Charnel House (36 page)

Some time later, Bobby raised his head. Norman lay beside him, unmoving. The crawlspace was dark now, the only light coming from the weakened flashlight Norman had dropped in the struggle.

When I was killing him.

The thought brought the ghost of a smile to Bobby’s face. Then he remembered Amy, spread so her most private parts were on display on the mattress at his back, and the smile fled. Just the memory of her made him want to curl up and cry again, but he couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her body in the (
blasphemous
) vulnerable position it was in any longer. She should be covered, even if the only thing he had was Norman’s tangled bedclothes to do it with. He rolled over and raised himself to—

The expanse of dirt where Norman’s nest had been was empty, nothing but level dirt except for the blood-mud trail the hobo had left when he crawled back here trying to get away from Bobby. The mattress was gone, as were the covers and magazines and paperbacks.

Amy was gone, too.

Had never been here
, the voice in his head whispered triumphantly.
She’s alive.
Bobby scuttled to the flashlight and picked it up, then played it across the area where the hobo had been doing his terrible business.

Nothing.

He crawled with the light to the spot where the mattress had been and ran his hands through the loose soil. It was dry and powdery as if nothing had been atop it, pressing down, for decades. Bobby wanted to kiss the dirt. He let the light shine further across the crawlspace. Still nothing. She really wasn’t here.
Norman thought seeing her like that would drive the will out of me.

His heart swelled with relief and joy, but there was also a voice niggling at him in his head. If Amy wasn’t really in here, had Norman been? He played the light on the body near the back corner. It hadn’t moved... but something wasn’t right. Something was
off
.

Then it hit him: the face on that body had a nose. The exuberance he felt already beginning to evaporate, Bobby crawled over to it for closer inspection.

The dead man looked nothing like Norman, save the need for a shave and a comb and a few scabs that looked like the result of injury rather than disease. His face was thin and pinched, and a long fresh scar ran along one cheek, like he’d tried to eat a razor blade and it had sliced him open. On one thin wrist he had a bracelet, a flimsy plastic thing with writing on a strip of paper inside it, identical to the one Bobby had to wear at the hospital the night before when his foot was getting x-rayed. Why had this man left the hospital and come to a place like this? Had Norman summoned him somehow, to be the physical part of their fight, the way he had with Dennis Ray?

Most importantly, who was he?

Bobby shined the light on the bracelet and leaned over to read the typewritten name. That’s when the man coughed, and Bobby nearly dropped the light. He put the beam on the man’s face and saw bloody bubbles forming between the slack lips.
Not dead!

“Bobby.”

The voice came from somewhere in the middle of his head. Bobby looked up, suddenly leery, and played the light around the crawlspace.

“Who’s there?” he called, his voice sounding shaky and childlike to him.

Something scraped in the corner of the crawlspace, where the light seemed to stop just short of penetrating the shadows. A face swam out of the blackness there, pale and moonish, with two deep hollows where there should have been eyes. Its gash mouth curved into a sickle of a smile as it crept forward.

I’ve been waiting for you,
that smile said.

Bobby hurled the flashlight at the face and dove for the sagging beam, moving so quickly he left a roiling cloud of dust in his wake. He rolled under the wood and scrabbled for the exit, now a faint purple rectangle because night must have fallen while he was lost in his grief. Just as he reached it, something clutched at his shoe and he screamed, throwing himself through in a blind panic. He burst from under the porch in a swirl of leaf fragments, his breath coming in short gasps. The night was cold and gooseflesh erupted on his exposed arms.

“Coming for you, Bobby,”
the alien voice whispered, both behind him and in his head. He heard the crackle of dried leaves as something clambered out of the crawlspace, and launched himself through the thicket of privet blocking the porch. “
Coming for
real.”

He tripped on a root and fell into the weedy yard, springing to his feet at once. Fog had moved in while he was under the house, graying out the world, and shreds of it drifted like ghosts around him. The thing at his heels crashed through the privet that had grown up to provide a barrier for the house, snapping branches and gabbling softly at him. Bobby raced across the yard, not sure of where he’d left his bike now that he couldn’t make out any details, so he just ran for the break in the trees where the driveway led down to the road. Pelting through the weeds and brambles that plucked at his clothes, he heard the pallid thing high in the trees behind him, its bony fingers rattling like castanets against the wood, the movement rustling new leaves. It was gaining. The road wasn’t far now, an almost indiscernible black stripe running through the mist. Cold dead fingers brushed the skin of his neck and he threw a frantic glance back in time to see—

—the harsh blue-white eyes of a slumped beast hurtling out of the fog without a sound an instant before it smashed into him like a freight train. He tumbled into the beast’s great maw and it chewed him up, grinding his bones into powder in its great jaws. Then its teeth clamped down on his head and the world went black.

Bobby tried to open his eyes, but they would only go up halfway.

Am I dead?

He was lying on the side of the road. He ran through a quick self-check, trying to move different parts of himself, but nothing worked. It was like his brain had been separated from the rest of his body. There was no pain, and for that he was thankful. Just white noise.

The beast that had tried to eat him squatted about thirty feet away in the thinning fog, only now that he was looking at its back end he could tell that it wasn’t a living thing at all, just a car. Beasts didn’t have taillights. But what a
strange
car, all curvy and sleek with those weird blue-white headlights he’d glimpsed—like something George Jetson might drive, except that it had wheels. And so
quiet!
It hadn’t made a sound before it hit him, of that he was certain. Cars were loud blatting things and this one had snuck up on him like a wraith.
Maybe it came from someplace like England
.

A small, jittering light appeared beside the faint bloody orbs encircling the taillights, shining on the ground, and a man walked into view with a flashlight clutched in his shaking hand. As he drew near enough to make out, Bobby recognized him right away.

How did Joey Garraty’s dad get such a fancy car?

Then a beast of a different sort swallowed him, and the question slid down its throat alongside him.

When he came to, Bobby was looking up at the joists and subfloor of the Barlowe house.
Brought me back
. They seemed so far away, though, as high as the ceiling in a normal room. Then he realized he was lying in a hole on his back.
Not a hole. A grave.
Joey Garraty’s father hovered over him, limned in the wash from the flashlight, peering over the edge.
Burying me.
The man said something, but Bobby couldn’t make out the words through the white noise.

Not dead!
he screamed, but his body refused to cooperate and he made no sound.

A second head eased into view over the opposite edge of the grave, round like the moon and as pale as the belly of a fish, watching him through empty black sockets.

Leave me alone!
Bobby screamed.
I beat you and got away.

The pallid thing smiled, revealing sharp black teeth, and looked hungrily across the grave at Joey Garraty’s father, and Bobby realized it wasn’t interested in
him
at all. Not yet, anyway.

Get away from it, mister!
Bobby said to the man.
Before it does to you what it did

“To me,” he slurred.

The man’s hooded eyes widened and he may have screamed. Bobby couldn’t tell. He vanished, only to reappear a moment later with the flashlight, which he shone in Bobby’s face. The bright light burned the boy’s eyes, but he couldn’t close them against it.

The man spoke again and the white noise swallowed his words.
But if Joey is anything like him, it probably involved cursing.
His lips were peeled back in a grimace, his eyes wide and showing white.

He’s scared, Bobby
, the alien voice in the middle of his head said.
It’s so much better that way.

The slumped thing turned its empty gaze on the flashlight in the man’s jittery hand, and it winked out. Blackness filled the crawlspace.

Run away!
Bobby screamed in his soundless voice.
Get away while you have time!

Something tickled in his head then. Down deep, where the alien voice of the other was.

While you have time.

The words triggered something, some tiny spark between two of the neurons that still worked in his sleepy brain, and he understood.
Had
understood—at least subconsciously—ever since he discovered that the man he killed in the crawlspace wasn’t Norman, actually, he realized. It all made crazy sense to him, from the strange George Jetson car to the man he had thought was Joey Garraty’s father.

I’m out of time.

He wondered dreamily if this was just another one of the house’s mind games.

I brought him here
, the alien voice whispered in his head.
Like you wanted.

I take it back,
Bobby thought.

He wished he could leave, could get up out of this (
grave
) hole and go home to his family. To find Amy and ask her if she would be willing to go steady with a goober like him, even though he had been too chicken to kiss her first. But he knew he couldn’t. That time was long gone.

After awhile the light came back on and Joey Garraty reappeared at the edge of the hole. Of the other there was no sign.
Gosh, but you’re so
old
now!
Joey looked terrified, like he was ready to cut and run, but he put the light back on Bobby’s face. It didn’t bother the boy so much this time.

Get away, Joey!
he wanted to scream.
There’s still time for you.

But he just lay there in the spill of light without moving, more dead than alive. He realized he could see something over Joey’s shoulder, wedged into the narrow knell between the joists, where all the creepy-crawly things lived. The slumped, pallid thing with an almost featureless face, save two black hollows where there should have been eyes, reaching down for the boy in a man’s body.

Go ahead, then,
he told it.
Do what you’re going to do...

“To me,” Bobby whispered.

The last thing he saw as Joe Garraty brought the chipped ice scraper down was a set of thin, skeletal fingers wrapped around the man’s wrist, guiding his hand.

In the midnight beneath the charnel house, a slumped shape crept out of the shadows in the farthest corner and crossed the crawlspace to the fresh mound of dirt.

There it began to dig with its bony fingers, as it had so many times before.

Thank you for purchasing
Charnel House
, it’s my hope that you enjoyed it. I certainly enjoyed writing it, though it took me a lot longer to finish than I originally anticipated. I started it in January 2013, fully expecting to finish by March with a total word count of 25,000 or so, making it a nice little novella. I didn’t finish the Garraty story alone until September or October, and it was somewhere north of 50,000 words, which technically made it a novel, albeit a short one.

So much for plans.

Several years ago when my wife Robyn and I were renovating the old farmhouse we now live in, we were standing on the front porch one spring evening taking a break when I happened to catch sight of something neither of us had seen before: an old dilapidated house in a copse of trees almost directly across the street. We need to work on our powers of observation, it seems. We walked over to look at it—keeping our distance from the house itself because it was on private property—and just found ourselves wanting to see more.

I invested a little time in tracking down the owner (hooray for the internet!) and called him. He told me the house had been built in 1876 and empty since the late 1970s. He had picked it up for a song from the man who owned the fields all around it, and it was his plan to harvest the old wood and sell it. I asked for permission to go inside and take pictures, because Robyn and I really wanted to see the place. He gave me his blessing, so we went over there and explored for a couple of hours one sunny afternoon with my in-laws. That house became the loose basis for the house in this book (although the real house was T-shaped, not L-shaped). You can see more pictures on my web site at:

http://www.fredanderson.org/the-old-house/

if you’re so inclined.

There were a couple of things about the house that sent my creep-meter off the scale. First, the old well—which had been dug by hand—behind the house, because I have a long and storied history of not caring for water and holes together. This particular well was dry, but still creepy as all get out. I took a picture down it and later found some broken glass at the bottom had caught the flash and looked like sparkling eyes down there.

Good stuff.

The second thing that got me about the house was its crawlspace. The entrance was on the side of the house and open, and when I looked in, the first thing I thought was
what if I had to go in there?
because let’s face it, I’m the sort of person who thinks like that. I took a picture from the opening, but it didn’t really come out.

As if something under there didn’t want its picture taken.

Anyway, when I was nearing the completion of
The Convert
in October 2012, I began to have the seed of an idea in the back of my head for two intertwined stories featuring a man, a boy, and a haunted/possessed house. The house was to be in the fictitious town of Belleville, where my
The Cove
takes place (and should be the location of at least one more book), because the ground there is poisoned and evil runs rampant. All I knew at the time was that I wanted the man to kill the boy, and the boy to kill the man, through the magic of whatever force was in the house, at the house itself. I made a few notes about the circular nature of the stories and saved them in a document which I promptly forgot about.

Months later, after
The Convert
was out and the writing bug bit me again (I’m not a constant writer like most; I just do it when I feel like it because, well, I’m lazy and unmotivated, generally speaking) and I was trying to decide what to do next, I came across that document and started thinking about it again, then wrote the opening piece featuring the house. I was pleased with what I had produced, so I penned the scene with Garraty in the strip bar. I liked that, too, and knew it was time to make some more decisions about the house before I proceeded. Specifically, whether to use the creepy old well or the creepy old crawlspace.

Our old farmhouse actually has a hand-dug well
in
the crawlspace—you can surely imagine my joy any time I have to go down there—that I plan to use in a future book (because I think there’s something terrible in that well just waiting to come clambering up the slick walls, using its mildewy hands to pull itself out), so I decided to make the crawlspace the centerpiece of the charnel house’s charm. To my thinking, there’s not much worse than being in the crawlspace of a notorious haunted house in the dead of night... unless you’re there with a dead kid.

I pounded out about half a page of Bobby’s story to get a feel for it: him in the crawlspace with a hobo, just as the man says
gimme a dollar, kid
and ending with him trying to get his hand into Bobby’s underwear. I found that I liked that one too (the writing, that is, not the experiences of poor Bobby; him I felt sorry for, not only for putting him in there with Norman, but for all the hell I knew he’d go through before he died).

And so it began. As with
The Convert
, I didn’t have a grand picture when I started beyond “man kills boy, boy kills man,” so I just sort of let the storytelling take over. I decided to call the house the Barlowe place as an indirect homage to Stephen King’s
Salem’s Lot
. That novel featured the uber-creepy Marsten house, occupied by the vampire Kurt Barlow. Interestingly, King’s novel also features a store named Crossen’s, but that’s pure coincidence, because I came up with the store name several years ago when I was writing
The Cove
. I didn’t know about Jeremiah Barlowe’s taste for childflesh until about 30 seconds before I first referred to it, nor did I realize that Garraty had visited the house with Bobby Frank in 1978 until he remembered it on the drive up (and for the record, I’m so pleased with that, because it gave Bobby motivation in the second story that I wasn’t even aware of until I was writing it). Ditto for Frank showing up as an (imagined) adult at the end of Garraty’s story. I guess the charnel house was working on me, too.

I’m happy with the way the stories came out, and if you made it this far, I hope that means you are too. It was interesting to write two related novel-length stories and put them together into a book, and I most definitely loved jumping back into the pure horror waters I first tested in
The Cove
. They’re so comfortable that part of me wants to stay for awhile, though I do need to make a small confession: when I was writing the scene where Garraty was under the house with dead Bobby in the grave and he heard something above him (which, by the way, was living Bobby in that 1978 Saturday morning, limping around up there after young Joey Garraty pushed him down), I got so creeped out I had to take a break.

But maybe that’s a
good
thing.

If you’re so inclined and have the time, I’d appreciate a review for
Charnel House
posted on the site where you purchased it. Reader reviews help not only other readers, but authors in that those reviews can give a book more visibility.

I’ve made every effort to ensure
Charnel House
is error-free, but I’m sure one or two invariably slipped through the cracks. If you spotted one I’d appreciate if you let me know, either via Facebook (see below) or email, so I can fix it. I’m at
[email protected]
. Thank you in advance.

I’m on Facebook if you want to friend me, at:

http://www.facebook.com/TheFredAnderson
.

              That’s my personal page, where I crack jokes, complain about getting old, and poke fun at politics. If you’d rather keep our interaction purely professional (and who can blame you, with the weird stuff I seem to think about all the time?), I also have an official author page that’s just for announcements at:

http://www.facebook.com/AuthorFredAnderson
.

              I hope I see you again.

—Fred