Authors: Don Sloan
Tipton whirled around and saw sixteen-year-old Stella Claymore standing just behind him and a little to his left. She was resplendent in a pure white diaphanous floor-length gown. She made a sweeping gesture with her arms and the hacksaw flew from Tipton’s hands. He made a choked sound and stumbled back a few steps from the altar, his face a confused and angry mask.
Wh-who are you?” he stammered.
“I am your daughter, by way of your repeated illicit unions with Moira Claymore,” said Stella. “You had me killed by the Beast you controlled many years ago, but now I have returned by way of a spell cast by my mother one hundred years ago. She said you’d be here, attempting to extend your life, and she was right. I am here to prevent that.”
“You’ll do no such thing!” Tipton cried, and he threw a mental command at the wolfhound to attack Stella, which it promptly did. The demonic dog, all gaping sharp teeth and slashing claws and more than 400 pounds of canine fury, thundered toward her.
She stilled the monster with a wave of her hand. Suddenly, the cavernous cellar was very quiet.
Stella looked around with her piercingly blue eyes, the color of a deep mountain lake. “I dislike this room,” she said, and waved both hands again. Instantly Stella, Nathan, Tipton, and Sarah (now unbound) were in Tipton’s parlor again. Sarah was lying on the sofa, Nathan and Tipton were seated in overstuffed armchairs flanking the sofa, and Stella was standing by a cheery fire in the hearth. Out the bay window, Nathan saw the snow still falling, though not as heavily as before this whole drama had begun to take place.
“I have come here to end the terrible cycle of tragedy begun by my mother all those years ago,” Stella said calmly. “No longer will the houses speak to one another and no longer will the shadows kill and maim at will. It is over.” She pointed a finger at Tipton. “And you will die.”
“The hell you say,” Tipton cried, and he sprang from his chair at Stella. He grabbed hold of her and they went tumbling across the braided rug. Tipton was screaming curses, while Stella was growling and shifting shapes, from that of a young girl into a great bear-like figure. With a terrible roar she broke free of Tipton and swiped at him with a huge paw. He flew across the room, where he slammed against the side of the fireplace. He picked up the poker and put it up in front of him. The bear—which had been Stella only seconds before—advanced on him in one great stride and overwhelmed him, but not before Tipton had buried the poker deep into the bear’s soft belly. They fell together into the fire and lay there, inert.
“You are no more,” Nathan heard Stella’s voice say softly. In the flames, he saw the bear transform back into the shape of the young girl, the poker buried deep in her stomach. The still body of Tipton remained where it was, being consumed by fire. But his head began to grow huge, all out of proportion to his body. Within a moment, it was as big as a weather balloon, and his facial features—his eyes, nose and mouth—looked as though they had been drawn on the balloon with a crayon. Then, the balloon burst, throwing white and gray matter in a wide arc all over the parlor, covering Nathan and Sarah in bloody gore, and leaving Tipton’s headless body to be consumed by the greedy flames.
Stella rose from the fire, plucked the poker from her stomach, and walked back to stand before the sofa.
Nathan and Sarah looked at her, awestruck, as she smiled and pointed her index finger at a curtain of Tipton’s parlor window. She made a shooting motion and the bottom of it caught fire. She did the same with the bottoms of all the other draperies in the room, and soon all the rich silk curtains were ablaze.
“Your Aunt Moira sends her regards to you, Sarah. Die well,” Stella said with an enigmatic look on her face and then quietly disappeared, like so much mist on a summer’s eve.
“Holy shit, Sarah,” Nathan said.
“My sentiments exactly,” Sarah replied. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
In the attic, the wooden idols are restless and afraid.
They can sense the fire two stories below them and know that they are in danger. They send out a powerful collective thought command.
Nathan, still in his swim trunks, was at the front door, which he found locked from the inside. The lock was a keyed one, and he knew the key was probably in Tipton’s pocket, but Tipton was being roasted at that moment. So searching his headless torso for the key was not an option. He decided to try the back door. He looked around for Sarah. She was not with him!
“Sarah!” he called. The ground floor was quickly being consumed by flames. Nathan twirled in a circle, looking through the acrid smoke for her. He knew he couldn’t stay on the first floor much longer. She must have gone to the back door and escaped that way. He moved off in that direction, stooping over to try and pull in some of the cleaner air near his waist into his lungs.
Sarah, meanwhile, was opening the door to the attic. Moving with purpose despite her fixed stare, she hurried to the dormer window, which she pushed open with an effort. A blast of frigid air and snow crystals pelted her nearly naked body. She didn’t seem to notice.
In answer to the strange summons in her head, she scooped up a handful of wooden idols and threw them out the window. They flew out a short way, dropped about a foot, then were thrown back against the house by the wind. They dropped farther down and were thrown back against the wooden clapboards again. This went on until they finally fell into the shrubbery at the base of the house far below. Sarah picked up another handful and threw them out as well, and the falling process was repeated, with some of them blowing back in the open window. Undeterred, Sarah threw these back out. This continued until all twenty-three idols had been thrown out the window. Then Sarah came to her senses with a start.
“Wh-where am I?” she said. She looked around, felt the cold air streaming in and at once realized that she was in immediate danger of hypothermia from the cold. She closed the window with a bang and quickly snatched up an old, moth-eaten fur coat lying on a pile of clothes nearby. She was shivering uncontrollably.
She couldn’t remember how she got there. She had forgotten everything after seeing Tipton’s head explode. Hesitantly, and on wobbly, barefoot legs, she crossed the attic floor to the doorway and looked out. She could hear the roaring of the flames long before she saw them. The blaze had fully engulfed the structure and had reached the third floor as she looked hesitantly out the door. There was so much smoke, she could barely see anything, but she realized there was no hope of escape by going down. What, then?
She returned to the window. Steeling herself for the inevitable roaring onslaught of snow and wind, she opened the window, paused for an instant on the sill and leapt out.
Nathan had had no choice but to break the glass window in the dining room. His elbow and hand were bloody, and the fire had come roaring past him, but at least he had an escape route now. But he still had not found Sarah. He had gone to the back door, found it similarly locked and deadbolted—no means of escape that way—and so he had run up and down the stairs calling her name. He had looked in every bedroom, but come up empty. He had even looked in the attic but had seen nothing but an open window and swirls of incoming snow. It was now or never for him in the dining room as the ceiling began to sag and collapse. Surely she had broken a window in the same fashion in another part of the house and would be waiting for him outside. With this thought in mind, he ran through the opening he had created and into the snowstorm.
my dear, our stories are almost over now, aren’t they?
yes, I’m afraid so, darling. We never did have a chance to punish her properly, did we?
no, we didn’t. The wrong Sister is burning down and we will never hear her stories again.
well, there is one more story to tell before we all go to sleep for good.
what’s that, darling?
the one about the woman who fell from three stories up in an old Victorian attic and broke her neck during a bad nor’easter.
no!
yes, and not too long ago, either. She was a pretty little thing, and doing her best to keep us all alive.
well, perhaps it’s just as well. We’re so tired, aren’t we dear?
yes. Yes we are.
Nathan went in the unlocked back door of Tipton’s house calling her name. He reasoned that if she wasn’t on the perimeter of her own house—he had checked—then she must have been in a half conscious daze when she escaped the burning building and come next door to this one.
“Sarah!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. He was shivering uncontrollably and on the verge of hypothermia himself. “Sarah!” he yelled again. He searched the ground floor. Then the second and then the third floor.
He was at a loss and frantic. After all they had been through, had it finally come to this? He couldn’t bring himself to the logical conclusion: that Sarah had been trapped in the burning house and had perished. Tears of frustration and remorse sprang to his eyes and he slipped to his knees, doubled over with grief.
An hour went by and still he couldn’t summon the energy to rise. He sat up, listening to the old house noises, subdued now, but still there. Slowly, and with great effort, he got to his feet and was headed for the stairs to go back down when he heard a whimpering sound and noticed that the door to the attic was ajar. He bolted for the doorway at a dead run and inside—
—he found Sarah, huddled in a corner, crying like a baby. He fell to his knees and enfolded her in his arms.
“Ow!” she said through her tears.
“What?” he said, glad and relieved to hear her say something.
“My-my arm. I think it’s broken. Must have happened when I j-j-jumped.”
Nathan gently tested the arm in question. Sure enough, it was unresponsive. Otherwise, after a few other probing questions, she assured him that she was fine, just a little bit in shock after jumping from the attic of her house house into a large snowbank and then, inexplicably, coming all the way up here to this attic.
“It seemed to be as far away from the fire as I could get and still be warm,” she said simply.
They went downstairs and called the EMTs. Someone else had called the fire department, which was already next door trying to bring the raging house fire under control despite the snowstorm, which finally was showing signs of blowing itself out.
After a trip to the Cape May hospital, where Sarah’s forearm was re-set, and following a thorough examination of them both, they returned via cab to Nathan’s house.
“Here’s to the conclusion of a thrilling adventure,” Nathan said, standing in the parlor and holding up a wineglass, full of Lindemann’s Bin 65 Chardonnay. “I’m sorry about the loss of your house.”
“Oh, Nathan, do you really think it’s over? Do you think we haven’t just had another of Tipton’s vivid dream-states? Will we wake up tomorrow and have to go through all this again?”
“Well, as we’ve discovered, nothing is for sure, but this episode surely had the right feel to it. I’d say we’re done with Mr. Tipton and his grab bag of tricks.”
“Mmm. That’s good. Because right now, I feel like a good, long soak in a big, soapy tub.”
“Does your tub have room for two?”
“We’ll just have to see,” she said with a smile.
They toasted each other and drew a collective sigh of relief. Their adventure was over at last.
Two days later, after the fire had burned itself out, Winona Fairbanks was sifting her way through the charred ashes of the old house. Her job as a forensics specialist with the Cape May Fire Department called upon her to try and come up with a cause for each fire that occurred. This was pretty much standard protocol for every fire department across the country, large and small.
Fairbanks had already checked the more obvious places—the fireplace and chimney, the fuse box and breaker panel, and a few others—and come up empty. Now she was making her way around the perimeter of the stone foundation of the old mansion, checking for any sign of accelerants.
As she was doing so, something caught her eye in the lower branches of a snow-covered bit of shrubbery. It looked like a wooden child’s toy. That was odd. She bent to pick it up and saw that it was a bit charred around the edges, but otherwise unhurt. She was about to throw it on the pile of other debris that remained for the front-end loaders due to arrive later that day to load up the remains of the old house, but she stopped.
A pleasant thrumming feeling came from the object, which was shaped like a tiny man. It was intricately carved, right down to the genitalia. She blushed a bit to see that. But, despite herself, instead of putting it on the pile with the other trash she found herself putting it in the pocket of her gabardine slacks. Looking a little deeper in the shrubbery, she found two more—alike somehow, but oddly different in certain aspects. She pocketed them as well.
She would keep one of the figurines for herself and give the other ones to a Sheriff’s Deputy friend and to another friend back at the office. Both had a taste for odd items such as these and perhaps they could offer an explanation about their origins.
Humming to herself now, she closed her notebook. She was due some vacation and tomorrow she would step onto a jet bound for Disney World, along with her husband and her two children. What fun they would all have!
She decided she would take her wooden figures on the plane with her tomorrow. She became nervous when flying, and thought perhaps she could stroke the object in flight, like rosary beads, to calm her. This idea made her very happy, and she continued to hum as she headed toward her car.
The End.