were there that night.  Some folks theorized the
boy’s wound was self-inflicted, that he’d done it for the attention and had
made up the story about being attacked by Silas’s ghost.”

          Luke nodded, letting out
a slow breath as he stared at the nearly empty bottle of Pabst he was rolling
between the fingers of both hands.  “Guess that makes sense.”

          Greg laughed softly. 
“More sense than a fucking ghost, that’s for damn sure.  Anyway, after that the
place was boarded-up pretty securely and some warning signs were posted. 
‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’, that kind of thing.  Guess it worked, because
there haven’t been any incidents since then.”

          Virgil Alston slid off
his stool and grimaced at the creaking of his old bones as he pulled on a
jacket.  “You watch, all that nonsense will start up again someday,” he said,
pulling up the jacket’s zipper.  “Now that the fuss has died down, sooner or
later some other group of kids will work up the nerve to try and get into the
place.  And then we’ll have some more ghost stories making the rounds.  You
watch.”  He took out a wallet, extracted some bills, and dropped them on the
bar.  “Anyway, reckon I better head on home while I can still stand.  Evening,
gentlemen.”

          The other men at the bar
bid Virgil farewell as he creakily made his way over to the front door and
pulled it open.  Another blast of frigid air swept through the opening, as well
as some snowflakes blown in by the shifting wind.

          Virgil glanced back at
them before stepping outside.  “Getting bad out here, fellas.  I recommend you
all hit the trail soon.”

          And then he was gone.

          Stu braced his hands on
the edge of his bar and surveyed the faces of the men seated on the other
side.  “Those are some words of wisdom.  Thinking I’ll go ahead and close up
early.  Time to settle those tabs.”

          The suggestion was met
with only minor grumbling.  Most of the bar’s remaining patrons accepted the
reality of the situation with relative grace.  The men paid up and shuffled out
the door.  A cab was called for the older man who’d been passed out at his
table for the entirety of Luke’s stay.

          Other than Stu and the
passed-out man, Luke and Greg were the last to depart the premises.  Before leaving,
Luke made some noises about finding a motel to stay in for the night, but Greg
had no patience for this, again insisting he stay the night at his place.  He
told Luke they’d stop at a convenience store for a couple cases of beer and continue
the reunion party within the safe and toasty-warm confines of a well-heated
house.

          Luke allowed as how this
might be preferable to spending an unknown amount of time seeking alternate
lodging.  The prospect of staying in an anonymous room at some cheap motel wasn’t
terribly exciting, anyway.  With some reluctance, he also agreed it might be
best to ride home with Greg in his Jeep Wrangler rather than trying to follow
in his Delta.  Greg had downed his fair share of double whiskeys while at
Sal’s, but he was nonetheless significantly less impaired than Luke, so this
seemed the sensible way to go.

          Unaccustomed as he was to
doing things the sensible way, this struck Luke as strange and sort of darkly
humorous.  But, hell, it’d been a strange night all the way around, with fate
steering him down a most unexpected path, so that was okay.

          Once they were buckled up
in the Wrangler, Greg started the engine and backed out of the parking space at
the front of the bar.  He shifted gears, got the jeep turned around, and rolled
up next to the Delta.

          “Anything you need from
your car before we go?”  He gave Luke’s Santa suit another amused once-over. 
“A change of clothes, maybe?”

          Luke shook his head. 
“Didn’t think I’d be alive come tomorrow, so that didn’t seem necessary.  Only
thing of worth in there’s my shotgun.”

          “Where’s that?”

          Luke glanced at the
Delta, voice going soft as he said, “In the trunk.”

          “Well, you won’t be
needing that fucking thing.  I’ll come back for it tomorrow and get rid of it.”

          Greg applied pressure to
the gas pedal and the jeep rolled away from the Delta.  He took a right turn
out of the parking lot and drove down a street that was nearly deserted in the
face of the strengthening storm.  Strong winds buffeted the vehicle’s canvas
top and vinyl windows.  The snow was sheeting down and getting blown sideways
by the wind, making it hard to see.  Greg drove in low gear for better
traction, but this reduced their progress to a crawl.

          The lights of a
convenience store came into view a few blocks farther down the road.  Many of
the shops and restaurants lining either side of the street in this commercial
district were already closed for the night, either in observance of the holiday
or because of the inclement weather.  On a normal night, most of these businesses
would be open for hours to come, but tonight their windows were dark.  As far
as Luke could tell, this corner Kwik-Stop store was the lone remaining
holdout.  There were no cars at the pumps, but a couple were parked near the
entrance and he could see people moving around inside the store.

          Greg turned into the
store’s parking lot and pulled up to the pump closest to the entrance.  He shut
the engine off and shifted in his seat to take out his wallet.  Opening it, he
took out some bills and offered them to Luke.  “You mind getting the beer while
I pump gas?  Normally wouldn’t bother filling up in weather like this, but I’m
running lower than I realized.”

          Luke waved off the bills
and reached for the door handle on his side.  “I’ll cover the beer.  Gas, too,
if you want.  Just tell me how much you’re putting in.”

          Greg tried pushing the
bills at him.  “Come on, man, take the money.”

          Luke opened the door and
stepped outside.  He leaned back in to shield his face from the swirling snow
and said, “I said I’ll cover it.  Got a fat roll of bills burning a hole in my
pocket.  Might as well put it to some use.  Now how much should I tell the
clerk you’re putting in?”

          Greg tucked his cash away
with obvious reluctance and returned the wallet to his rear pocket.  “Twenty
dollars unleaded should suffice for now.  Since you’re feeling generous, grab
some chips and shit.  Feeling a bit famished.”

          “No problem.”

          Luke shut the door and
headed for the entrance to the brightly-lit store, walking hunched over with
his head down and his hands shoved deep inside the pockets of the red overcoat. 
The freezing wind was so fiercely cold it felt like it was on the verge of sheering
away the top layer of skin from his face.  He shuddered and groaned loudly in
relief as he pushed through the door into the store’s much warmer interior.

          After stamping his feet
on the floor mat just inside the door to dislodge some snow from his boots, he
headed for the counter, where he took out his wallet and handed the clerk on
duty a bill.  “Twenty dollars unleaded on pump number one.”

          The clerk nodded and rang
up the purchase.

          Luke trudged off to the
rear of the store and the beer coolers that lined the back wall.  Opening one
of the coolers, he took out a case of Bud and a case of Pabst.  On his way back
to the register, he walked down an aisle devoted to automotive products. 
Plastic bottles of motor oil and deicers, window scrapers, fuel injector
mixtures, that sort of thing.

          On the bottom shelf were
some gas cans.

          He stopped in his tracks
and stared at the cans for several moments as an idea flared to life in his
head.  That the notion was completely insane given the current conditions
outside was something he instantly recognized.  Knowing it was crazy, however,
made the idea no less compelling.  A deep frown creased his face as he turned
away from the display and glanced outside.

          The snow hadn’t slackened
at all, but he could just make out Greg’s shadowy form near the pump.  Luke
tried to imagine how his friend would react to the idea.  Not with enthusiasm,
probably.  But maybe he could frame it in a way that would appeal to Greg’s adventurous
side.  Along with the rest of their old crew, they’d had some wild times in the
past.  They’d even done a few things that were arguably just as crazy as what
he had in mind now, things most often fueled by a large consumption of alcohol.

          And, well, Luke and his
old buddy had both been hitting the sauce pretty hard tonight.  Sure, they were
older than they’d been in those risk-taking days, and Greg definitely seemed
more level-headed now.  But maybe if he saw the idea as Luke’s final act of
defiance against his tragic past—as a kind of exorcism, really—maybe, just
maybe, he could be convinced to go along with it.