THE BURNT REFUGE
By Artie Margrave
The Burnt Refuge
By Artie Margrave
Copyright © 2012 Artie Margrave
Cover image was collected from the internet and I don’t claim ownership of it. If it’s yours and you’d like it removed, please contact me at
[email protected] This is a work of fiction. The events and characters described herein are imaginary and are not intended to refer to specific places or living persons. Any resemblance to any person or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All Rights Reserved
No part of this eBook may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the express written consent of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Other works by Artie Margrave includes:
Hunted: Jake the Ripper, a novelette
The Curse of the Chest, a novella
Body Parts For Hire, a short story
For Ms. Rose Wickler
I hope you keep hold of your true reality
It‘s what endears you to everybody, even me.
THE BURNT REFUGE
*****
THE inhumanity that people breed is what gives birth to a grudge. A grudge, when nurtured well with fear and utter hatred of the unknown ultimately births pure evil. Once pure evil is born, it never dies. It can only be suppressed, restrained. Trying to kill it only makes it stronger.
*****
CHAPTER ONE
YES, this is the place.
Gerry Broker stopped in front of what was still living, upright remains of a completely burnt duplex. It stood, enshrouded by months of an untended lawn that consisted chiefly of carpetweed and ragweed that made it look like it’d sprung out of the earth. Portions of the house’s roofing had taken a good deal of erosion that there was little left of it to protect the house from above and although the afternoon sun’s rays splashed on the house, it looked mysteriously dark, both from the inside and on the outside. The inglorious blackness of the burns inflicted upon the house, coupled with the darkness the house retained around itself made it look reminiscent of one of those documented haunted houses.
Gerry hated haunted houses. He knew he didn’t want to go in there. It looked scary enough from the outside. His stomach constricted at an invisible warning.
The voice in his head understood the feeling but it spoke without sympathy.
If you don’t go in now, you will certainly fall prey to the horrors of which you have seen in your head.
“Do I really have to go in there?” Gerry asked, more to his shuddering self than to the voice in his head. The voice beat him to an answer.
You will be safe there, I’ve said, and you need be witness to what is going to happen.
“Whose house is it… was it?” he asked again, feeling the tightening of his stomach once more. It wasn’t a good sign. It had never been a good sign for him.
It belonged to a family, the voice said after a few seconds delay in which Gerry detected restiveness. Now you can keep asking questions or you can go and ask who is home. The time is nearly upon us.
Gerry reluctantly pushed his feet forward. He forded the sea of weeds with abandon and advanced upon the house. Nearing it, he imagined it swaying and was tempted to turn but he wanted to know what originally brought him here, why the voice brought him here.
Somewhere off to the side, he detected two stakes that’d been pushed far into the ground. They were black. One had tilted to its left side. A little push was enough to send it to its side on the sand.
Getting to the house’s rain-washed verandah, he discovered that the top half of the door had fallen off its hinge, probably due to rust and chars, he wasn’t sure, and it was replete with lice-eaten holes. It gave him a view of the darkness he was to be familiar with. However, seeing it inside scared him to pieces.
He entered with fearful uncertainty.
###
THE voice had started in Gerry’s head two months ago, after the cremation of his grandfather, Joel Broker Senior’s body. Senior had been the oldest surviving Broker in the family and the only other one besides him. Gerry’s dad, Joel Broker Junior had died of a severe heart attack barely three months back, leaving him with the imperative responsibility of checking on Senior once weekly.
Senior was a retired cop and a patient at Memorial’s Nursing Home, bound to a wheelchair due to paraplegia. He’d come that way almost seven months back. Dad had said that the place he’d retired from had put him in that misfortunate condition. He’d never given any concrete explanation though.
Merging the care of Senior with his work as the public relations person; more precisely the spinmeister of The Adonai foundation, a medical research organisation that specialised on developing vaccines and toxin anti toxins for virulent disease-causing microorganisms, hadn’t been tasking at all. He’d observed the former duty well in respect of his father and had even gotten along with the old man too.
However, when Senior died, Gerry was relieved. For one, he’d grown quite fond of the man that the depression of seeing him in the bondage of the wheelchair had gotten overwhelming.
And then there were the dreams too. Gerry’d first ascribed them to the depression until they became so vivid and intense that they cost him nights of sleep and bought him worry. When he actually managed to sleep, he would wake feeling drained and feel pains on several parts of his body, particularly his chest.
The most he usually made of his dreams were tongues of rapidly swirling flames, and a childlike voice crying in anguish from its fiery midst. He never understood it. It drove him into several panic attacks.
The day Senior died, the dreams stopped... and for a week Gerry had absolute peace of mind. And then the voice came too and spoiled everything.
He thought it was a figment of his thought, something about the after-effect of the nightmares. It started as a whisper but became persistent over the weeks until it seemed to control everything he did. And then it grew in consciousness, awareness, like a secondary being born within him. Strangely, it knew who he was, who his father was and his granddad – and their names too. It scared him at first. He believed he was out of his mind, his head out of sorts but the voice had a distinct talent of soothing that he forgot about the dreams that’d plagued his mind altogether.
And after a while, it deceptively replaced those dreams with a terrible vision, one that always recurred. A land strewn with dead people, gothic, grotesque and inhumanly gross. Every time he challenged the voice, it kept repeating that he had a duty to perform somewhere and he was losing time fast. It was an enigma, almost impossible to comprehend.
Being unable to cope successfully at work, he quit. A mistake he committed quite rashly, for after this, the voice had all the freedom of time to bother him. He hated it mightily.
Finally he succumbed to its pressure and asked what it wanted from him. Its answer was simple, precise, and direct; the hallmarks of an order, only subtler: Go to Queening, Massachusetts.
The name had struck a chord with the memory in the sanity he had left. Searching through Senior’s belongings, he’d fallen upon Senior’s badge and ID card of office. He’d been a Sergeant at Queening. He’d also stumbled across a tiny scrap of paper among the possessions on which the words ‘unfinished duty’ and the date ‘21st September’ were inscribed roughly.
With the voice and that although little evidence, he’d obeyed and came to Massachusetts.
#
Queening was a s
mall town of a population of about twenty thousand. It hadn’t been difficult to locate but when he’d gotten there, he wasn’t sure he was in it. The streets were weirdly empty and the houses eerily quiet; it was like a ghost town. Not sure why and not wanting to check around, he’d followed the compass that was the voice in his head.
After about three hours of trekking over naked roads, through dust and on piercing stones with the sun flogging his body with searing heat, the voice entered into his head again.
Yes, this is the place.
###
CHAPTER TWO
WALKING into the darkness of the house, he immediately hated the voice in his head once more. He hated that it had pushed him in here, despite all the reassurance garbage. There was nothing reassuring; nothing good about this place. The acrid smell of smoke crept into his nose. It brought to mind the cremation of Senior; same sulfurous smell.
He wanted to turn back but once again, the pestering voice was a step ahead. Its voice was soothing this time. He hated it when the voice got that way.
There’s nothing here. You have nothing to fear.
He expected the worst straightaway.
Still, the longer he stood at the entrance he realized that the voice was probably right. It was a bundle of emptiness and silence inside. It was just as the streets of Queening was, but worse. Its silence was almost earsplitting and its emptiness, engulfing.
He issued a sigh of calmness. All that the place needed was light. He searched his pocket and found his lighter. His mind instantly went to the cigarette pack in his other pocket. That, his ATM card and a few dollars were the only things he’d brought along. He could never forget his cigarette even if he forgot the others. It kept him calm usually; kept the voice out of his head occasionally.
He removed the lighter from his pocket and started to ignite it.
Don’t light that thing!
The voice came so abruptly that his heart leapt two feet out of his chest. When he was sure it’d returned, he asked, “Why?”
You want to torch the house?
Gerry looked around. “I see no harm there, considering someone had done a much better job.”
There are some things you just can’t do here.
“It’s a complete ramshackle. God knows how long ago. I don’t even understand why it’s still standing.”
Now listen to me! The voice ordered aggressively and wanted to add something but there was no more. Gerry felt a sigh of calmness issued in his head, like the one he’d given barely minutes ago. It made him wonder. Could the voice actually do that? What more could it do inside his head? How much access did it have? How did it even get in?
There should be a dynamo torch, actually two, in the corner, just beneath the window.
Yeah, like you’ve been here before. And reality dawned on him. The voice had brought him here, led him every step of the way from Manhattan to a seemingly long forgotten, burnt, abandoned house and now it was telling him where certain tools in the house were. He was sure the voice had originated from here. What did it want from him? Why was Senior involved?
Gerry pushed those thoughts down for later assessment and for the first time noticed the windows; the two of them. They were as dark as the house was, with dirt. Whatever light they were supposed to be admitting inside they rejected. It was the reason he’d not detected them earlier. They’d also been pulled shut.
Gerry made for them. On the way, his fibula painfully crashed into a wooden stool and he cursed. The house looked empty. It didn’t mean it was.
Getting to the window, he was surprised to see how bright outside was. It was a distressingly sharp contrast to where he stood. He thought of pulling the window open but he also thought of getting rebuked by the voice about doing what he wasn’t told to. How he hated that voice.
He fingered the darkness underneath the window till his fingers came in contact with the cold torches. He picked one and turned it on. It had a dull light that failed to test the darkness. The other torch did much better. All it needed was a little charge. He began to shake it up and down alternately, listening to the rhythmic sound that the dynamo’s coil battery made as it hit the bottom and top repeatedly.
Finally he stopped and put it on. The resultant effect of his exercise was highly encouraging. A brighter light shone. It scared some of the darkness away.
Fair enough, the voice popped back into his head. It’d been occupied briefly by his previous exercise.
He allowed the light roam the house and found that it was worse than the outside was. It was probably the living room; which was now the dead room. Everything inside had been engulfed by the flames that had burnt this house down. Charred remains and not much of it were all he could see and those that were manageably in better shape, he could barely identify.
Half of a blackened table had fallen on its side due to the loss of its other two legs. Only one chair remained and that was badly burnt as well. The others were definitely amongst the scattered ashes that carpeted the floor. There was also the stool he’d previously stumbled into; an undead survivor in a completely dead world. On the walls he caught sight of scorched picture frames that had lost pieces of wood and had jutting or hanging pieces of shrivelled papery ashes.
The house was also as filthy as it was burnt. Cockroaches had made themselves playgrounds and hide-and-seek spots through the walls. Geckos ran riot. Cobwebs were intricate patchworks designed in strategic places and strategic places were very much every free space the spiders could find.
Searching through the house, arduously ignoring the filth, his light stumbled on a stairway. It led to the upper sections of the house and more darkness. Parts of its rails were missing. His light found much of them jutting out from beneath the stairs. Rung after rung of the stairs were carpeted lightly with black dirt. He resisted the thought of checking upstairs out and remained where he was.
“Not much here,” Gerry said. His voice echoed eerily through the house. He thought he felt it sway slightly. “What happened here? Did the family move out in time or…?”
And a sick thought rushed into his head. Had somebody died here? Was that the reason the voice brought him here? What was he supposed to see? He decided to find solace in the voice, something he’d never done before.
“What am I supposed to do now?”
It answered almost immediately. Now we wait and watch events unfold.
“Great.” was Gerry’s response. He sent the light of the torch, which was beginning to dull, back to the room and once again noticed the badly burnt chair. Being the comfiest place he could find, he walked over to it and sank himself. The moment he fell on it, its left arm fell off and he was forced to spring up alertly. Noticing there was no immediate danger he returned to it and rested his head.
He did not know when he went.
###
“BURN it down!!”
The cacophonous voices sprung from nothing and filled his ears. Gerry jumped up; at least he tried to before finding himself already standing.
He looked around him. The room had changed, like he’d been transported to somewhere else.
Unlike the black, ashen living room, this room had colour. He noticed a bed lying a few centimeters from him. It wasn’t burnt. Nothing in this room was burnt. A white, diamond-patterned bed sheet hung from the bed to the floor. A closet stood beside the bed, ajar.
Beside him, built into the wall was the make-up section: a chair, a desk containing everything from hair cream to eyeliners and a mirror that would directly face the person sitting on the chair. It had an aura of femininity. From the quality of the different cosmetic stuffs, he believed it to be either the woman-of-the-house’s or for a spoilt teenage girl.
And then a loud bang made him shake. He suddenly noticed he was standing in front of the window and the noises outside began to fill him again.
He pulled the window open and instantly discovered that he was upstairs. How? He looked down and could hardly contain the fracas going on outside. It
was serious stuff, alarming and grave.
“Burn them. Yes! Let them burn! Let the fucking witches burn! The house cannot save you!” Their chants of dissent soared in conflicting volumes, sharpness and tone. There were no less than six scores; men, women and children altogether. From the look of things, it seemed they were trying to get in or bring the house down trying. Each person brandished a flambeau. Someone was going around torching them.
What in God’s name was going on?
“Witches! Witches! Let them burn! Burn them down!”
The cries went on and as he predicted, the people began to throw the flambeau at the house. The fire caught the house than the house did the fire. Rapidly, it spread. As it consumed, the people screamed with glee.
No sooner had they exhausted themselves of their flambeaus than another set of flambeaus began to go round. To those it didn’t reach, they grabbed pitchforks and clubs and stones and began to attack a boundary Gerry believed to be the door. He gave credit to it. It was doing a good job in keeping the mob out. But it was also keeping whoever was inside in, including him and the house wasn’t holding its own against the incessant attacks of fire. The fire was spreading freely. The walls were slowly burning into the house. The roof was already blazing. Thick clouds of smoke billowed and drifted carelessly into the sky.
Then he heard a shaken voice. It came from beneath him. It belonged to a girl. It was loud, fraught with fear.
“We cannot linger here, dad!”
That voice. He’d heard it several times before, in the dreams before the voice came; when he used to check on Senior. Add that to the flames and he realized he was in his dream; only this time it was at its vividest, as if he was living in it; as if he was living it.
“We can’t go out there either,” a thick manly voice responded, “we’ll be ripped apart. We’re safer here.” And in a reduced volume added, “How did it get to this? She was only trying to help.”
He thought of going downstairs. Troubled voices floated up to him.
There were people inside this house. Why were the people outside trying to kill them? Why were they crying ‘witches’? Was someone else in this house? Were they harboring a fugitive?
Before fully considering that option, he registered and ducked just in time as a well-aimed torch sailed over his head and landed behind him inside the room.