The Haunted Halls (12 page)

Chapter Eight

Kenneth’s virginity had died a wonderful death at the will of his rescuer, the Ice Queen. He didn’t count having his man-pussy ravaged by “Uncle” Wes as his official first time. He no longer cared about that,
she
had given him this beautiful girl as a reward for his dirty work in the woods. This girl had cried and fought for the first couple of minutes, but a few hard shots to the face had subdued her. He was about to explode his gift into Meghan Murphy when he was rudely snatched from behind and thrown to the far side of the room. His sweaty back slammed against the far wall, his hard on, slick with the girl’s fluids, firing cum into the cold air. Eric had robbed him of his moment. Kenneth’s eyes narrowed at the sight of the big guy moving in and out of their latest recruit. He imagined himself walking up behind the dumb lug, putting a blade in his spine, and watching him bleed all over the floor, but he knew
she
would not be pleased with such an action. Imagining the vengeful act would have to do, for now.

…..

Meghan felt a change spiral through her. Her body betrayed her. Looking into the eyes of this larger man, there was a sense of desire coursing through her veins and a wetness between her legs. He entered her, fast and hard, driving into her sex–a Mack truck barreling down a steep hill with no breaks and no cares. More confusion, more impossible thoughts attacked her mind while he attacked her body. Her hatred faded, replaced with hunger. Her grunts came louder and with more ferocity at each powerful thrust. She sunk her long black nails into his broad back drawing blood as she dragged them down to his ass, pulling him closer, begging him to drive deeper. She moaned and growled until she felt herself racing toward climax. The moans turned to shrills of ecstasy. The anticipation was near unbearable. She began to whimper, began to cry. “Now! Now! Now!” she said. She felt his release; an electrical current blazed through her womanhood and up through her entire body.  Her mind was slammed with a white heat as a dark red vision slipped over her sight. Images of a river of crimson pleasures, splashing across her own naked form buried the last shred of evidence that Meghan Murphy had ever been.

…..

Eric had done as
she
had told him. This girl was now theirs. He finished his part and then pulled himself free and watched the spell take hold. The pretty girl’s eyes rolled up into the back of her skull, her hands pawing at every inch of her body following the new energy moving through her. Her legs twitched, toes curled. One second she was laughing, the next she was crying. The scream that signaled the end of her transformation ripped through the room bringing a dark grin to his face. As the scream died out, her body fell still.

…..

Kenneth McGowan needed a release, and not just the wasted jism he had decorated the floor in room 209 with. There was a monster inside of him that wanted out. He left Eric and the changing girl in the room, and walked down to the room he’d seen the man and the boy with the Red Sox raincoat earlier come from. He thought about them whispering about him.

I’ll teach you to keep your mouths shut.

Kenneth knocked on the door and waited. After a minute, the man opened the door.

“Yes?” the man said. His eyes drop to Kenneth’s nakedness. “What the hell?”

The man tried to close the door in Kenneth’s face, but with the new gifts given to him by
her
, Kenneth pushed his way into the room. He grabbed the man who was almost half a foot taller than him and threw him to the ground. He slammed the door shut.

“What do you want? Money? I haven’t got much, but I could–”

Kenneth slammed the heel of his bare foot into the man’s mouth, feeling a surge of power and excitement at the sight of the blood.  It was as if each act under her command gave him a little more strength; he liked it. He liked it a lot. Before the man could plead his benign case for mercy, Kenneth smashed his bleeding heel down again. He continued the violent act until the man’s face was ruined.

“Daddy,” the boy said, waking up from his slumber.

Kenneth McGowan limped over the broken body on the floor, stepping up to the cowering boy on the bed.

“You’re Daddy’s gone. I’m here to take care of you now.” He raised a blood-splattered hand to the boys head, petting his blond crop of hair.

“Wh-wh-who are you?”

“You can call me Uncle Kenny.”

Chapter Nine

The lights of the Bruton Inn came into view as Rhiannon turned the corner. Emotionally wiped, she’d already decided she would be staying the night; no way was she going back to her empty apartment. She needed to sit down and try to wrap her head around what the hell was happening.

She pulled into the parking lot of the inn. The pavement was wet. She hadn’t seen a drop of rain in Hollis Oaks. The building stood silent. Room windows were lit up sporadically across the front side. For the amount of cars in the front lot, there should have been more signs of life. It was quiet.
Oh stop it
, she told herself.  The nervous part of her brain wondered if she’d been wrong about the middle-aged quitters who believed in what?
Ghosts? Demons?
 
Something or someone
had been in Kurt’s room at the hospital. She wasn’t fucking crazy. Whatever it was had chased her into town and that old man into the intersection.

She pulled around to the back lot. It wasn’t nearly as full as the front.
See, there really aren’t that many guests tonight
.
No ghosts, no goblins
. The thought was comforting, but there was still no way she was walking around out here in the dark. She turned around near the back corner, and drove back around to the front rolling up and parking beside a red mini-van. She shut the car off, got out, and walked into the lobby of the well-lit hotel. The front desk was deserted. She saw the
Be Right Back
sign sitting next to the little round silver bell and the
Ring Bell for Service
sign and decided to grab some coffee while she waited for Jeff.

…..

Jeff ascended the stairs with caution certain that someone or something was going to jump out at him and send him plummeting down the stairs like Meghan.
Maybe I should quit reading so many horror comics.
He reached the top step and glanced down the hall. Kenneth McGowan came charging out of a room buck naked. Jeff stood quietly in the stairwell as Kenneth McGowan hobbled across the hall and knocked on the door.

What are you up to?

The door opened and Kenneth disappeared into the room; the lights along the hall flickered and then steadied. Jeff’s mouth went dry.

Chapter Ten

Kenneth knocked on the door for room 225. A man opened the door. Kenneth walked in and pushed him backward. He closed the door, shutting the couple off from their only way out.

The woman on the bed in the sexy negligée covered herself at the sight of him. With one quick strike, Kenneth knocked the nose of the man between them up into his brain, dropping him to the floor

“Jonathan,” she cried. Kenneth charged at her. She held her hands up in a weak attempt to defend herself. He picked up the phone from the nightstand beside the bed, yanking it free from the wall, and with the hard plastic base, smashed the shocked woman over the head. He was flooded with a lifetime of weak moments. He thought of Uncle Wes and his violating touch (he smashed her head again), he thought of his mother’s denial and betrayal, her outright choice of his stepfather over her own son, her abandonment (he smashed the bloody face again, a piece of flesh clung to the underside of the hard plastic base), he thought of the big guy, Eric, and his intrusion upon
her
reward (he grabbed the makeshift weapon with both hands, bringing it up over his head) he saw Eric pushing into the pretty girl in 209–with all of his newfound strength and every last bit of rage built from his 19 years of guilt, shame, and impotence, Kenneth bashed the sickly, bludgeoned human skull, separating the jaw from the rest of its brutalized face.

He wanted to smile, he wanted more than anything to feel better, but he didn’t. He was drained, and beneath the exhaustion running like a river forever winding, the anger flowed. For now, he needed to rest, to recharge. There would be time to kill the rage inside. If not, then he would just kill.

He lied down on the bed placing an arm over the gory mess next to him that still looked like a woman from the neck down. He closed his eyes thinking of
her
and slipped into dream.
She
was waiting for him. In the vision he lied down beside her on a bed of dead roses, the smell of her pool water perfume stung his nose, but faded as she held him in her arctic embrace.

…..

In room 209, Eric stood silent staring out at the night beyond the window–a sentry, waiting. He had done as
she
wished. He had grabbed the girl, fucked her, and changed her. For all of his loyalty, there was one thing he wanted that she had not given him since their first engagement. He wanted to be next to her. She had promised he would have his turn, but when? His thoughts turned to the other man. 
Timothy
.

He wondered where Kenneth the Rat had vanished.

Eric turned, left the room, and walked two doors down to room 211. He could sense that
she
was weak from a day of testing her limits and pushing her powers. Lethargy settled over him. He too would need to rest, but first he wanted to see her, to gaze upon her perfect form, even if it meant seeing her chosen one lying next to her. He reached for the handle of room 211.

The handle turned. He could see the vapors of his breath as he entered the icy room–
she’s here
. A single light, shining through the window from the parking lot, illuminated the shape of Timothy. At first glance, the other half of the bed appeared empty, but upon further inspection, he could see the depression in the mattress where she lay. He wasn’t able to physically see her. Part of him was wounded by this, the other part swooned. Satisfied, he crept back out into the hall and moved on returning to the room he had shared with his original traveling companion.

Bloodstains and bits and pieces of the broken TV stand reminded him of the darker glory
she
had impressed upon him. He lay down on top of the sheets of his bed crossing his large hands over his waist. Eric closed his eyes. His dreams were only of death.

Chapter Eleven

Jeff flew through the door to the back office.

Rhiannon screamed, dropping her coffee to the floor.

“Jesus Christ, Rhiannon, you scared the shit out of me,” Jeff said, clutching the doorframe.

“Oh my God, you have no idea.” Rhiannon snatched a towel from the closet behind her and bent down to sop up the wet spot on the rug.

Jeff noticed her hands shook as she did this. “Forget about that,” he said. “Come upstairs with me.”

“Why?” She left the rag on the floor and followed him out to the front.

Jeff walked over to the stairwell. “Come on.” He climbed the steps as carefully as he had earlier.

“Okay, what’s going on? You’re freaking me out,” Rhiannon said.

“Shhh, just get moving.” Jeff reached the top step of the second floor and snuck over to the doorway, held his hand out and signaled for her to wait. He peeked around the corner. Nothing was there. “Come on.”

“Wait,” Rhiannon whispered. “Are you going to tell me what we’re doing?”

He stopped and turned to her. “Okay, this is probably going to sound stupid, but you know Kenneth McGowan?”

“Yeah, the weird guy who always hears people doing it in the room next to him. What about him?”

“He’s registered to room 219, but I saw him come out of one farther down, 225, 226 maybe. I couldn’t tell. I watched him from here like this.”

“Okay?”

“He was naked.”

“What? Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“All right,” she threw her hands up in the air, “and now you’re just fucking with me. Nice.”

“Hey.” Jeff grabbed her wrist. “Hey, look at me.”  Her bottom lip came up as she rolled her glistening eyes. In all of his excitement over Kenneth he’d acted impulsively. She’d been through enough today without him dragging her up here with tales of some naked weirdo. He waited for her to calm down. “Look, I’m sorry. I know you’ve been through a lot already. Maybe this is stupid. Let’s go back downstairs.”

“No, I just…I just need a minute.”

He let go of her wrist. She looked tired, run down.

“So, he was really naked?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“What the hell was he doing? Where is he now?”

“That’s the even more fucked up part. When he came out of that room, he was limping. He hobbled across the hall and knocked on the door.”

“What happened–” Rhiannon stopped talking at the unmistakable sound of a door opening.

Jeff moved back over to his vantage point, daring a glance down the hall, praying that it wasn’t Kenneth McGowan. He slid his face out just enough to view where the door had opened. It wasn’t Kenneth. It was the bigger guy; Eric something.  Eric slogged out of a room that
he
wasn’t registered to.

What the hell is going on here?

The big guy headed to the last room at the end of the hall and disappeared inside. Jeff turned back to Rhiannon.

“Was that him?” she said.

“No, it was that big guy, Eric, that I saw him hanging out with earlier. He came out of a room in the same area, maybe even the same one that our naked friend had been in.”

“Did you say they were hanging out together? What, is there a party going on up here?” she said.

“I have no idea,” Jeff said, pondering his next move.

He stepped out into the open; the thought of checking in on Meghan crossed his mind. He had promised her he would, but decided there were more pressing matters to tend to.

“Jeff,” Rhiannon whispered from the stairwell.

He motioned for her to join him.

“What are we doing now?” She saddled up next to him.

“I just want to walk the hall and see if I hear anything,” he said.

“And if we do hear something, or someone?”

He didn’t answer.