House In The Woods

They rolled to a stop, the sound of gravel crunching beneath tires floating up to them as the car died. The engine made a few coughing noises as the car came to rest, as if it wasn’t quite done yet, and then finally choked on its last gasp of air. Greg threw his hands up in the air, letting them fall again upon the steering wheel. He gripped it with a hidden anger, evident only in the whites of his knuckles. He stared straight ahead into the darkness, trying to shake the feeling of predetermination flooding his mind. A little voice was whispering to him from the deepest corners of his consciousness that this was supposed to happen. The shit always flew when you were expecting it. The shit always flew when you knew it was coming but prayed it wouldn’t. And whoever, or whatever, flung it sat in some dark corner somewhere laughing at your misfortune throughout the entire ordeal. That was how it was. He gripped tighter on the wheel and thought of happy things.

Images of ocean waves lapping against white beaches, shadowed only here and there by the swaying leaves of palm trees, shattered in his mind at Peggy’s voice. He turned to her, his anger swelling now into his deep brown eyes, and apparently showing on his face. She recoiled from him instinctively, as if her boyfriend had suddenly become some looming cobra, hood exposed, wavering back and forth before her.

“Greg, what are we gonna do now?” she asked again. Why in the hell had he asked Peggy? Why in the hell had he done that? He glared at her. What the hell were they gonna do? How in the hell was he supposed to know? Couldn’t she figure it out for herself? He held back an urge to shake her violently screaming “why” into her confused little face. Instead, he smiled.

“I guess I’ll get out and check the engine.”

“In this weather? You’ll freeze to death.”

He smiled at her, his left cheek twitching in spite of himself. How could anyone be so, so out there?

“Hon, if I can’t get the car started, we’ll freeze to death.” His words pattered against her face like rain on the surface of a pond. It instantly changed from a look of concerned annoyance to one of sheer terror. A petite hand jutted up to her face and covered her tiny little red lips. Those lips were supposed to be doing more than just jabbering. By now they should have been at the campsite, snuggling up close to one another by a fireplace, their friends tucked away in their own cabins doing the things couples do. But no, they were trapped in a shitty car; he was trapped in it, with her. He had to get out for that reason alone.

He opened his door and stepped out, only half hearing Peggy telling him to be careful from within before he shut the door on her in mid sentence. “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.” He didn’t know much about cars; he’d never paid much attention. But when Peggy had mentioned that they should take her car instead of his, he’d thrown a fit. Her car was a piece of shit. He couldn’t imagine driving it up the hundreds of steep roads to the campsite. It would take years. Finally, she had relented and given in to him, like she always did. They’d taken his own car in the end. He could kick himself in the leg. Of course, if they’d taken her car instead, they’d probably still be in the last state.

A gust of zero degree wind blasted him immediately. He winced at its cold penetration. He raised his hood from its resting place behind his head and gloved his stiff hands. He didn’t know what he was doing, maybe he could find something obvious under the hood. A broken belt, a cracked cylinder head, an empty radiator, something. He popped the hood and stared in at the tangled mass of the engine before him. It was like looking at a tree and wondering where the seed had gone. He found the windshield washer fluid easy enough. The radiator was obvious, it looked fine. There were no broken belts. He checked the oil; it was full and lately changed. The engine itself looked intact. He didn’t get it. He shook his head, wincing again as another blast of cold air struck his exposed face and tore through his jeans. He was cold and getting colder.

The weather reports for the area, at least from home in Indiana, had relayed that a storm front was moving in. He’d expected to outrun it. It was on the border of Indiana and Illinois when they had left, and he figured they’d be there before the worst of it had set in. Guess again. He dropped the hood and trudged back through a growing drift of snow to the driver side door. A moment later, he was back inside, back in the relative warmth of the car’s interior, and the relative insanity Peggy drove deeper into his brains every time her mouth opened.

He didn’t know why he’d asked her to come. He thought about it for a moment and realized that he actually did. She had a pretty face, killer legs, and tits perfectly shaped. He had imagined those legs wrapped around him, and given Peggy’s supposed history, had asked her to go with him to the cabins as if he were buying a new BMW. He was the smooth negotiator, after all. He’d negotiated Peggy Williams right into his car for a rendezvous in the woods they’d surely never forget. Unfortunately, no one had told him how much of an airhead she was. No one had told him how unbearable she was. He’d found out pretty quickly on the car ride up. Questions like “I wonder why cotton candy melts in your mouth,” or “Why are there laces on a football,” had nearly driven him insane.

And now he sat, staring bleakly ahead into the drifting snow, hoping for a quick death and realizing that if they didn’t find shelter soon, there wouldn’t be one. Peggy stared at him inquisitively, twirling her hair in her fingers. He felt like exploding. Peggy, however, did not have similar feelings towards Greg.

He was her “perfect mate”. He was tall, ruggedly built, short blonde hair, blue eyes. He intoxicated her. He played football, he ran track, and he wrestled. He was a walking talking Adonis. Of course she would say yes to him. Of course she would go with him to the cabins, wherever they were. She didn’t care, as long as he was right next to her. And if he wanted to roll around in front of the fire before making love, she’d be thrilled to come along for the ride.

Of course, she knew even less about Greg than he did about her. He was quiet, mysterious; she could feel a deep malevolence in him. It comforted her somehow. Maybe deep down it reminded her of her father. Maybe she just liked strong men. Either way, she knew that Greg was all her little life needed, and she had literally jumped at the opportunity to be courted by him.

However, she wasn’t quite as flighty as Greg had intuited. When she wanted to, she could be extremely smart. She was number three in her class, albeit through a dozen or so drama and music classes she’d taken and aced, knowing full well that they’d land her within at least the top five of the class rating. She was one of the more popular girls at East Midland High School, though that popularity was beginning to wane do to the repeated accusations of Maggie Ambers that Peggy was a flat out whore.
So she’d slept with a couple of guys. It wasn’t like she’d slept with every guy. That would make her a whore, she figured, which she certainly was not. In fact, she had information that Maggie had slept with at least five guys, three of which were very close friends, and all on the track team, no less. She’d learned this piece of gossip just before she’d left with Greg, and was dying to tell him. Her moment hadn’t come yet, however, so she held back the urge for now.

She stared at him now with the eyes of a deer caught in a headlight, for that was how she genuinely felt. Her lips began to tremble and a finger meandered into her mouth, her teeth biting down on the nail at the end of it. She quickly withdrew it remembering that good girls never chew. The boys in the locker room had had a few laughs at that one, but of course Peggy knew nothing about that.

“Greg, what’s wrong.”

As the words entered his ears, he closed his eyes and grated his teeth. He sat silent for a moment, collecting himself, settling himself. He was an inch away from slapping the girl. He slowly opened his eyes again and looked over at her with the deepest brown eyes she had ever seen. She nearly melted, and somehow, he could sense it. He took it for fear rather than infatuation. It only fed his anger with her.

“I don’t know.” He stared blankly at her, realizing the depth of what he was saying. He really didn’t know, and that was bad. There was nothing obvious wrong with the engine. If it had been a broken belt or something, at least he’d be satisfied with their predicament. But the way things were, he had only become more frustrated. He looked away from her and back out the windshield at the swirling snow dancing in the wind outside the car.

How long, he wondered, how long till the cold crept in and became unbearable? An hour? Two? Probably three tops. He grated his teeth, not even knowing it. It was a habit his mother had tried to correct by slapping him across the face every time she had seen him do it when he was younger. She hadn’t dared do that in three years. Not since he’d grown from a boy into a young man. She could see the same eyes of her husband in his own and would cower before him if he desired it. And he knew it. He knew that Peggy would too. Why was he controlling himself? Why hadn’t he just slapped her silly yet? She hadn’t crossed the line yet, plain and simple. So far, she’d only annoyed him. She hadn’t really pissed him off yet. When that happened…

He noticeably shook his head, willing his thoughts away, forcibly clearing his mind. Peggy noticed at least, that was for certain. The tone in her voice was one of pleading. It dragged him straight back to reality once again before he could even picture those beautiful white sands far far away.

“Greg?”

“What?” He snapped at her. She recoiled again. She was growing more and more apprehensive by the moment. He almost enjoyed it. It seemed to perk him up a bit.

“What, what are we gonna do?” Her question hit him like a ton of bricks. What were they going to do? He didn’t know. He was only seventeen for Christ’s sake! How the hell should he know? In the distance, the howl of a wolf suddenly was carried down the wind to the broken car. It sent shivers down both Greg and Peggy’s spines. Peggy seemed to shrink into the corner of the car even further, if that was even possible.

“I don’t know.” He suddenly had the urge to comfort her. His words had tipped her over into the kind of chaotic fear that only a young child can have, or, in Greg’s mind, the very stupid. He felt a kind of sympathy for her. He reached over and took one of her hands, and she immediately leaned over and embraced him, wrapping her little arms around his broad shoulders. She was shaking like a wet dog. And he loved every minute of it. He could feel her breasts pressing against his chest, the nipples hard with apprehension. His jeans suddenly felt too small.

He shook the feeling from his body as easily as one might shake a semi-truck. After a few minutes of embracing the frantic Peggy Williams, he got hold of himself and returned to the issue at hand. She seemed to calm down a bit as well, sinking back into her seat, the same size she’d been when she’d first planted herself in it in the relative warmth of Indiana. Relative compared to now, at least. It hadn’t been two below there.

What were they going to do? He figured they should wait a while, at least until the car failed to keep them warm. And what then? Maybe another car would drive by, and they could hail it, get some help. Sure, that would work. If, that was, another car just happened to drive by on a lonely stretch of highway out in butt-fuckin-egypt. It was likely, he realized, but probably not at this time of night, which, by his watch, was nine-thirty. Everyone within an inch of sanity would have hidey-hoed it on home long ago, and only the truly fucked up would come ambling along at such a time in such weather. He laughed at the thought in spite of its direness. They’d driven up the lonely stretch of road in the horrible weather. Just maybe someone else would too.

“We’ll wait,” he said. This seemed to confuse Peggy.

“For what?” She asked.

“Another car. If someone else drives by, I’ll hop out and try to get their attention. Maybe we can get a lift.” This satisfied her. The look of confusion faded gradually away from her face as if she were absorbing what he had said as slowly as a snail might digest a blade of grass.

“What if no one comes by?” He refused to look at her. Why would she ask that? Didn’t she know that he didn’t know any better than her what they should do?

“I don’t know,” he said almost growling. Peggy looked out her window at the storm raging beyond. The snow danced and swirled inches from her face, the wind buffeted the car, gently rocking it every few seconds. It seemed to be getting worse, if that was possible. The sense of dread that had been growing in her since the car had died rapidly sprouted leaves and took firmer root in her mind. Greg’s apparent inability to figure out what to do only edged her further into fear.

What could she do? She pondered this for a moment. She realized that it would be very boring just sitting in that car with the silent Greg for who knew how long before someone happened to drive by. So she did what came naturally to her when placed in such circumstances. She started to gossip.

After a good five minutes of listening to Peggy go on and on about the treacherous Maggie Ambers and the fact that she’d slept with way more guys than she claimed Peggy had, Greg started to wonder why he hadn’t asked Maggie to come instead. She was less of a chatterbox, seemed slightly more intelligent, and from what Peggy was telling him now, was perhaps a little more experienced in the world of sex. In other words, the perfect girl. The kind of girl he thought Peggy would turn out to be. Too bad for him, and too late.

Five minutes was, for Greg, way to long to listen to Peggy gossip. He could have summed up every word that had spilled from her mouth in that time in a short couple of sentences that would take no more than twenty seconds to utter. He was thoroughly disgusted with her, and growing more so with every second he spent sitting next to her. Finally, he gave up. He looked at her and interrupted her in mid sentence.

“I gotta piss. I’ll be back in a minute.” New fear washed through her face. She was worried all over again. She’d once again regained some of her composure with her gossiping, and he realized that it was going to be a very long night in the car if someone didn’t drive by, cause gossiping seemed to be the only thing that made her feel any better in this situation. He wondered if maybe the back seat would be better, and settled it that he would try to warm things up a bit when he got back to the car after his business. If he couldn’t shut her up, maybe he could control the sounds coming out of her mouth. He stepped out into the frigid air again.

A few yards away from the car, he stopped at the edge of the road and stared into the thick forest before him. He unzipped his fly and relieved himself in the snow. It made him think of a time, long ago it seemed, when he and Tommy Thrasher and Sam Ules had tried to write their names in the snow with their piss. He smiled thinking about it. Of course, none of them had been able to. It had been funny, nonetheless. He slid his member back into his jeans and began to turn to walk back to the broken car and the boring Peggy. He stopped dead in his tracks.

Something seemed to flicker in the trees a few hundred yards in. The image of a wolf instantly painted itself in his mind. He’d seen two yellow eyes, glowing in the half light cast by the snow, staring at him. He only noticed it as he began to move. He peered ahead through the drifting snow and the closely huddled tree trunks. There was something definitely there, looking at him. The two yellow orbs looked too big to be eyes, however, unless they were very close. A shudder of fear ran down his spine. He didn’t move, almost couldn’t. He’d never seen eyes like that before; they seemed to transfix him to the spot.

A few moments later, and after a harder stare, a smile stretched across his face. They weren’t eyes. They were lights. His heart began racing with excitement rather than fear. He spun around and jogged back to the car. A moment later, he was inside again and looking at Peggy with wide eyes. She could see something was up and returned the same look to him. Thankfully, she didn’t open her mouth, though he wouldn’t have heard her even if she had.

“There’s a house, or something, a little ways into the woods here. I saw two lights, looked like from windows, in the trees. I think we should try to get over there.” Peggy looked at him hard for a moment. She didn’t know whether she should trust anything seen in the woods late at night with a storm raging all about you. But she didn’t feel like freezing to death in the car while they waited for rescue either.

“Are you sure you saw a house?” She asked. He wasn’t sure, but realized that if he said this, it would become increasingly harder to remove Peggy from the car to find the shelter he’d seen.

“Of course I did. I just told you didn’t I?” She still looked uncertain. “Look, we could wait around in here for another hour or three before anyone comes along, freezing our asses of, or, we can jog out into the woods a bit, find that house, and be sipping hot chicken soup in some elderly couple’s warm kitchen? You seriously want to wait around in here to find out how long it takes to freeze a human body?” He looked at her with imploring eyes. It had worked. Her face instantly melted into one of agreement.

“O.K.” she said.

“All right. Make sure you zip up tight; it is horrible out there. And keep close to me, the drifts are starting to pile up pretty high and you don’t want to get caught in one. The house didn’t seem much more than a few hundred yards away, so we should be able to get there without too much suffering.” She only looked at him, nodding as she zipped her coat up and pulled the mittens from her pockets. A minute later, he was running around the front of the car as she opened her door to the cold night air without.

The stiff wind rammed into her immediately. It took her breath away. It was almost unbearable. She didn’t have a hood or cap and the wind tugged violently at her long blonde hair. She almost sat back down in the car and shut the door, but Greg suddenly appeared before her through the white and helped her out. She was already shaking with the cold. He hadn’t been kidding. How, she wondered, had he managed to piss in this weather? She could barely breath. He took her covered hand in his own and the two of them started out towards the tree line at the edge of the road.

They trotted down a small dip in the ground where the runoff ran in the spring or after a rainstorm and back up to the beginning of the trees. She peered ahead into the whitewashed gloom. She could see nothing. She could hear only the wind swirling all around her in some ancient hypnotic dance. She looked to Greg. He was staring straight ahead into the forest. Suddenly, he smiled, pointed, and looked at her.

A moment later, they were slowly moving through the trees towards a couple of lights he’d seen, a couple of lights she still hadn’t noticed. Every step she took sent another shiver of cold down her middle. The jacket she was wearing was horribly inadequate. She hadn’t expected it to be so bad, and besides, they were supposed to be snuggling up next to a fireplace in some warm cabin somewhere.

They progressed very slowly. Greg seemed to be growing agitated. They stopped for a moment as he stared ahead into the swirling snow through the tightly clustered trees. He must have lost sight of the lights. Great, she thought, now we’ll freeze to death for sure. Then they were moving again. He’d caught sight of something, it seemed. Her eyes darted to and fro, looking for the mysterious lights he’d seen, but the only thing that met them were black tree branches swaying in the wind and snow dancing and drifting all about. Her worry began to intensify. All at once she stopped. Greg immediately turned to her.

“I can’t go on!” she screamed into the wind. She couldn’t tell if Greg had heard her or not. His face was blank. Then he shook his head at her. “I can’t do it!” she screamed again. This time, he seemed to understand her. He shook his head yes and began tugging at her arm. He leaned in close to her when she wouldn’t budge.

“The house is only a few more yards away, maybe thirty. Can’t you see it! The car is too far away now, if we turn back, we’ll freeze!” Determination was stretched across his face. He was growing a pale white, his lips were purple. She wondered if she looked that horrible. Finally, she gave in to his tugs and trudged ahead through the snowdrifts.

All at once, they emerged into a small clearing. The wind seemed even stronger here and the snow pelted her face with tiny daggers. She was shaking uncontrollably now. Greg wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her close to him. She felt slightly better, but knew they’d have to find this mysterious house soon. And there it was right before her. She looked up at it. A shiver of fear, not cold, ran down her spine. There were no lights on it any of the black windows. The place looked like it had been abandoned sometime back in the 1820’s.

She didn’t like it. But it was too late now; Greg was pulling her towards it. With every step, her sense of fear grew more and more pressing, like the weight of a dead body slung across her shoulders.

Greg had begun to worry a few minutes earlier when he first lost sight of the lights. They’d gone no more than a few yards, he’d dropped his head to step over a fallen branch, and when he’d looked back up, swirling snow and dancing limbs filled his vision, but no lights. He’d kept going in the direction he’d seen them in, not stopping for a moment. So close to the car, he was certain that Peggy would drag him back if he let on that he didn’t know where they were going. He had glanced back over his shoulder and could still see it sitting by the side of the road, the drifts growing thick around the rear tires and trunk.

But he’d kept going. And thank god. A few yards further, the lights had shimmered back into view before him, seemingly no closer. He squashed the idea of a will-o-the-wisp as soon as it had entered his mind. Foolish nonsense his mother had told him late at night as a bed-time story had no place in the middle of a snowstorm with no place to go. For the time being, the idea vanished from his mind. He and Peggy had moved slowly, unbearably slowly, towards the two dim lights without the slightest hesitation.

A minute or so later, when the lights vanished again, the child hood story resurfaced in his numbing head. He felt a growing sense of bewilderment building in him. Despite the cold, electricity was crackling through his body. They were close, but not close enough to see the dim outline of a house or whatever it was with windows up ahead of them. The lights going out should have pissed him off. He should have been enraged. Instead, he was slightly thrilled and frightened all at once. He had stopped then, and Peggy had shouted up the wind at him that they should go back. Over his shoulder, he couldn’t see anything but trees and snow playing in their footprints for a few yards. Beyond that, everything was black. Nope, they couldn’t have gone back then, and he knew it. It was too late. And they were close. He knew that they were close.

When he’d looked ahead again, the lights had been there again. And so they pressed forward. With each step, his apprehension grew. It was strange, unsettling, very unlike him, to be feeling that way. He was intelligent to know that he typically experienced a very small gambit of emotions, and fearful apprehension was not one of them. Especially not mixed with a feeling of deep exhilaration. Walking around out in the middle of the snow storm charged him up, he was jiving on it big time.

Peggy, it seemed, was not in the same state of mind. She seemed to shake more violently with every few feet closer they got to their destination. It didn’t tell on him like it should. He felt like goading her on with a great big grin on his face. He felt like pushing her before him to watch her struggle forward.

As they had stepped suddenly into the clearing his apprehension became nearly intoxicating. Peggy had made a noise, maybe said something. It felt as if her hand had shrunk in his own. He stared up at the house like a mouse at a hunk of cheese, his eyes wide open. It was beautiful. It was hauntingly beautiful. Greg didn’t see the ancient abandoned black building that Peggy did.

Greg wasn’t filled with dread at the sight of it. He had felt her recoiling and had wrapped an arm around her waist, pulling her forward. The lights had vanished as soon as the two of them had entered the clearing, and now, Greg was filled with the urge to find those lights. It was indescribable, electric. He moved without thought. The world melted away from him as the house loomed closer.

They stepped onto the front porch, Peggy shaking more with fear now than cold, Greg standing upright as if the storm wasn’t even happening, the wind blasting open his jacket and tossing his hood about his head behind him. The door before them had been boarded up long ago, and those boards had rotted away long ago as well. The warped door stood slightly ajar. A low sound of wind moving quickly around the corner of the door pervaded the porch. Peggy felt like she was in a wind tunnel. Greg felt like he was coming home.

Peggy’s eyes wandered as they stood there. Greg stood still, breathing deeply, eyes blank. For the moment, she hardly noticed him. What she noticed was the house. She felt like screaming, crying, running, tearing the hair out of her head and slashing her wrists. She felt like she was rapidly going crazy.

Her eyes fixed on the shadowed corners of the porch’s high ceiling. They darted back down to the boarded windows lining its walls. Things moved in the dark behind those boards. Things looked out at her through the cracks. She began to sob. Her breath came to her in short wet gasps. The wind took it away as soon as she could get it into her lungs. She continued staring at the boarded windows, and the feeling of terror slowly seemed to melt away. There was nothing there, no beady little eyes staring out at her, no dark shapes crouched in the shadowy places beyond. It was just an old house. She turned and looked up at Greg, and her fear rushed back up and slapped her right across the face.

Greg wasn’t Greg anymore. Greg was gone. Greg had been replaced. It was instantly apparent. She nearly shrieked but again, the wind caught her breath and dragged it away with cold pincer fingers. Peggy tried to back away from the thing holding her close to it, one of its long arms wrapped tightly around her waist. All at once, she felt numb and stiff. The Greg thing was looking down at her, a twisted grin stretched across its warped face. Its eyes were twice as big as they should have been, and glowing a hot pink. They seemed to shimmer and dance, it was like looking into a large opal.

No, not really. It was like looking into the gaping maw of insanity. It was like falling into hell. A scream finally left her as the world began to spin. Greg’s already warped face became distorted beyond reality. The thing holding her was drooling through limp lips topped by the crests of impossibly jagged teeth. The thing holding her was a foot taller than Greg ever would be. The thing holding her was grinning at her with its bright pink eyes and gaping mouth. The face leering down at her suddenly filled her vision and everything went black.



Peggy screamed in his arms. She was looking straight up at him and felt stiff as a board. He was torn away from his stare at the half open door. He realized he was grinning hugely. The crotch of his jeans suddenly felt too small as well, painfully so. His smile stretched to a grimace as he quickly rearranged himself. Peggy was still screaming. What a time to get a hard-on, he thought. It hadn’t happened so unexpectedly like that since he was fifteen.

He gazed down into her face with a look of worry playing out on his own. The wind tossed her hair all about it, but it didn’t seem to faze her. Suddenly, she ran out of her own wind and her body went limp in his arm as her scream scurried away into the night. He caught her and held her up. Go inside you idiot, his inner voice told him.

Obediently, he tugged at the warped and weather stained door before him, still clutching the rag doll that was Peggy in his right arm. The door did not give easily, but it would last under his repeated tugs. He was an athlete, after all, an all star. An old cranky door wouldn’t stand in his way. And it didn’t. It suddenly gave, nearly toppling Peggy from his hold. He smiled, for a moment reveling in his own strength. The idea that the door had given way because it wanted to never crossed his mind. And that was just as well.

A moment later, he was inside, and Peggy was lying on the floor in a dusty entryway. His hard on was still raging in his jeans. He pushed the thought of it from his mind after making himself a little more comfortable downstairs again. Then he was turned to the door again, tugging it closed. The knob on the inside had rotted off and lay on the floor next to one of Peggy’s legs. He closed it as tight as he could, but the wind pulled it back open a little.

He left it ajar, just as he had found it when he’d stepped onto the porch. He swiveled around on his feet and peered into the gloom of the house surrounding him. The feeling he’d had of indescribable excitement had all but vanished, leaving only the faint ghost fingers of electric current running through him that excitement always did once it was fading to nothingness. Now he felt exhausted, spent. He felt like lying down and taking a long nap. He shook it from his body as he squatted next to Peggy.

She was murmuring, her head rolling back and forth slowly on the ancient creaking boards beneath her. She was gradually coming to. He wondered if that was a good thing. After his car trip up with her, he decided he’d rather she stay out for a while, give him some peace and quiet. She opened her eyes and stared up at him, her face instantly twisting into one of agony and fear. It slowly fell away as recognition replaced it.

“Greg?” She asked, bewildered.

“Yeah.” Who else would it be?

“Oh my God!” She reached both arms up and gripped him tightly, pulling herself up into a sitting position and burying her face in his left shoulder. His prick suddenly screamed at him as she twisted him into a less than comfortable position. He wished there were an off button for the thing. He quickly readjusted and wrapped his own arms around Peggy, who had begun to shake a little again.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I don’t know for sure. You, you weren’t you. You were something else, something horrible. I don’t want to think of it. Just…” She trailed off. She didn’t have to finish. He gripped her more tightly and her shaking almost ceased. If they’d been standing he’d be feeling pretty embarrassed right then. As he thought this, he realized that things were finally staring to settle down in Prickville. Couldn’t be sooner.

He helped her to her feet as she continued to hug him. It felt good to hold her like that. It felt good to comfort her. As much a pain in the ass she was, he was thoroughly enjoying her presence now.

She pulled away from him, here eyes moving like pinballs in a machine. She was investigating her surroundings. A look of terror slowly built on her face. She looked directly at him, almost pleadingly. He knew exactly what she was going to say. She started to shake her head from left to right. She opened her mouth, and he placed a finger over her lips.

“It’s o.k. Everything’s fine. We’re out of the storm, we’re safe here. And we can’t go back. It’ll kill you.” He looked at her with gentle eyes, reassuring eyes. It seemed that it was starting to work. Then she started looking around again like a caged animal being approached on all sides by men with large sticks. She started to cry all over again. He let her fall back against his shoulder, sighing deeply with discontent. As she shook in his arms, he glanced about at the house surrounding them as well.

To his left, a long and rickety looking staircase rose to the second story. He looked up at the rotted banister at the edge of the hallway up there. He figured the flooring up top might support someone as light as Peggy, but never himself. They’d have to find refuge here on the ground level, or the basement, if the house even had one. The word floated through his mind like an apparition through a door. It lingered there. He rolled it around inside his head. It felt good, it sounded good. The basement. Of course, it would be the warmest, safest place in the house. And the way down was most likely no more than a few feet away, behind ancient staircase that rose to the second level.

For the moment, he let the idea fade away slightly as he took in the rest of the house. Before him the entry way opened into what appeared to be a dining room. A large oak table sat in its center, the walls were lined with huge oak cabinetry filled with cracked plates and tarnished silver. Above the table hung what was once a beautiful chandelier, now covered in a centuries worth of cobwebs and dusty filth. He watched as a large black spider cast out its line and fell from the chandelier on it down to the table. It scurried across the tabletop and vanished beneath a moth eaten doily.

He turned Peggy so that she was now facing the dining room, and he the room previously behind him. This was obviously a living room. But not the kind you actually lived in. The kind you sat around in your Sunday best sipping tea or coffee talking about the Marshall’s and the Stephenson’s and how they were going straight to hell, while you and yours were bound for sunnier climes. He could easily picture his grandmother sitting in one of the high backed chairs, upholstered with its’ ancient flower pattern cloth, her legs crossed neatly, her chin high as she sipped from a teacup. He almost laughed at the image. Peggy put a stop to that with another high-pitched scream. Her fingers dug into his biceps with the strength of a bear as she pushed herself away from him. He winced as he held her out from him, hoping like hell she’d let go of his arms.

She was looking behind him. Her eyes were huge with horror. Something was scaring the shit out of her, and he wondered if he wanted to know. Then again, it was Peggy, and she’d flipped out like this only a few moments earlier before passing out. Maybe she’d come down with something, something brought on by the cold, something that had been incubating deep inside until it was coaxed out by the drifting snow and ice cold wind. He shook her lightly, trying to will her into getting a grip. Her gaze upon whatever was behind him was shattered. She looked up at him and her lips quivered as her scream died down with lack of oxygen. She sucked in air, opened her mouth even wider, and began screaming again.

She sounded like one of the chicks from some crappy horror flick. The few he’d seen had made him laugh, they were so funny. And when the girls in them screamed, he wondered how anybody could really enjoy such a flick. It was terrible, and not in a horrifying way. The horror flicks he’d seen were terrible because they were horrible pieces of film work, wastes, in his opinion. Now, however, with his own girlfriend (was she really? He shook the idea from his mind, just a friend, he told himself) screaming her lungs out before him, the situation suddenly seemed a bit more terrifying than usual. Still holding her as she sucked in more air, preparing to let out another gut wrenching screech, he glanced over his shoulder at the dining room beyond.

He half expected to see some guy standing there with a butcher’s knife and a badly scared face. He half expected to see the wolf man, or Dracula, or something worse. Maybe Frankenstein. The chandelier rocked slightly from side to side. His eyes took in as much of the room as he could see from his over the shoulder vantage point.

Several boards were missing from a window to the right of the chandelier. Wind gusted in through the large gaps, tossing a drift of snow that was slowly building below the window ledge. The wind caught the chandelier again, causing it to rock back and forth in a slightly wider arc. Was that all she was frightened of, some swaying chandelier? He looked back at Peggy.

She was screaming again, a white plume of frozen air rising steadily out of her gaping mouth like she was some steam ship docked at port, ready to charge out into the great blue beyond. The idea wasn’t too far from the truth. She seemed to suddenly come back to reality. Her scream stopped halfway through, she blinked, and started to squirm wildly in Greg’s arms. Finally, she kicked him in the groin, he let go and fell to the ground, his own mouth gaping wide, his own eyes yanked open with the force of a hurricane. She was free.

She didn’t think about what to do next. She just ran. There was a long staircase to her left, and this she bolted up without even thinking about its condition and the danger of running up it like a gorilla up a mountainside. She just bolted. She mounted the top stair and stood for only a brief moment as she looked from side to side. A hallway stretched out to her right and ended in a door. To her left, another hallway bent into a corner and continued on deeper into the house. She darted to her left. Greg saw as much from his spot on the floor, his body contorted with the agony of kicked balls.

Pain like a firework going off shot through his guts, straight up through his belly and throat, ending in a massive headache at the top of his head. It surged through his body again and again. He could barely breath. Tears were forming at the sides of his eyes. He blinked wildly, only barely catching sight of Peggy and her decision at the top of the stairway before his eyelids involuntarily dropped back down, covering his field of vision. When he opened them again, she was gone, but the pain was still clear and present. It gripped him and played with him like a dog yanking on a knotted rope.

He’d been dropped like this before, but that had been in the seventh grade. He’d lain on the ground for ten minutes, at least, that time. The deep feeling of nausea racking his stomach finally got the best of him and he lurched all over the floor next to him. It flew out of him in one great spasm of pain. It seemed to help, only slightly. Another surge of hot agony raced through his body again. Surely his balls were beginning to swell.

In the seventh grade, he’d fallen on the jungle gym, landing on his boys. He’d then fallen another four feet to the ground, his hands over his crotch, landing on one of his shoulders. He had hardly felt his landing. His balls had swollen up then into great big purple knots. They felt now like they might get as large as cannon balls.

He sucked in wind and squirmed on the floor, struggling to breath. The pain began to slowly, very slowly, diminish. Each surge was less and less powerful. He lurched onto the floor again, this time not quite as much, and dry heaved a couple of times before his stomach settled down a bit. The room about him was spinning, but also beginning to slow down considerably. His head felt like it was full of angry hornets. He began to blink more controllably.

He was regaining his senses. The room was suddenly horribly cold to him. He could feel sweat beading all over his body, probably freezing to his skin in the refrigerated house. He choked a few times, thinking he might throw up again, but only a few coughs escaped his mouth. More air poured into his lungs as his airways opened up again. It was cold, deathly cold. It had caused him to cough. His eyes were gushing with tears now.

He rolled onto his back, staring straight up at the chained candleholder hanging high above him. He suddenly realized how old this place must be. He hadn’t noticed a single light switch in the entryway, and now, the sight of an ancient copper candleholder, a half melted candle still jutting up from it, only convinced him that this house had been empty for a very long time. The idea vanished from his mind as another wave of nauseating pain washed through him. Thank god, he thought, it’s not as bad as seventh grade.

Two minutes later, he was sitting upright, his hands still cupping his crotch delicately. He could breath easily, and his head was starting to cool off considerably. His boys, however, were still screaming at the top of their lungs, and his stomach felt like it had been filled with air and then twisted in as many directions conceivable. His breath escaped him in great big clouds of white and floated away on the moving air rounding the corner of the door.

It filled the room with a very low, almost imperceptible, whine. Greg shuddered in the cold as the room finally stopped swimming about him. He thought for a moment he could stand, but as he tried to, he quickly realized he’d have to give himself a few more minutes at least. Every move he made seemed to send new waves of pain through him.

Peggy could wait, he thought. After all, she had gone upstairs, and his initial thought that they’d hold her but not him still seemed very logical. He wasn’t about to go tromping around up there to find her, not without trying to coax her down first. He wondered what in the hell had gotten into her. A rush of anger began to swell from his balls straight up to his head, carried by another surge of dull pain. She had kicked him in the fucking balls! Something had freaked her bad.

But he hadn’t done anything. Maybe she’d felt him as he held her close. Maybe his jeans hadn’t settled down all the way. Maybe his prick, on the retreat, had reawakened at the feel of her sexy little body pressed up against his. And maybe she had been offended enough by it to actually kick him where it counted. If his swollen balls hadn’t already melted the thought of actually getting laid on this trip, the idea that his hard on had frightened her enough to make her do that to him certainly killed the idea off for good.



Greg’s member, however, had not offended Peggy. There had been something behind him, she knew it. She saw it. Her eyes surveyed the room she was now standing in with the precision only a hunted animal can have. A closet door beckoned to her. Under ordinary circumstances, in any other creepy house, she’d be revolted by the idea of hiding in a dark, musty closet behind moth eaten clothing, squatting next to shoes filled with the squirming eggs of spiders long dead. But in this house, under these circumstances, the closet seemed to be a welcome sanctuary. She’d nurse the damned spider eggs herself if they made a little room for her in there and hid her from the thing she’d seen in the dining room.

At least, that is what it had seemed to be at first. Everything had quickly changed, however, and not for the better. The walls had been covered in wallpaper that had begun to roll in on it again. Long scraps of it lay on the floor in mangled heaps below the table. The table, oh god the table. She’d followed the leg of it with her eyes until they rested on the vast doily that had been laid across it for some party in the faraway past. It was now crusted with dirt and webs, and most of the holes in it were not woven, but eaten out by hundreds of moths over the past hundred or more years.

She had been staring at that doily, beginning to calm down a bit in the warm embrace of Greg’s arms, when everything had changed. The room had twisted and warped right before her. The walls had splintered, spraying wood like a fine mist into the air. Her eyes had been distracted by this first. The walls were changing; the wood was becoming something different altogether. It seemed to be melting, splintering, and shattering, all at once. In the cracks of the wall, a strange glow was beginning to emanate. A weird pink glow. And the blackness beyond the cracks growing into mouths was the blackness of infinite void.

There were no studs behind those walls. There were no strips of insulation, no second wall to which the siding of the house had been nailed. There was a deep black void, and somewhere close in that void, something was moving, something that glowed pink, something with eyes like an a rabid wolf and claws like butcher’s knives.

Her stare at the changing walls had quickly been diverted by something moving within the room before her. Her eyes fell back on the doily, which seemed to be twitching all over, as if some horde of ants, or spiders, were moving beneath it.

Tiny black shapes moved, their backs shining vaguely in the growing pink glow, beneath the doily, exposed only momentarily by the gaping holes in it. And the black shapes had eyes, tiny pink eyes, thousands of them. And as they moved under those holes held aloft by their fellow nasties movements, they’d look at Peggy. They’d look right through her. And somewhere beneath those eyes, Peggy could imagine scissor like appendages slicing back and forth through the air anxious to bite into something other than a dead rat they’d caught in their pincer grip, or a bird that had happened into one of their webs.

She had started to scream as the doily began to rise. It lifted off of the table with a speed unimaginable. It seemed to take on the shape of some human like thing standing beneath it. The tiny black things still squirmed beneath the doily, and then, all at once, stopped moving.

The thing standing on the table seemed to be oozing with dread. Blackness poured out from the holes in the doily like you might imagine light doing through a colored pane of glass. And as she stared at it, lungs screaming in pain and fear, her body going as stiff as a board, the thing in the dining room opened its eyes. They swam with color. She watched with the unmoving eyes of a statue as the thing raised an arm, a tentacle, an appendage, maybe a knifed tail, under the doily. It began to reach out to her, and though her mind said it couldn’t be so, a deep blackness shot out from a large hole in the doily, finger like appendages at its end, and seemed to slither through the air towards her.

She had felt herself being pushed away from Greg in that instant, and she was suddenly staring straight up into the face of the demon that had been holding her on the porch. Its leering face gazed down at her like she was something it thought might be tasty enough to eat. It licked its thin lips, drool flowing from its hanging lower jaw out onto her jacket and down the front of it onto her jeans. She screamed again at the thing gripping her. She found that her hands were also gripping it. Suddenly, something took her. She was alive again. The stiffness left her. Involuntary response had taken over, and her flight or fight reaction was kicking in like a sledgehammer through ice.

She lifted her leg, bent it at the knee, and sent it home. The thing holding her shut its pink eyes. Its mouth twisted into a snarl of pain. And it let go of her. She was free. Her aim had been true, and she’d dropped the Greg thing with one quick movement. It squirmed on the ground before her, clutching at its crotch, curling up into a little ball like a kid who’s frightened out of his mind. The thing was wearing Greg’s clothing, she noticed, but it bulged in strange ways. His shirt seemed two times too small. Huge bumps rose and lowered below it. His jeans looked as if another set of legs had been squeezed into them. They had begun to tear at the seams, and the flesh beneath wasn’t human. It wasn’t flesh like anything she’d ever seen before, unless maybe what she’d imagined the victims of a nuclear holocaust might look like.

She broke her stare at the hideous thing on the floor before her. The thing in the dining room had vanished. It was now just a dining room again. Warping wallpaper replaced the gaping cracks in the wood that wasn’t wood. She turned and ran. She found herself going up a flight of stairs. At the top, the hallway stretched out to her left and her right. The right end ended in a doorway. That was no good, too close to the dining room and the thing in the entryway. The left end rounded a corner and dove backwards into the house. Perfect. The further away, the better. She made the corner and found herself jogging down a long dim corridor, lined with seemingly dozens of doors. Ancient sagging doors. Some were opened to the rooms beyond. She didn’t dare look into them.

Finally, near the end of the hallway, she ducked into one of the closed doors. The knob twisted easily in her grasp and the door opened with a high squeak. She hoped to god it wouldn’t lead the Greg thing to her. She shut it as carefully as she could and locked the once brass latched above the knob. It was now a solid black, encrusted with ages of filth and tarnish. It felt slimy between her fingers, like a wriggling maggot. She pulled her hand away with a look of disgust wrapped around her face. She turned, took in the room and eyed the closet.

It was on the other side of the room in a corner. It seemed oddly placed, but the idea wasn’t foremost on her mind. All she cared about was hiding till daylight. Her face twisted with agony at the realization that the last time she’d looked at the time, the clock in the car had broadcasted it to her. That had been a few minutes before the car died, and it had told her it was only 9:13. Surely, they’d spent no more than a half hour in the car, and they’d been in the house no more than five minutes. A conservative figure would put the time at around 10:00. She wondered if she’d make it through the next five minutes, let alone the next nine or ten hours of night. Even when the sun finally did come, the storm outside might mute it to a dull glow, extending the night into the day.

She shivered as a gust of cold air embraced her from the open window in the far wall. A lonely holey curtain fluttered in the breeze. It seemed to beckon to her. She began to wonder if it was really a good idea to be hiding in this room. The whole place seemed to be enchanted. No, that wasn’t the word. She wouldn’t let herself think of what the place really was. No sir, she couldn’t bare another descent into the madness that word would surely bring upon her. She shook it from her mind as she raced past a huge oak bed. The mattress atop it seemed to be alive with something. She forced herself to look upon it.

What initially looked to be streamers of white mist rising from the mattress quickly shaped themselves into what they were. The surface of the bed looked as if it had been ripped apart by some man-sized cat. Tatters of fabric lifted and played in the wind still gusting in through the window. Springs jutted up through balls of cottony white filament, rusted and brittle with exposure. It was just an old bed. Some animal, some rabid animal, had probably torn it up in a mad delirium before leaping out the window to its death. She let the image of the bed swim away as she turned to face the closet door.

She half expected some terrible wraith to come bolting out at her as she opened the door. She twisted the knob in her hand, and it gave way after a little arguing. The door swung open before her. She sucked in air, preparing herself for what had to be within. Sagging clothing met her gaze. Little white mothballs covered the ground, but they hadn’t held back the moths for long. The clothing was just as riddled with holes as the doily had been downstairs. The thought of the doily instantly sent a shiver through her spine. She shook it from her head and stepped into the closet. As she closed the door, the darkness swallowed her. It was a tremendous relief. She squatted there in the black, smelling the rotting fabric hanging all about her.

Nothing happened for a good long time. She could hear the wind still gusting in through the window. She could feel its icy fingers reaching under the tiny crack afforded by the weather warped closet door, reaching out at her ankles, stretching up her legs beneath her jeans. It was unpleasant, but bearable. At least she couldn’t see these fingers. At least they could easily be explained away by the cold the wind brought. At least these fingers weren’t attached to some horrible vision with eyes swimming with hatred. She almost welcomed the reality of the cold. It helped to calm her nerves in a strange way.

Before she even realized what was happening, those icy cold fingers raced up her legs, past her panties, under her shirt, and straight up to her throat. They poured into her mouth and down into her lungs, where they squee zed. But they were pleasant. They felt good. She was enjoying these fingers. Her eyes drooped as she began to swoon. A smile lighted her face as her head dipped forward, landing on her knees, which she held up before her. Her arms grew limp, as did the rest of her body, and she slouched to one side, her head landing in a plume of inch thick dust. She was out cold.



As he stood, the hornets in his head only grew angrier. The world began to swim again. Greg felt like passing out. He reached a hand out and steadied himself on the wall. For a moment, he stood there, wondering if the feeling wouldn’t pass, wondering if he’d fall face first to the ground while his mind fell into pitch black. He wondered if he’d wake up in a few minutes with a chipped tooth or two. The feeling washed over him, and then was gone.

The entryway stopped moving about him like the horses on a possessed merry-go-round and he took his hand away from the wall. A dull thud welled up from his guts and spread with each heartbeat throughout his body. It was manageable now. He could deal with it.

He took a step forward, towards the staircase. He eyed it closely. The thing would never hold him. It had swayed and rocked as Peggy had run up it in a panicked frenzy who knew how long ago. He’d have to find another way. He’d have to try to find another way, at least, before he dared try his luck. If he’d been a year younger, a year less experienced, a year more brass and less cautious, he’d walk right up those stairs like they were the ones leading to his room in his own house a million miles away. But he knew better. He had to be a good fifty pounds heavier than Peggy, and fifty pounds would be enough of a difference to matter. He was certain the staircase would crumble under his weight.

He opened his mouth and sucked in air, preparing to yell at Peggy to come down. He wanted to yell a few other things at her too, but he’d save that for later, when they were long gone from this place. He let the wind he’d just pulled in puff back out without a word. It danced before him in a cloud of white vapor, drifted up the stairway a bit, and vanished on a draft of air. What had just happened? He had felt something. Something had changed. His head wasn’t buzzing like a hive anymore. In fact, his head felt wonderful. The aching in his crotch had ceased as well. And suddenly, he realized, he wasn’t alone.

He wheeled around on his feet, ready to pounce, to grab, punch, kick, whatever. The image of Peggy screaming at something over his shoulder came back to him, and he wondered if she hadn’t actually seen something. The feeling of being watched, that maybe there was something standing right behind him or over in a dark corner, he couldn’t shake it. The hair on the back of his neck was standing straight up, his eyes were wide with apprehension. They moved in their sockets nervously, surveying the entire room as he moved on his feet in a complete circle. He had seen nothing.

But the feeling was still there. The stairway creaked in a gust of wind that shook the entire house. Greg jumped a little at this and stepped away from it. He could feel the air being sucked into the house through the slightly open front door behind him brushing past his left arm. Where it was going in such a hurry, he didn’t know. Without warning, something asked him if he’d like to. His eyes shifted in his head again, trying to pull in every corner of the room at once. Something had just spoken to him. But not out loud. It had been in his head.

You’re going crazy, Greg, he told himself. This is just a dream, a faint induced dream. You’re still lying on the ground, clutching your balls, with your eyes shut and drool pooling in your cheek, slowly dribbling out onto the floor. Get a hold of yourself, wake up, shake it off! Something moved. But it wasn’t in the entryway, not in one of the corners or in the hallway above. Something shifted in his head. He could feel it sliding around in there. And all at once, he realized it felt wonderful. If this is a dream, he thought, but he didn’t get a chance to finish it. Now whatever had spoken a moment before was speaking again.

It buzzed in his head, filling it with its voice. It was incredible. It was outstanding. It was far out. He giggled as he thought that last word. It was like something his dad would say. “Far out and way cool, Dude!” His father hadn’t quite given up on the seventies. This thought was dragged away from his mind with cold steely fingers. The thing inside him wanted his utmost attention. Greg would be punished if he wandered like that again. It played with his mind like a rock star with a guitar. It strummed a solo for Greg that was so far out, he didn’t know if he’d ever be able to smoke pot again. It would never compare to what he was feeling now. Now the voice in his head spoke up even louder, and Greg could hear it clearly.

In the deep gloom of the entryway, Greg stood stiff, staring blankly ahead. His eyes were those of an invalid, dreaming of a day they spent as a child being pushed in a swing, watching the horizon rise and fall, being captivated in their fools mind by the flitting clouds of white high above zooming into their vision, only to fall away and be replaced by the branches of a tree, and finally the green green grass below. From the corner of his mouth, a thin line of silvery drool began to trickle down his chin. Tiny little puffs of air escaped his lungs creating tendrils of vapor before him that winked out in the drafts like candles in the wind. Greg wasn’t alone anymore, Greg wasn’t Greg anymore. And Greg didn’t mind that one bit.

Behind his eyes, a pinkish glow swarmed.
Finally, finished speaking its nasty little things and gripping down tighter, the thing in his head took control of his body, and Greg moved with the precision of a puppet on strings towards the doorway below the stairway. It opened before him on ghost fingers. He grinned at it, how amusing it was! A moment later, he disappeared into the dark beneath, and the door slowly closed with a slight creak behind him. Greg was gone.



Something was gripping her. Something had a hold of her, and it was leering at her with big pink eyes. It was moving close, breathing on her with a mouth that reeked of rotting flesh and ageless filth. It was going to give her a kiss. It was going to kiss her right on the lips, and probably pull one of them away from her as it retreated, it’s jagged teeth slicing into the thin skin above her chin and biting deep.

Peggy woke with a scream in her throat. It trickled out of her like an ice skater tripping on the front of her blades, arms flailing, tutu spinning. It plopped out on the ground like a dead rat. Her throat ached horribly. It felt hard and dry. She realized it was the cold.

Her entire body felt like a brick of ice. She tried to move her legs; the result was not a good sign. Numbness raced through her, and then her limbs began to tingle like a foot that’s been awakened from a deep sleep. It was agonizing and pleasant all at once. She pushed herself up on hands she could barely feel. A second later, she was sitting on her butt. It felt more like she was sitting on two pencil thick rods jutting up from the floor. Slowly, her feeling came back to her, rushing back into her consciousness like a train late for the station.

She peered ahead into the darkness. It was as thick as syrup around her. She took a deep breath, and realized why. She inhaled the stale filth of an ancient dress, which was hanging directly before her. She hadn’t felt it as she sat up. It was drooping over the top of her head and down into her face from where it hung on a rusting coat hanger above. She could taste the dust coating it. She gagged as she yanked the thing to the floor. The world became brighter, but not much. She was in a small place, a tight place. She suddenly panicked.

Her eyes flitted from side to side, met only by walls of darkness. Where the hell was she? What the hell was going on? Tiny cracks of light erupted into her vision. Before her, a door stood, and about its edges, the strange half glow the snow was creating outside the window next to the closet cast itself in through the cracks. Memory flooded back into her mind.

She’d escaped the Greg thing, run up the staircase, and found this closet. But what then? Had she passed out, fallen asleep? She must have. A shudder ran down her spine as the idea that by now, Greg, or whatever he had become, might be standing outside the closet door, grinning with his insane clown grin, eyes glowing a horrifying pink, hands held out, the tips of his fingers adorned with claws filed to a razor sharpness.

She blinked in the darkness, allowing this vision to take hold of her mind. Cold sweat popped out all over her body. She was shaking again, both from the cold and from fear of what might be lurking behind an inch of wood and a few feet of air before her. She shook the image from her mind, realizing it would only drive her deeper into insanity. Just stay put, she told herself. If it comes, it comes, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t, but you’re not going to give yourself away by opening that door and peeking out just to make sure everything is ok. Her head nodded in agreement.

She closed her eyes and thought deep. What was she going to do? Stay put! Sure, but then what? Wait till morning? Wait for rescue in a house abandoned to the wilderness for years? It would remain unvisited until the summertime, most likely, when a group of exploring boy scouts would come across it, and find her stinking dead body curled up in a closet on the second floor. Her heart beat in her chest a million miles an hour. She had to stop thinking like this. She had to get a grip. She was number three in her class, damn it! She could think of something. She had to think of something! But nothing came, nothing but glowing eyes and the horrified faces of a dozen boy scouts staring in at her putrefied body.

These images were scattered in her mind like confetti in the wind. Something was moving in the room beyond the closet. New sweat trickled down her cheek. Her hands began to shake; her heart picked up and raced in her chest even faster. She felt like she’d explode. Another scream began to itch at the edges of her throat. She held it back as she held her breath. Something was moving towards the door. Something big, something heavy, something nasty.

Sound erupted into her ears and she finally let her scream escape. It wasn’t the weak dead thing that had trickled out of her in her waking a moment before. It was the full out roar of water leaping over a cliff and falling three hundred feet into the wells of the world. But before it had become her world, she had heard something else. And it had pushed the scream out of her. She shook all over with it like a can of paint in a mixer. Her lungs emptied and she sucked in air, ready to let out another horrifying screech. She stifled it back as the sound of Greg screaming back at her flooded her senses.

He wasn’t in the room outside her little closet. He wasn’t in the hallway beyond that. He wasn’t even standing at the top of the staircase. His scream echoed up to her from some place deep below. It seeped in through the cracks in the door, probably from some vent in the floor. Again it came, a high-pitched blood curdling sound. It reminded her of a baby screaming. She’d done plenty of baby-sitting the past few years and had grown to hate that sound. And now Greg was making it from somewhere far below. She almost felt like laughing at it. A quick chuckle escaped her twisted lips. Her eyes were wide with the look of a patient on a mental ward.

There was a whiff of something horrible in that scream. It was a scream of insanity, and it seemed to infect her momentarily. She had a sudden urge to bolt from the closet and down the stairwell back to the entryway. She had a sudden urge to kick Greg square in the balls again as he lay on the ground, laughing at him with the glee of a school girl whose just told the ugliest boy in class that he’s disgusting. Her fingers danced crazily before her eyes. She wondered for a second, before returning to reality, how easy it would be to pop her eyes out with them.

As she returned to reality, her face contorted into a look of disgust. Had she really just thought about pushing out…. she wouldn’t go any further. She felt like throwing up. Greg’s scream trailed off and vanished. It didn’t come again. And thank god, she thought. One more of those and I might have leapt out the window. She sat now, breathing heavily, shaking and sweating all over. Nothing moved in the room outside the closet but the tattered remains of the curtain she’d seen twisting in the wind before.

Far below, in the basement, Greg sat, his legs pulled up to his chest, staring blankly out into the darkness surrounding him. Beneath him, the floor was dirt. Around him, the air seemed to dance wildly. Shapes moved in the darkness. Horrible things were moving all about him, and over him. Tiny black shadows with hundreds of pink eyes scurried over the front of his jacket, up his legs, beneath his shirt, into his gaping mouth. Despite the fear gripping his heart like a straight jacket, he was smiling. His lips were stretched into the impossible gape of a lunatic. His eyes where wide and glowing. And the thing in his head had let him scream, just twice, that was enough. It didn’t want Greg to loose his grip on life in the throes of a fear induced heart attack. It needed Greg, and it needed Peggy. It was just getting started.



Outside, the wind began to die down. Drifts of snow had entirely covered the driver’s side of Greg’s car. The snow on the road was fresh, untouched. Even if someone had ruined it as they passed by, they might not have even noticed the car parked on the side of the road. They’d certainly see the hill of snow growing over it, and maybe wonder to themselves what it was. And the sound of a wolf howling somewhere very close would probably make them step on the gas a little harder.

All about the house, the dancing swirls of white began to settle in the dying wind. A mile above, the clouds were beginning to break apart. Tiny glints of silver shone down through them for seconds at a time through their breaches. The moon, a quarter crescent, sailed in and out of the cloud breaks; it’s pale light casting shadows about the trees in the forest and the eaves of the house.

A squirrel that had burrowed into one of these eaves for the long winter retreat was suddenly startled awake by a deep groaning sound, like the house lifting a foot up off of its foundation and putting it back down again after stretching its leg. It had heard the sound before. It squatted restlessly in its hole, unable to return to its deep sleep for the moment; fear danced upon its eyes.



Peggy heard the house shudder. That was the only way it could be described: a low, sonorous shudder that vibrated throughout the building and rattled up her spine only to echo in the chambers of her ears. Her heart, which had begun to slow to a normal rate, picked up at its sound. It had been how long, maybe ten minutes, maybe two, since Greg had screamed? She had sat there breathing deeply, telling herself over and over again that there were no such things as the bogeyman. The recital of this chant seemed to calm her nerves a little, but there was still a nagging something tickling at the back of her head. Some looming thing standing in the shadows with a grin on its face.

She shut her mouth and opened her eyes. The interior of the closet suddenly seemed brighter. For a moment, she sat listening. There was something missing, something not right. With an inward sigh, she realized that the wind had slowed to almost a dead stop. The air seemed still at her ankles where minutes before it was in chaos. She could hear her heart beat. She could hear the air filling her lungs and flowing up and down her throat. And she could see the interior of the closet very well. She suddenly had the feeling that something was there with her; something small and malevolent.

She slowly, as if forcing herself, looked to her right. a pair of dusty shoes. Not a man’s shoes, or a woman’s, however, but a child’s, a female child. They were the kind of thing you saw on a Barbie, sandal-like. They were the kind of thing parents put on their children’s feet back in the 1920’s. An intricate lace design had been stamped into the patent leather and both shoes had been polished, though the dust sat upon them thick, a gleaming white, now turned a waxy pale gray.

She blinked, swallowed hard. Only one other place the something could be. She gradually moved her head to the left, her eyes following a pace behind. Her head stopped moving, her eyes rolled in their sockets until they were staring down into the dark corner beside her. At first, there seemed to be nothing. She let out a puff of air that she hadn’t even known she’d been holding in. She mopped the sweat of her brow and flung it to the floor, sighing and smiling a bit at herself.

The sound of feet tapping against a hard wood floor suddenly filled the closet. It was the sound of a little girl’s feet adorned in shoes with the kind of hard leather soles that would make a tapping sound. Her immediate logical response was to think the footfalls were coming from outside the closet, from the room without, or maybe even the hallway beyond. But, though they seemed distant, the steady tap tap tap of a child running was definitely coming from inside the closet, and from her left. Don’t look! She told herself. It’s nothing, just a rusty pipe banging against the wall, nothing…

As she lifted her gaze to the left side of the closet again, she felt her stomach roll over on itself. Somewhere deep down inside her, another scream was fighting its way out. For the moment, she couldn’t even breathe. Her mind had been gripped by the fear standing before her, and try as she might, she couldn’t take her eyes off of it.

The left wall of the closet had flown away from her as she looked up at it. It had vanished into the gloom of a seemingly never ending corridor, which stretched out before her like some special effect in a horror movie. Rotting and moss covered wood met her eyes. There were doors upon doors in the hallway of this corridor. All of them were, blessedly, closed. She didn’t think she’d want to know what was behind them. She found herself wondering if she’d be finding out anyways.

In the middle of the corridor, about fifty feet away, stood a small figure. It was child-like, but too small. And it was running towards her. As it neared another ten feet, she could see exactly what it was. Her heart stopped. She gagged on the scream forcing its way up her throat, carried on the last wind in her chest. The figure running towards her was a doll. It had appeared to be a child because it was shaped like one, but it was no more than a foot tall.

From where she sat, it seemed to loom at her out of the darkness of the corridor. Upon its face was an impossibly wide grin. Its left cheek bore the scar of a gaping crack where the doll had been dropped on its porcelain face a hundred years prior. And in its outstretched right hand, it held a thin knife. The half-light of the corridor played on the blade, and it flashed at Peggy tooth lined smile of a wolf.

She began shaking again, the steady tap tap tap of a doll’s feet growing closer and closer by the second. Finally, she managed to get some air into her lungs and push it back out again as a scream. The smile on the doll’s face seemed to widen at the sound of it, and it’s rigid legs hobbled towards her even faster. It swung the knife in the air before it as if it were holding the string to a runaway kite instead. Laughter erupted from the things mouth, the giggly laughter of a little girl.

Peggy wanted to claw her eyes out, stuff her ears, pass out, anything to get this vision out of her mind. That is what it had to be, after all. As if to answer her, the doll launched the knife at her, and it struck her left thigh, only nicking it. A trickle of blood oozed from the cut, and that was all Peggy needed to see, or feel.

A split second later, she was on her feet. A moment after that, she was in the room beyond the closet and slamming the door shut behind her. She ran to the bed, gripped the iron balusters at its end, and pulled it with all of her strength. It moved angrily across the floor. She could hear wood splintering and cracking beneath its heavy iron feet. But it didn’t daunt her, and it didn’t stop her. Not even ten seconds after the knife had struck her, she was panting heavily next to the closet door, the bed pressed firmly up against it. She listened as the sound of tiny feet against a wooden floor stopped directly behind the closet door.

“Mommy, let me out. Mommy, I’m scared, it’s dark in here.” A little girls voice pleaded with her. For a moment, she wondered what she had done. She had locked some poor little girl in the closet, and there was something horrible in there with her. She had a sudden urge to pull the bed away from the door and open it. The sound of what could only be metal sliding against wood drifted to her ears as she thought these thoughts. An image of the knife being picked up by the little doll monster filled her mind, and the urge to help the thing inside get out fell from her head like a brick into the ocean. The thing behind the door seemed to sense her change of mind. A low growl rumbled behind it. It wasn’t happy.

“Mommy, let me out now!” This time, it wasn’t the sweet voice of a little girl. This time it was hardly a voice at all. It was the deep growl of a wolf or a shark whose been given a voice box. It was the grunt of insanity embodied. It set Peggy in motion again.
She rushed out the room, slamming its door shut as well. But she hadn’t escaped. Not by a long shot.

She stood and listened as the thing in the closet buffeted the door. The bed hopped and squeaked within. In a few moments, it would be far enough away from the door that the thing could squeeze out into the room. And then, there would be nothing between it and her but the ancient wooden door before her. She had to get out. She had to escape. She looked to her left, as if by some inner impulse.

The corridor before her stretched out to an impossible length, just as the one in the closet had. And it was lined with hundreds, maybe thousands, of doors. And they began to fly open, one by one, like the shutters on a window being tossed out in late spring to let the cool air in. She was moving again.

Peggy turned to her right and balked at the stretch she’d have to run. The hallway had definitely shifted, elongated since she’d last run down it. There had been no more than three, maybe four doors on either side of it before. Now there were two dozen or more. She had no time to wait, so she ran. Around the corner and down the stairway lay her salvation. Behind her stretched the caverns of hell. And something, some group of things, was now bearing down on her, slithering out from behind their locked doors and racing after her like dogs at a fake bunny on a track.

The sound of doors thudding against the walls behind her as they were ripped open grew closer and closer as she ran. And the things, terrible things with black eyes and claws that would slice her open in one quick movement, were gaining on her. She could almost feel their crypt breath pounding down against her back, flowing over her shoulder and into her face. She gagged on it, almost tripping forward. She regained her balance, thank god, and continued forward, her lungs screaming at her from over use.

All at once, she was around the corner and bolting down the stairway. Before her, the front door loomed. Her salvation was at hand. She burst through it and out into the night. After a sprint through the woods, she’d end up at the car and leap into it. Or maybe she’d just keep running down the road. Maybe she’d just run till she found a safe place, a place with real lights in the windows and real people snuggling up next to a fireplace while they sipped real hot chocolate. She laughed hysterically at this thought as she nearly rolled down the stairs.

The things had stopped following her. But she could still feel their eyes boring holes into her back from around the corner behind her. If she turned around, she knew they’d entice her back, screaming the whole way. Nonetheless, she stopped dead in her tracks at the foot of the stairs. A voice, this one for real, had brought her back to her senses.

She turned to face the stairway, not daring to look up it, but peered into the gloom down the hallway next to it. It lead to what appeared to be a kitchen. A door opened from under the staircase and the kitchen was blotted from view as Greg stepped out before her. Relief washed over her. She had completely forgotten about the thing Greg became at the last minute. She rushed to him, and he took her into his arms. It was a wonderful feeling. She cried into his chest, just as she had his shoulder not an hour before. He stroked her hair delicately, telling her that it was all okay.

The two of them moved together into the pitch-blackness of the stairwell leading down into the basement. Before she even realized what was happening, the door shut and she was enveloped in shadow. She looked up from Greg’s breast at his face, nervous and bewildered. She wanted to ask him what was going on, but he raised a finger to her lips before she could speak. He shook his head at her, barely visible in the gloom of the stairwell.

“Everything is going to be better now. We’ll be safe, and warm here. We’ll be happy here.” She couldn’t see it, but she knew there was a huge grin stretching across Greg’s face. She realized now what had happened. It had been the house. It had tricked her. It was going to have her no matter what, whether it was at the hands of some fabricated monster it had created in the closet, or in the possessed arms of Greg. And it had won.

A pink glow began to swarm behind Greg’s eyes, and it lit up his ghoulish face. It wasn’t the stretched and twisted face of the demon that had held her before. It was Greg, but it wasn’t Greg. He’d fallen head first into insanity, and it was horribly evident.

She put up no fight as he carried her in his arms down the steps into the basement. She could hear the sound of his feet squelching in the mud of its wet dirt floor as he walked deeper into the darkness with her. A smell of musty wood rot and water puddled in dirt for ages rose into her nostrils, filling her head with a kind of unpleasant ecstasy. In the distance, near a corner, pinkish light suddenly filled a crack in the rotted wooden wall. Behind that crack, something waited. And Greg carried her to it.

As they neared, a wonderful pleasant feeling washed over her, pervaded her straight to her very soul. “Isn’t it wonderful,” said Greg. He didn’t even look down at her, just stared straight ahead as he stopped before the crack. He dropped to his knees and she slid out of his arms onto the soft dirt floor below. Her body went limp, and she rolled right up against the crack. She stared up at it with sleepy eyes.

And suddenly, it wasn’t wonderful at all. It was horrifying. A black hand crept out of the crack and gripped her at the waist. She opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came out. Her head swam. She felt as if she were being tossed into a whirlwind. The room danced about her. She could see Greg, and he was the monster he’d been before, leering at her in the darkness, eyes glowing, jagged teeth protruding from his idiot’s mouth. She convulsed as a spasm of fear ripped through her body. A current of electricity ran down her spine and seized her brain. The world began to fade. All she could see now were Greg’s glowing eyes. And just like that, she was gone.



In the heady heat of July, a young boy entered the house in the woods. His head swam with the delight of exploration. And here was a treat beyond all hope. An old abandoned house in the middle of the woods. He stepped into the entryway, tugging the old warped front door open. It swung in a hot breeze behind him as he stood gawking at the interior of the house before him. It was incredible. He was one lucky kid. He’d have some real fun here this summer, maybe show a couple of his friends, and start up a club.

His feelings of joy were dampened a bit by the stairway. It was a crumbled ruin before him. The banister at the edge of the hallway above seemed at least fifteen feet over the floor. He’d not be able to go upstairs on this visit. He’d have to bring a rope, or maybe a ladder with him tomorrow, get Tim and Sam to come with him. They’d have a great time.

He stepped forward and peered into the debris filled hole left where the staircase had collapsed on itself. A vile smell seeped up from it and gripped at his stomach. He felt like vomiting, and backed away. A feeling of deep dread suddenly filled his mind, and his gut. He continued to stare at the hole in the floor. Was there a glow coming from the darkness beneath it? He blinked, wrestling himself away from his stare. There was something coming, something bad. He could feel it. And the glow was growing more obvious. It was a sickening pink, and it reflected off of his eyes in a fetid simmer. He felt his bladder begin to kick his insides, and his sphincter muscles tightened in involuntary response.

He turned, nearly ran into the front door, which had mysteriously swung inward at him, and shoved it forward. It seemed that something reached for him as he dashed out into the hot summer heat of the clearing surrounding the house. He had felt it brush against his ankle. He was sure of it.

He stood panting in the tall weeds; they rose nearly to his waist. No, he wouldn’t be coming back here. Not on his life. This place was bad. This place was infected with some horrible disease. He could smell it, he could feel it. His heart pounding in his chest, he ran into the woods beyond the clearing and out of sight, letting the images of the house in the woods fade from his mind as he did. Deep below in the basement, something groaned. Wind played for a moment in the weeds sprouting up through a hole in the floor of the front porch, it died down to a soft whisper and faded away; all was silent, all was still.