Come Alive (Experiment in Terror #7)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“Uh, guys,” I said, looking around me, trying to take the house all in. “Are you feeling this?”

Perry’s dark head bobbed up and down in front of me. Maximus fiddled with his camera. “I’m putting this on night vision, can’t see a thing in here like this.”

That didn’t really help me. There was little light coming in off the streets since the windows were all boarded up, and I couldn’t find the flashlight I’d packed. The one on my camera was piss-poor but it would do. I could see a white glow in front of me though as Perry brought out her iPhone and put it to the flashlight application—just like old times. I did the same, and though the room wasn’t illuminated, with both our lights going we could at least see what was in front of us.

First of all, it was apparent that no one had been inside for a very, very long time. The creaking floorboards were covered in a thick layer of dust that only our footprints seemed to have disturbed. There was some furniture scattered about, stained, old, and with holes in it, although not as dusty as the floor. Beside the furniture were the plastic covers, discarded once squatters found their way into the old house and decided to make it their home.

I could see from the way her phone’s light jerked that Perry was scared. I’d learned to recognize those subtle movements, episode after episode. She was always so afraid to let me know how she was really feeling, how vulnerable she really felt. Here, I couldn’t help but feel the same way. It wasn’t that there was anything menacing in the corners, or that we were being watched by unseen forces (although, if I really let myself think about it, I would have felt that too), but that we were somewhere we really weren’t supposed to be, yet somewhere that…knew we were coming. The house felt like it was expecting us. I was seconds away from saying that, but didn’t want to make myself look like a chump in front of Maximus.

We continued to walk into the inky abyss, across the ragged old rug that went across the living room floor to the stately stained glass windows that must have looked out to the backyard, except those windows too were boarded up. I felt like we were in a house-sized coffin and every step we took forward was a step into the ground.

Maximus was now in front of us, relying on his night vision through the camera. I could see the faint shapes of things over his shoulder and knew we were about to walk into the kitchen and pantry. For a split-second I thought I saw someone standing over a cutting board, giant knife in hand, slicing something gruesome. But once I shone my phone in that direction, I saw it was just the refrigerator, its chrome trim gleaming against the blackness.

“Are you guys picking up on anything?” I asked. The EVP recorder wouldn’t tell me any of its secrets until we were done and had uploaded it to the computer.

“It’s cold in here,” Perry said softly. “Everything is cold. But nothing like it was with the two men outside.”

“I’m getting nothing,” Maximus said. “Are you getting the magnetic readings too?”

“I don’t think so,” Perry said.

“Why don’t you aim it at the ceiling,” I told her. I could barely see her turn around in the dark to give me a look but she did as I suggested.

“There’s…” she trailed off. “There’s heat upstairs. I can’t tell what though. And the magnetic fields look a bit warped. What does purple mean?”

Maximus made a noise of agreement and cleared his throat. “Purple means something. Next stop, second floor?”

I knew we’d all be going up there even if we said no. Part of me wanted to play chicken—be a chicken—and hightail it the f*ck out of there. We’d been in haunted lighthouses, hotels, islands, and mental asylums before. All of those places had given me the same heebie jeebies as I was feeling now. But this place felt different. This house felt like it was a mixture of dead and alive, old and new, bad and…worse. There was something more than the dead at play here, but the feelings, the vibes, they were so abstract that I couldn’t put my finger on it. I felt like I was in one of my nightmares, unsure if it was real or not, but certain that it meant something for somebody somewhere.

“Dex,” I heard Maximus say, and I turned my head to follow his voice. He and Perry were lit by the glow of her phone, standing underneath the doorway out of the kitchen. Somehow they had gone past me, back the way we all came, and I hadn’t even noticed.

“I’m here,” I told them, feeling shaky. I wondered how long I had been in my head like that. I followed them out of the kitchen and back into the main room. There was a grand staircase that led up to the second floor and together we climbed it. Maximus was leading the way now, Perry behind him, and me at the end. I guess the laws of our show dynamics were changing now that we were inside. I hoped Perry felt at least a little bit comforted about being between the two of us, because I was freaking out by being at the end, feeling like something dark and heavy and horrible was following up the stairs behind me as we went, nipping at my heels.

My mind wanted to imagine my mother, her lithe, snake-like form, her torment, her terrible words. I could almost feel her, her wide black mouth and sharp teeth, her sharper tongue, her blacker heart, wanting me to suffer.

But I couldn’t let my mind go that way. I couldn’t let my own demons get in the way of everyone else’s.

The second floor was a little bit easier than the first. For one, half the floor was divided into rooms with closed doors while the other half, the half facing the street, held a couple of chairs that must have had quite the view over the streets and gardens. The windows weren’t boarded up here. They were open and broken, with the hot breeze flowing through the jagged holes, stirring up little clouds of dust that rose from the various chairs and coffee tables. If this was a boarding house once, this must have been the breakfast area or a lounge, a place for people to relax and get some sunshine. Now the only light was the one coming off the street, and though it was eerie in its own way, it still let us see what we needed to.

“Should we go into each room?” Perry asked, and I was surprised by her tenacity. And a little impressed. I had assumed everyone was as scared and eager to run away from this place as I was, but that didn’t seem to be the case now. Maybe it really was in my head, feeling that the whole house was against us, that living and dead forces were at work. The thoughts about my mother should have been the first sign that I was alone in feeling this way.

Take it easy, I told myself, inhaling deeply through my nose. So you’ve had a few bad dreams, you’re doing okay. You’re doing okay.

“Yeah, why don’t you try the first door?” Maximus said, and it struck me how much he sounded like me when Perry and I were doing the show together. There was a brief time when Perry and I had stopped doing the show and Maximus had gone to Portland—with Jimmy’s blessing I might add—with hopes that he’d be able to convince Perry to do the show with him as the cameraman. It hadn’t worked out, because my poor woman got f*cking possessed and Maximus plead allegiance to the nation that is Palomino. But I had to wonder how long he’d been waiting to take over this role.

“Okay,” Perry said uneasily, stepping toward the first door. Now that I wasn’t the one ordering her around, now that I wasn’t the one who was in charge and worried as shit as to whether or not we were going to get a show worth showing, I could see how demanding the job was. I had a glimpse of it when we switched roles up in Canada, but Sasquatch was an entirely different ballgame and now I was even further removed.

Perry placed her hand on the knob and the door swung open, creaking loudly. The room was entirely empty, except for an open window and a woman who stood beside it.

“Shit!” I exclaimed, my heart attempting to leapfrog out of my throat.

“What?” Perry asked, swinging her head toward me. Her eyes were wide and white in the light of my phone and I adjusted my camera so it would pick it up.

“Didn’t you see that?” I said, trying to tame the panic in my voice. “The…the woman?”

Maximus and Perry exchanged a look—f*ck I hated that—and then looked back at the room and at their gadgets.

“The temperature didn’t change,” she said, peering at the device. “But I thought I saw that purple glow, just for a bit.”

I didn’t know if she was trying to make me feel better or not. I appreciated it, but it didn’t work. I just nodded and said, “Never mind.”

We went to the next room and the next room and the next, Perry opening them all as if they held some hidden prize we’d won on the spinning wheel. But there was nothing inside, nothing that they saw or that I saw.

“Next floor,” Maximus said in a deadpan voice, as if he was that droopy-faced dog in that cartoon that always said “going down.” I could have smirked over that at any other time, but both Perry and I just nodded, tensing up and preparing for the next level.

Together we walked around the corner and made our way up the next set of stairs. Dust and cobwebs covered the railing, and we all tried not to touch it as we walked up the stairs, each one groaning as we went.

We were halfway up when one of the groans turned into a crack. Perry cried out, her legs falling through the stair, the wood splintering around her. I yelled and made a move to grab her, getting her arm hooked underneath mine as the entire stair disintegrated beneath her feet, sucking her body under until her lower half was dangling into the unknown.

“My Lord,” said Maximus, turning around at the top of the staircase and coming back down toward us to help. He was only two steps away when the stair beneath him broke as well, splitting under his weight. He yelped and fell, holding his camera high in the air. Luckily his chest and arms were too big to slip through, though I was starting to think the whole staircase might collapse beneath us at any minute.

“F*ck shit f*ck,” I swore, trying to figure out what to do. Obviously Perry was first, but as much as I hated Maximus, I couldn’t have him get hurt either. I placed one foot on the wainscoted wall and the other on the railing, and pulled Perry straight out of the hole. Once she was able to get her footing on the step I was standing on, I crab crawled up the railing and wall to Maximus.

I looked down at his pale, sweating face and offered my hand.

“Come on, Dickweed. Your day’s not done yet.”

I hoisted him up, my grip wrapping hard around his elbow, my shoulder straining. I didn’t know if old Dex would be able to get him out, but I was new Dex for a reason, if not for this reason. With some strain and effort, Maximus was lifted out of the hole in the stairs and climbed onto the next one which thankfully supported his weight. I then told Perry to take a flying leapfrog onto his back. It took her a few seconds to realize what I was asking, but she did it, jumping clear across the hole that nearly swallowed her and coming to a thud on him.

Before the step had a chance to break under both their weight, I got into a squat and yanked hard under Maximus’s arms, pulling him and Perry forward before anything gave way beneath them. The three of us collapsed onto the floor, taking a few moments to breathe before we got to our feet.

“Thanks, man,” Maximus said, avoiding my eyes and walking away. I gave him the finger behind his back while pulling Perry closer to me. I kissed the top of her head and said, “Third floor’s a charm.”

She couldn’t even muster a smile. I couldn’t blame her. I squeezed her shoulder and told her we were almost done.

The third floor was a lot like the first floor. More or less one giant room instead of a bunch of tiny little ones. There were two rooms at the end and a bathroom, something I assumed either richer boarding guests or the owners would use, but the rest of the area was one big game room with leather couches still covered in plastic, shelves of books and game boards and picture windows. Dust still covered the floor, but everything else looked somewhat fresh and new, as if some ghostly couple had pulled down a game of Monopoly and entertained each other for a few nights.

But as much as this floor held my attention, it was the attic that was calling me. A door at the end of the room must have been the way up. I looked at Perry and Maximus, who were chattering to each other about cold spots and purple waves and this and that, and felt like they were speaking in an alien language. The thing that I was after, the thing that I understood, was upstairs, and upstairs was where I had to go.

I walked to the door and opened it, not at all surprised to find a flight of stairs leading up to the next level. I looked behind me first, but the two of them were paying no attention to me, so I walked up the stairs. They were much more solid than the ones earlier; in fact they felt like pillars of strength, wrought from the earth itself.

Once I got to the top of the stairs, it took me awhile to understand what I was looking at. I mean, it really took me awhile. Instead of a boring, dark attic as I had expected, I was looking down the length of a well-lit room. There were flickering candles in the middle of the wood-slat floor, hundreds of them, some of them red but most of them black, all of them forming this giant oval. In the middle of the floor was something white and moving. It took me awhile for my eyes to focus on it, to pinpoint what it was, but when I did, a small scream got buried in my throat. It was a small white snake with yellow diamonds down its back, pinned to the floor with a knife down its middle, writhing in pain as it was forced to die an immobile death.

A strange smell of sweet baby powder and tangy copper filled my nose as a cold breeze blew past, making the flames dance. I looked up and saw row upon row of bleeding chicken feet suspended from the arched ceiling by delicate wires, the drops of blood scattering on the floor.

I didn’t know what to think or say or do. I wanted to yell and scream and tell Perry and Maximus to come up here, to see what I was seeing, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t do a single thing because things were happening beyond my control, without pause, without consent. I was f*cking losing my mind, that’s exactly what was happening. >

Because at the very end of the room, beyond the dying snake and where the hundreds of black, greasy candles were burning, there was a mirror. A full-length mirror. A mirror that was aimed right at me but didn’t even hold my reflection. But what it did hold, what all the mirrors held lately, was my mother.

She waved at me from inside that silver, the way she looked in my dreams, the way I remembered her in life. She waved at me. She blew me a kiss. And then she disappeared.

I blinked, trying to regain control of myself, of my soul, of my goddamn bladder, when my attention was ripped from the empty mirror—the mirror that still wouldn’t hold my reflection—to the space just beyond it.

A tall, hulking black man stepped out from behind the mirror. A familiar face, if not for the dead glazed eyes and drooling lips that curled up in rage as soon as he saw me. It was Tuffy G. It couldn’t have been anyone else. Tuffy G, the man we all saw die in the bar, was standing in this attic with me, looking like I was next on his hit list. I didn’t know what to think, but luckily my instincts were quicker than that.

I turned and ran and ran hard. I went for the stairs, feeling the floor beneath me shake and rumble as the giant undead thing came toward me. I kept running, taking the stairs two at a time until I was on the landing of the third floor. Perry was by the wall trying to get readings from her thingamabob and Maximus was filming an inanimate couch.

I screamed. I ran. I tried to warn them.

But Tuffy G already had a plan.

He lurched forward after me, and just when I felt his hand grazing the back of my shirt, I knew he went off to the side.

Toward Perry.

My Perry.

She screamed once she saw him, his arms outstretched, his mouth open, teeth bared. He grabbed her by the neck and shoulders, his fat, dead hands about to dig into her and break her to pieces. His jaw snapped violently, wanting to eat her alive.

I didn’t have much time. No time to think about what was really happening, whether this was a ghost, a zombie, or a sick f*cking prank. I dropped my camera to the floor, making sure the lens was pointed in the general direction and grabbed the nearest sharp blunt object, a floor lamp without the bulb. I swung it up like I was in the Little Leagues and cracked it against Tuffy G’s back. When that only made him pause in mid-attack, I quickly did it again, dropping low to a crouch and swinging at the back of his knees. I swung hard enough to break any man’s legs. Only this wasn’t any man. The lamp post broke instead, splitting in half, and Tuffy G turned around, enraged and ready to fight. His dead eyes focused on me, and even with all my super strength, I was pretty sure I was a goner.

“Hey, f*cker!” Maximus’s voice rang out across the room. I looked over at him at the same time that Zombie G did. He was by a window, aiming his camera at us and waving obnoxiously. Even if I wasn’t the undead, I’d want to tackle him.

Tuffy G fell for it. He lurched forward, the floorboards creaking beneath him, closing in on the space between him and Maximus, the living and the dead. He was almost at Maximus, almost to the point where I wanted to say something, anything, just in case I never saw the ginger alive again.

But he was a man with a plan. He tossed aside his camera at the last minute and dropped flat to the floor. The zombie kept running, too stupid and enraged to gauge what had happened until it was too late. He went straight through the window with a crash, glass fragments flying everywhere, then dropped to the ground far below. I ran to the window just as Maximus was getting to his feet and we both looked out together.

Three stories down, on the circular stone patio in the courtyard, his body lay, rivulets of blood flowing from him.

Tuffy G had died for the second time.