Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner (38 page)

#

There was one way into the attic. It
was through the closet in Monica’s room. The sun had set, and soon
it would be night. Sully wasn't sure how much time he had before
the tiredness overwhelmed him and put him to sleep. He took a
flashlight and a chair to the closet. He got up on the chair. He
stood there scrunched over and went to undo the latch that would
let the little flap door fall down. But before he could slide the
latch, he heard the fast reverberating noise, and he jerked his
hand away.

At first, it was just one, then
several more joined in, as if daring him. Sully was not ready to
take that dare. He jumped from the chair and into his daughter’s
room. He slammed shut the closet door.

The sounds were unmistakable. He had
heard one of them on a few occasions. He had seen the source of
such a noise before and known to stay clear. The sounds that had
come from the attic were from that source. There were rattlesnakes
in his attic.

Sully stood there and thought for a
little while. He considered his shotgun. One good blast would clear
the path, but only in one direction. And they would be quick. From
the sounds of their rattles, they were highly energized.

“Wait a minute,” Sully said out loud.
Logic came, and it made his fear subside a little.

A rattlesnake took its energy from
sunlight. It was dark in the attic.

“They’re not real.”

#

Sully was now more determined. He knew
he had found something. It, with whatever strange power it had over
his consciousness, had installed fears in him before, tried and
succeeded in making him do what it wanted. But now it wouldn’t
succeed. Sully was going to see what was hidden in that
attic.

He opened the closet door, and that
set the rattlers in motion, loud, daring him once again, triggering
in his head the images of green reptiles baring their fangs. He
inched forward and they grew all the louder. He crept up on the
chair and thought he could hear their bodies, right above him,
slithering over the door, waiting for him.

Yeah, Sully. Go ahead.
Think that we’re fake. We’ve been waiting for you. Now you think
what we want you to think.

Sully put his hand on the latch. There
was a cacophony of light thumps, and then there were more rattles
going off. He withdrew his hand from the latch. But he stayed on
the chair. His heart pounded like a drum in his chest. His air felt
diminished, and he was sweating, but he had to do it. He lifted a
heavy shaking arm up to the latch. There were more thumps, but of a
different quality. In his mind, Sully saw the snakes trying to bite
through the wooden door. In his mind, he saw their beady reptile
eyes. He could now imagine their fangs striking him. He
shivered.

Again, Sully had to get
down.

#

Yet another thing occurred to Sully.
He had not always been a good sleeper. He had never been an
insomniac, but some nights he had lain in bed for thirty minutes to
an hour before he fell asleep. But at some time, that had changed.
He couldn’t pinpoint the time for certain. He thought it might have
been shortly after coming out of the coma. Or maybe it had started
when Anna came into the picture. Whenever the onset, for some time
he had been falling asleep very fast. He thought maybe it was
because he and Anna had sex most every night and that wore him out.
But considering it a little further, he realized that he and Anna
often had sex after waking up in the middle of the night instead,
and on the nights they didn’t have sex as soon as they got into
bed, he fell right asleep anyway. When had it started?

But he didn’t have a lot of time to
dwell on that. Sully was fairly sure his third attempt to get into
the attic would have to be his last of the night. It was now dark
outside. Any minute, sleep would take him. Then he would have to
restart tomorrow.

And he couldn’t wait. He had to
know.

Sully opened the closet door again.
This time, there was no sound. He would have thought that would
have made it less frightening. But it made it worse. It was as if
the rattlers were trying to hide their presence. He would open that
flap, and they would strike from every direction. But he told
himself that was ridiculous.

They’re not real. They
can’t hurt me.

Sully got back on the chair. He
reached up to the latch and then just held his position. Seconds
passed, then minutes, with him trying to work up the nerve. This,
for him, was like driving at night had come to be. He had to face
the fear that logic said was only in his head. He had to face the
fear that all of his consciousness outside of logic said was
warranted.

Or did he have to face this fear? Did
he really need to know what was up there? Was there some other
way?

Sully thought of running. He could go
get Monica, and the two of them would never have to return. But
then what? Then this thing would just toy with his mentality from
far away, ever wanting him, ever pulling him back to it. It had
toyed with him while he was on the road, many miles away. Maybe
there was no distance it couldn’t reach him at. He couldn’t run.
And if it were possible that he could stop this thing, then he
needed to know what was in the attic. At least, that was what he
thought.

The answers were above. He was sure of
it. Once up there, he would know for sure if it were Anna. With so
many things pointing her way, Sully still didn’t want to believe it
was her, and he suspected what was up there might very well tell
him it wasn’t Anna. It would tell him what benefited from him, what
fed on his many lives.

“Holy shit!” Sully whispered, his hand
still gripping that latch.

He remembered what his dad had said to
him, the very last thing the old man had said on that night. He had
to think of what would benefit from his condition. He had thought
about that last night. His condition was life in abundance.
Something could benefit from that if life was what that something
fed upon.

Sully remembered the time his mother
had sneaked meat into Anna’s salad and Anna had become violently
ill. She had said she couldn’t handle dead flesh in her mouth. But
was it more than that? Was it that Anna could not feed on dead
flesh because Anna could only feed on life?

Sully whipped the latch open. He moved
over to let the flap fall. He stood up straight and shined the
flashlight inside.

He ducked down and leaped from the
chair again, this time jumping far enough that he landed on
Monica’s bed, then bounced to the floor on the other side. He lay
there, pulling himself into the fetal position, as if he could hide
from them that way.

It wasn’t rattlesnakes in the attic.
They might or might not have had rattles at the end of their
bodies. But they were definitely not rattlesnakes.

They sat on that attic floor with
their heads propped up above their bodies. Their fangless mouths
hung open in their threatening posture. Their heads were the size
of baseballs.

And now they would make him into a
zombie, Sully thought. Just like they had done to the investigators
in Anna’s story.

Sully realized that he had to move
now. Because if he didn’t, they would come down for him. He got up
off the floor. It took everything he could muster to move up on
that bed. There, on his stomach, he looked over the edge at the
carpet on the other side. He didn’t see any of them slithering
across the floor. He lifted up the blankets, so he could peek under
the bed. There were none there either.

He got on the floor. He moved a few
feet toward the closet. He could see the open flap. No, that was
too much. He wouldn’t be able to get that far. He wouldn’t be able
to close the flap. But he was able to shut the closet door. He
backed out of the room and into the study. He shut the glass door
to Monica’s room.

He wanted to leave, to just run from
the snakes. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t leave because, when he
left, people died. When he left, other horrifying things came to
him. There was no easy escape.

Sully went back to his room, and now
he did get his shotgun. He held it in front of him, cocked and
ready, as he made his way back through the house. He went to the
study. He had to watch the glass doors between Monica’s room and
the study. Because if any of them had made it out of that closet,
that’s where they would come next. They would try to crash through
that glass to get him.

Logic was there. He wanted to shut it
off. He just wanted to stand there all night and watch that door.
He didn’t want to hear logic saying that he would soon go to sleep
and they would have their way with him.

And there was more from logic, as it
became more refined. The higher logic said that the snakes weren’t
real. It said that his questions were answered. He wanted to tell
logic to go away. He didn’t want its conclusions today. But he was
a mathematician, and he couldn’t deny logic for too long. He put it
into words.

“You put them there. They’re your
snakes, and you put them in my head, so I would be afraid to go
into your attic. My God, Anna! What the hell are you?”

With that, he heard the car coming up
the road.

Sully thought he knew whose car it
was. But he still held hope that it would just drive by. Maybe it
would just drive past his house, the last one on the road, and into
the country. But that car did not hear his will. It pulled right
into the driveway.

#

When Anna walked into the study, Sully
still had the shotgun trained on the glass doors. He turned to her,
lowering the gun to his side.

For a few seconds, she stared at him,
her face in quiet disbelief.

“Sully,” she said in a whisper. “What
are you doing?”

He could
not speak to her, not right now. He was too afraid, and his breath
would not let him.
Raise the
shotgun
, he thought. But he couldn’t. He
didn’t know if it was his fear of this woman who had been in his
head so many times now, or if it was his old feelings for her, the
one he had admired, the one he had trusted.

Suddenly, there was the familiar
sound. It was the same sound that had brought him from sleep the
nights before. The dogs were barking. Now he was awake enough to
realize that they were barking from the wrong direction. Their
noise wasn’t coming from inside the addition, from the houses. They
were coming from the opposite direction, from the relatively bare
countryside.

Anna
stepped further into the room, and Sully took a step back. Anna
looked directly at the shotgun and moved slowly to the side, as if
she wanted to circle him, a bird circling its prey. Sully pivoted
around with her. She kept moving on the perimeter of a circle,
until he had his back to the very door that he had been guarding.
Anna stopped. She then backed up to the wall, her eyes still on the
shotgun. Sully backed up until he was nearly touching the glass
door.
Raise the shotgun
, he thought. But he still could not.

Anna continued to stare at the gun,
like she was debating something in her mind. Then she finally
looked up, slowly. “No, Sully. It’s not what you think. It’s just
made you believe what it wants.”

Anna started to move in on him and
Sully raised the gun, but just a little, not actually pointing it
at her, but it was enough, because Anna stopped in her tracks. At
that, Sully let the gun drop back down.

Anna began to cry. “No, Sully. I love
you. Don’t do this. It’s not me. It just has you.”

Sully held firm. He sucked it up. He
had to speak. He gathered enough air to say, “Move at me, I kill
you.”

At that,
Anna cried harder, moving her hands to her face. Sully could still
feel it. A part of him wanted so badly to wrap his arms around her,
to say all was fine. Even if she was a monster, all was fine, and
he still loved her. But he pushed that back. It was the way she
wanted him to think. But she was a monster, and he could not let a
monster exist under the same roof that Monica slept under. And what
had she done to Monica already? The sand monster. He had thought
that came from a mixture of his dad’s playful stories and the vivid
imagination of a four-year-old girl. But had Anna put that there
too? Had she been in Monica’s head?
Raise
the shotgun
, he thought. He still could
not.

“It has you, Sully!” Anna said,
pleading through her hands. “Please believe me!”

It was easier to speak now. He had
thought of his daughter, of protecting her, and it was easier to be
brave now. “And how would you know that, Anna? How would you know
that there is anything at all to have me?”

Anna dropped her hands and looked at
him. Sully tried to read her face. Was she thinking about it,
trying to find some false answer to set him at ease? He wasn’t
sure.

“Because it had me too. It put the
thought in my head. It made me think that if I came back here, you
and Monica would die. It showed me things that would
happen.”

Anna took a step forward. Sully nudged
the gun up again.