House of Fallen Trees

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“This is not good,” Saul said from the dark kitchen.

The instant the lights were extinguished, Karen had reversed direction and gone back to the room where the men were. “What the hell?” she asked.

As if replying to her, a gust of wind slammed the outside of the house, rattling the trees together.

“There’s your answer,” Rory said. “Sounds like a wind storm is kicking up.”

Karen felt her belly roll over. “Wind storm?”

“They’re pretty common this time of year,” Saul told her. She could already hear him rummaging around in one of the drawers. A second later and he was striking a match and lighting a candle. A corona of golden light bloomed around him. “I’m sure it’ll start raining soon too.” He handed Karen the candle he was holding and used its flame to light another, which he passed to Rory before lighting one for himself.

“Every room has at least two candles in holders,” Rory said, standing up. “We should all take a floor and light them too.”

“What for?” Karen asked. “I think we should just stay here and sit tight. No use in lighting up rooms we won’t even be in.”

“Who says we won’t be in them?” Rory said.

“Why would we be?”

“You never know,” he replied. “We might be running from spookies before the night is over.”

Resisting the urge to flip him the finger, she said, “Didn’t your mother ever tell you to never leave a candle unattended?”

“Yeah, she also told me that Jesus was my Savior and that I would grow up to sell insurance like my dad and marry a nice girl and have good Christian children. Then she found out I was gay and told me I was an abomination and would be burning in hellfire for all eternity. I guess you could say I’ve learned to disregard all the stuff she told me.”

“Okay,” she said slowly. “But maybe you should tell me why you feel we need to light every room in the house. That doesn’t make any sense to me.”

In the glow of orange candlelight, Rory said, “We’re a ship lost at sea. If there is any hope of being seen and rescued by another ship, we’ll have to make ourselves as visible as possible, which means we light all the candles and put them on the windowsills. Happy now?”

Karen and Saul stared at him for a long time, open mouthed, unsure if he was being serious or not.

Rory groaned impatiently. “Okay, fine. I’ll do it myself.” He left the kitchen, taking a third of the light with him.

“What the hell?” Karen said again, but she could see that Saul had no answers for her.

“I guess we should help him,” Saul whispered.

“Really?” Karen was surprised, but kept her voice low. “I’ve never heard of the tradition of putting a candle in every window before.”

“Neither have I. But I have a feeling that he knows more about this place than we do. And even though he said he didn’t hear the sounds of a rocking ship, I think he believed we did. He knows more than he’s telling us.”

“Well, no shit. Do you think he knows about Sean?”

“I doubt it.” He took Karen’s free hand with his own. “Come on, let’s get this over with.” He tried tugging her along but Karen resisted him. He stopped, looking back at her.

“I have a really bad feeling about this,” she said.

He hesitated before replying. “It’ll be okay. I don’t think anything can hurt us.”

“Oh, really?” She moved her candle so it shone on the back of his gouged hand. “What would you call this?”

“My own doing.”

She couldn’t think of a suitable argument for that. Instead, she asked, “Do they hurt? The scratches?”

“They sting a bit, yeah.”

“We should clean them up with alcohol or something.”

“We will. Let’s just get this crap with the candles over with first, okay?”

Distressed that her attempt to distract him had failed, she sighed and said, “Okay. But I don’t want us to separate.”

“Don’t worry. We won’t.”

She nodded reluctantly and they started off, Saul calling out for Rory to determine the other man’s location in the house.

“Still downstairs,” Rory called back. “In the Captain’s quarters.” Karen and Saul immediately froze at this news. The Captain’s Quarters? Then the sound of Rory chuckling drifted to them beneath the sound of the lashing wind. “In the library,” he called.

“Okay,” Saul called back after a moment. “Karen and I will take the third floor. That way we’ll all be able to meet on the second.”

“Good thinking, Mate.” Rory still sounded amused.

“This is ridiculous,” Karen muttered, gripping Saul’s hand much harder than necessary but she couldn’t help herself. As they climbed the stairs to the third floor, she kept her gaze on the floor, not wanting to look up and see those grotesquely altered photographs again.

At the top, Saul said, “I’ll take the rooms on the left. You take the ones on the right.”

“I thought we agreed not to separate?”

“I’ll be right across the hall and we’ll meet in front of the threshold of every new room. We won’t be apart for more than a minute, tops.”

“You said we wouldn’t separate,” Karen repeated, hating the tinge of panic in her voice.

Saul did his best to give her a reassuring smile. “You know, at some point one of us is going to have to pee, especially after all that beer we drank.”

That was one thing she didn’t need to be reminded of. She’d had to pee for the last twenty minutes. “Okay,” she said. “But we meet at every threshold.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Promise?”

“Cross my heart and—”

“Don’t say another word,” she interrupted. “I don’t want us having any more bad luck than we already do.”

“Try to think of all this as good luck,” he said optimistically. “For all we know, the house could have eaten us by now.”

She licked her lips. “How do you know it hasn’t?”

“Because, we’re not drowning in digestive juices.”

This got a smile out of her, made her realize how silly she was being. She let go of his hand and they each went their separate ways, Saul disappearing into a dark room on the left and Karen turning into what she soon realized was an office of some sort. Probably where Rory did his paperwork and whatever else it was he had to do to get a B&B up and running.

Karen didn’t bother attempting to take in her surroundings, but made a beeline for the window on the far side of the room. She had to swerve around a monolith of an old oak desk to do it, but she immediately saw the votive candle precariously balanced on the porthole’s windowsill. The glass was small and ruby-red, perhaps an antique. She quickly lit the candle within it and turned to leave, catching a glimpse of a framed photograph on the desk. She almost averted her gaze instinctively, but before she had a chance to, she caught the smiling face of her brother. She paused, felt her heart stutter, considered ignoring it but at the last second reached for the photo, holding her candle close to the glass.

Sean was grinning up at the camera from a stooped position, his brown hair messy and falling into his eyes. He was shirtless, wearing cut-off blue jeans and canvas sneakers, holding a paint roller which dripped white paint into a tray. Beneath him was a white-spattered drop cloth.

He looked beautiful and happy and very, very much alive. It made her heart ache, not only because she was almost certain he was dead, but also because she had neglected to get to know him better when she had the chance.

“Where are you?” she whispered, feeling the prick of tears in the corner of her eyes.

“Right here,” came the reply. Karen gasped, dropping the framed photo onto the desk where it clattered loudly. She whirled around, shoving the candle out in front of her, searching the darkness in the direction the voice had come from.

Over in the far corner she could make out movement, but barely. Heart hammering, she screamed for Saul, but the instant his name was past her lips, the office door slammed shut.

Paralyzed, Karen couldn’t think, couldn’t figure out what to do. Out of the darkness came a grunt and a cry of pain, followed by a wet smacking sound.

She backed up, colliding with the wall beside the window where she’d just seconds before lit the candle. From far away, she could hear the pounding of a fist on wood, someone shouting her name. Part of her knew it was Saul, trying to get in, but another part — the part present in this room at this moment — focused only on what she couldn’t see and could barely hear.

More strange sounds — flesh hitting flesh and whimpers and ragged breathing — came from the corner. Shadows moved, rocking fast. “Oh God,” she moaned. “Please, no.”

As if in response to her pleading, the candle in her hand flared brightly, as did the one behind her, illuminating the room until she could see the figures in the corner just well enough to recognize her brother.

“Sean!” she cried. He looked up at her from his position on the floor, on all fours, naked, being pounded from behind, just as he had been in the vision she’d seen on the laptop. His hair matted and sweaty, stuck to his forehead, one eye swollen shut while the other filled with blood that spilled down his cheek in a slow rivulet. Mouth pulverized and pulled back in a grimace of agony, he seemed to be searching for where the voice was coming from, just as she had been searching moments before. “Sean, I’m right here!” She moved forward as her words caused Sean’s rapist to look up at her, revealing his own face, twisted in sexual, predatory release.

The rapist was Sean, holding himself by the hips, fucking himself with such violent force that Karen could clearly see the blood flowing down the inside of Sean’s — the victim Sean’s — thighs.

Her brother. Both men, her brother.

“TWO MEN HAVE THE CARCASS!” a voice hissed directly into her ear, so close she could feel air brushing her cheek.

She reeled away, screaming, raising the candle in that direction. A shadow flittered away to where the candlelight couldn’t touch it.

“None of this is real,” she whispered. “Just hallucinations.” But where Sean — both Sean’s — had just been, there was now a little girl in an old fashioned high-collared white dress. The girl stared at Karen and began walking towards her.

But no, that wasn’t quite right. She wasn’t getting any closer to Karen, though her legs were clearly moving in a walking motion. She was walking, but going nowhere.

Karen’s whole body began to shake as her bladder let go. Warmth oozed down her legs, but she hardly noticed. Her eyes were on the walking girl and, as Karen watched, the little girl held her right arm straight out from the side of her body. Beginning at the shoulder, the arm writhed under the sleeve of the dress in a way that was definitely not normal.

The arm grew wider, fatter, tearing the fabric of the sleeve, splitting the skin beneath it. There was no blood, but Karen could clearly make out the bone beneath the skin.

But no. Not quite bone. It was too dark to be bone, even in this light she could see that.

As if some invisible zipper were opening in the child’s arm, the skin fell away, disappearing completely before it hit the floor and whatever it was inside the arm began to grow tendrils that shot off from the main stem.

A branch, Karen realized. A tree branch was sprouting from the child’s shoulder as the girl stood there and simply stared at her, seemingly oblivious to what her body was doing.

Soon the child held her other arm out from her side and it too began to morph before Karen’s eyes.

“No.” Karen shook her head. “No.” The word, at first a soft mewling sound, quickly became the shriek of the terminally insane. Karen pressed the heels of her hands hard against her closed eyes, sinking to the floor where she remained for an unknowable amount of time.

She’d screamed herself raw long ago, it seemed, when she felt something touch her. She made no sound, resisted having her hands pulled away from her face, but the grip around her wrists was too strong.

Light punched against her closed eyelids and she squeezed her eyes tightly closed, not wanting to see the next horror, knowing her mind would snap if she did, snap and drift away like so much useless space trash floating through oblivion for all eternity.

She heard voices, but made no attempt to understand them, blocking them out. She would listen no more. She would see no more. She would feel nothing ever again, forget everything, become no more than a collapsed star falling in on herself and away from herself, never to return.

Never to return.