House of Fallen Trees

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Karen paced her bedroom, fists clenching and unclenching, wishing she could punch or kick something. Anything would do, but mostly she was wishing she could kick those two assholes in the fucking teeth. Why were they doing this to her, fucking with her this way? Was it some insurance scam? Some revenge plot? But against who and why? She’d never even met Rory before so she knew whatever was going on couldn’t have anything to do with her. Unless…

Unless he thought he was avenging Sean somehow.

But what had she ever done to Sean? Nothing she could think of that warranted this kind of insanity. Just typical brother/sister shit every person with a sibling goes through. And all of that stuff was ancient history. She’d barely even seen her brother in what…five years? Maybe more?

Of course, she supposed it was possible that was the problem right there. Though Sean had never said anything to her about wishing she’d visit, had never asked her to, maybe Rory thought she should have. Hell, maybe Sean actually complained to Rory that his family never made the trip out west to see him. For all she knew, it was a big deal to Sean. She went over to the dresser and took a sip of the whiskey she’d helped herself to before coming to her room. She’d gone back down to the living room and taken her glass and the bottle back up with her and now she was just beginning to feel its effects. The booze was taking a bit of the edge off which was exactly what she needed right now.

How dare Rory have said such things to her, all but accusing her of…of what? Screwing up his plans for the B&B somehow? He probably thought she’d brought a jar of piranha fleas smuggled in her suitcase and then released them while she’d been in the basement, knowing full well they could eat a person alive.

She felt like bellowing a loud maniacal laugh, loud enough for him to hear from his room down the hall, letting him know how evil she was and how well her plan was working.

The thought amused her a great deal as she sat down on the edge of the bed, sipping her drink and smiling to the empty room. Imagining herself as an evil villain was kind of fun, she thought. Perhaps she should write a story from a super-villain’s perspective. The prospect was entertaining.

She considered it for a while, but knew before she could write anything enjoyable, she had to get back to her journal about this visit to Falling Trees. Setting the glass on the night table, she crossed the room and brought the bottle back, putting it beside the glass so it would be within easy reach. No longer particularly tired, she made herself comfortable on the bed with her laptop, opened the document, and sat there chewing her lower lip for a while. After drumming her fingers lightly on the keyboard for several minutes, she reached for her glass and took a long swallow, draining it. As she removed the glass from her lips, she looked up to see a figure across the room. The empty glass clattered onto the computer before rolling off onto the bed.

Karen gasped as her lungs seemed to freeze inside her chest.

The figure appeared to be a frail old man, his back to her, kneeling before the cedar hope chest. His back heaved gently; he was weeping, though Karen heard nothing. Face in hands, the old man’s bald and spotted head bobbed slightly with each silent intake of breath.

Feeling a trembling beginning in her hands, Karen wanted nothing more than to cover her face, will this apparition away, snap out of it goddammit! She closed her eyes, opened them again, but the old man remained, seemingly oblivious to her presence and now the hope chest wasn’t a hope chest at all anymore. No. No, it was a coffin now. A coffin just like the ones she’d seen in the basement and the old man’s body shook and shook, devastated by the death of…who?

Without even thinking about it, on the verge of tears, she reached for the empty glass beside her on the bed, wrapped her hand around it and screamed aloud as she threw it across the room at the old man’s flannel back. The glass passed right through him and shattered against the coffin which was once again a hope chest and then he was gone as though he’d never been there at all.

She raised a shaky hand to her mouth, biting down hard on the knuckles to keep herself from screaming again.

Her heart felt like a machine gun shattering her ribcage in an attempt to escape her body, her eyes wide and unblinking, ears pricked for a sound, any sound, but most especially the sound of approaching footsteps from the hall.

Surely, Rory had heard her scream. Why wasn’t he coming to investigate? Saul could have been knocked out from the Benadryl or just plain exhaustion, but where was Rory? Why was he not responding?

She considered the possibility her cry of terror hadn’t been as loud as it had sounded to her own ears, in her state of paralytic fear.

Still in her lap, the computer chirped. She glanced down, the screen flashing so blindingly bright she brought a hand up to shield her eyes. A second later, she dropped the hand to see a scene playing out on the screen, a scene from a movie. A scene starring her brother Sean, who was naked in a bright patch of sunlight, surrounded by trees.

Sean was down on all fours, another naked man behind him, fucking him, pounding him hard enough to make him cry out in pain. The man pressed his face into Sean’s back, concealing his identity, one hand on Sean’s hip while the other held a fistful of his hair, yanking his head back with every thrust.

Dirty, covered in pine needles and patches of sticky sap, Sean opened his eyes and appeared to look directly at Karen, his eyes pleading.

In the blink of an eye, his entire agonized face filled up the screen, battered black in places, and he spoke, his voice amazingly calm, his teeth smeared red with blood, as he said, “Two men have the carcass.”

Karen choked down a cry as the camera pulled back again, showing the same scene, Sean being fucked, possibly raped by the unknown man. She grabbed the laptop by the screen, intending to throw it across the room the same way she’d thrown the glass and then another figure stepped into the scene, entering on the right, closer to the camera than her brother and his assailant.

A cloaked figure in a dark robe, hood raised, immediately bringing to mind the Grim Reaper. An instant later, as if reading Karen’s mind and playing to her thoughts, the head raised up, revealing a skeleton face, just bone, empty black sockets where eyes and nose had once been.

She felt something inside her mind snap and her mouth moved wordlessly as a single trickle of blood began to ooze its way down from the top of the screen, thick and slow and so unbelievably red. Unsure if it was part of the movie — if it was a movie — or actually coming out of her computer, she reached out, fingers shaking worse than any palsy victim’s ever had, but at the last instant she drew her hand away, not waiting to know for sure, certain that if her fingers came away red she would disappear so deep inside herself she would never again know reality and be forever locked away in the dark.

Hissing, she tossed the computer away, off her lap, off the bed. It crashed against the dresser and hit the floor with a heavy thud. She was dismayed to see it remained open, though the screen had gone dark. “Jesus,” she gasped. “Jesus. Fuck.” Breathing hard as hot tears spilled down her cheeks, she again willed herself not to scream, not to cry out in any way, though she had no idea how she was managing it. Insane, she thought. You really, truly are insane.

No, another stronger voice shouted from somewhere inside her head. Remember the photographs. Rory and Saul saw them too. It’s not you, it’s this…place. It’s cursed, haunted. But by what? By who? And why?

The answer was there, of course. Had been there all along. It was the Captain. Captain Frank Storm. That’s who she’d just seen, kneeling before the hope chest/coffin.

She waited until her heart had settled into as normal a rhythm as she thought she was going to get out of it, swung her legs off the bed, never taking her gaze from the computer on the floor.

The blood was gone, so it had been part of the show after all. Knowing there was no way in hell she’d be able to sleep tonight, she retrieved the glass from the floor, relieved it hadn’t broken, and poured herself another shot. The whiskey scorched her throat going down and almost came back up again. She coughed and sputtered, but managed to keep the burning fluid in her belly. She needed to get out of here, out of this room. She grabbed the bottle and left, hurrying downstairs, thankful the hall lights were still on. As she hit the bottom step, she heard an odd creaking sound that made her pause, ready to run back up if she had to.

The creaking came again, slow and lazy, as if something were rocking in a relaxed, leisurely way. But what? There was no rocking chair in the living room, which was what immediately sprang to mind. She stood stock-still, listening to the sound as it reached its listless crescendo before fading again, never growing very loud.

It was, she realized, as if the walls themselves were creaking under some unknown weight and the sound beneath the creaking — a very gentle splashing — gave it all away.

She was listening to the slow easy sound of waves splashing sleepily against the hull of a ship, the ship itself creaking under the pressure of the water sloshing against it. She sank down into a sitting position on the stair. The whiskey was threatening to come up again and her head had begun to pound like a new hangover.

“You hear that?”

She nearly jumped out of her skin, leaping to her feet and spinning around to see Saul at the top of the staircase. The sight of him both relieved and frightened her.

Wanting to proceed with caution, she asked, “Do I hear what?”

He smiled crookedly at her, a painful sight that went beyond all the ugly scratches covering his skin. “It was a dark and stormy night,” he said as he began to descend the stairs, one hand grazing the banister absently. “We were standing on the deck. The ship was sinking and the Captain said to me, ‘Tell me a story, my son.’ And so I began. ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ We were standing on the deck. The ship was sinking and the Captain said to me, ‘Tell me a story, my son.’ And so I began. ‘It was a dark and stormy night—’”

“Stop it,” Karen snapped.

Saul stopped, that half smile still on his face but Karen could see his dark eyes were haunted. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, she had already backed across the living room, trying to keep her distance.

“Sorry,” he said. “I guess all this,” he gestured around the room and she knew he was referring to the ship sounds the house was now making, “is getting to me.”

“What’s going on?” she demanded.

He shook his head. “I don’t know.” He peered at her, as if noticing her body language for the first time. “Are you afraid of me?”

She suspected a trick question and had no idea which would be the right answer, so she said nothing.

“You don’t have to be afraid of me, Karen,” he said. “Look at me.” He held his arms out to her, turning them so she could see the fronts and backs. “Look what I did to myself. I’m just as much a victim here as you are.”

Watching him carefully, she said, “I’m not a victim.”

Dropping his arms to his sides once more, he said, “No?”

“No. Sean was a victim though and I will find out what happened to him.”

“This is all so strange, don’t you think?”

Again, she didn’t know what the preferred response would be and remained silent.

“I guess my grandmother was right all those years ago,” he continued, crossing the room to sit on the couch, taking care to give Karen a wide berth, almost as though he were just as afraid of her as she was of him. “She used to spout on about all that hooey. Angry spirits getting their revenge, lost souls wandering the earth, not even knowing they’re dead.” He sighed heavily, as though he’d never been so tired in all his life. “Do you think that’s what’s happening here? Angry spirits?”

“I don’t know,” she replied, impressed with how steady her voice sounded as the house creaked and groaned around them. “But obviously it all has something to do with the Captain who built this place.”

Saul smiled weakly again. “Yeah, I think you’re right about that. But what does it have to do with Sean? And even more importantly, what does it have to do with you?”

“I don’t know,” she said again. “What makes you think it has anything to do with me?”

“Because the house wasn’t like this until you got here. That’s what Rory was trying to say in his not-so-elegant way.”

Karen folded her arms over her chest.

When he realized she wasn’t going to reply, Saul asked, “You’ve been having hallucinations, haven’t you?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Are you talking about what happened in the basement? Because that wasn’t a hallucination.”

“Yes, it was, Karen. You know it was. Rory and I went down there, remember? No caskets, no coffins, no candles. Just a bunch of junk.”

“Junk and fleas,” she corrected.

He pointed a brown finger at her. “Exactly. The fleas.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked impatiently.

“You hallucinated coffins, I hallucinated flea bites. Or something. I’m not totally sure what that itching attack was about, but I think it had something to do with the fleas.”

Karen was getting tired of standing and walked slowly to the lounger to sit down. “You’re saying you think the allergic reaction was just in your mind?”

“Yes. Like the coffins were in yours.”

She didn’t bother to argue with him about it anymore. “So, what’s your point?”

He leaned forward on the couch, his face suddenly animated. “You’ve had other hallucinations.”

Knowing he must have heard the commotion in her room just before she’d come downstairs, she did her best to keep her expression blank. “And how do you know that?”

“Because I’ve had others too.”

Skeptically, she asked, “What kind of hallucinations?”

Saul’s face darkened slightly, and Karen was unsure what that meant. Was he embarrassed?

Shifting on the sofa, he clasped his hands together, rested his elbows on his thighs. “First, let me ask you a question,” he said.

She waited while Saul seemed to grow even more uncomfortable. At last he said, “Forget the question. I’ll just tell you what I know.” After clearing his throat, he said, “You and I have made love every night since we got here.”