“For all we know, they’ve tried to pull the house down, demolish it but somehow they never have. It still stands there, in fearful obscurity.
“Exactly this day every year, two people disappear from their homes and are never seen again; at least that’s what they say. People who go to look for them in the Bode residence never return.”
Mark stopped and swallowed in air. Then he took a long gulp of the drink served. His eyes rolled upwards, lost in thought.
“But we know they’re just tales… formulated to trouble the mind,” Judd said. “There’re no such things as haunted houses.” Then he smirked. “Haunted houses.”
“It’s perfect!” Gail’s remark drew Mark into presentness, threw Judd into surprise. “How far away is it?”
“C’mon,” Judd said. “Don’t tell me you believe all that… crap!”
“If you’ve seen half the things I’ve seen, then you would believe. Now will any of you tell me where I can find this place?”
“I can but I’m not sure you should; at least wait until tomorrow. Not that I believe the stories but it’s not safe today and it’s night already.” Mark advised
“We’ve never had a better timing,” Gail said. “We could never be more opportune. The closer we are to paranormal activity, the more we understand.”
“It’s dangerous, unsafe.”
“It’s our job. But if you too boobies are too chicken to show me where it is…”
That jolted Judd. He felt his pride smashed on the floor. He disliked being called a wimp.
“We’ll take you there,” Judd said and felt his pride returning.
“We?” Mark said.
“Sorry, you’re not coming?”
“Of course I am. Besides if we don’t, you’ll still go anyway. I want to be sure you’ll be okay.” Mark replied.
“Aren’t you a darling,” Gail said erotically. “I have a minivan outside. Let’s go.”
As she led the way, Judd playfully punched Mark on the shoulder. “Yeah, you can have this one, mate.”
###
GAIL turned off the engine. Judd and Mark stepped out. She followed.
“Here we are,” Mark declared.
They stood in front of a shadowy overgrown thicket. It looked like a very minute wilderness. A dense mess of tangling masses of dark-green had heavily infested the walkway. They could see the silhouette of the burnt house set against the moonlight. It stood there, gaping, grim and silent.
Gail found a path through the long stands of the overgrown grasses. Thanks to the heavy clustering of the bushes, she realized they were going to need help to push further.
“This is the way I think,” she declared and returned to the van, going to its back to obtain some things. She returned holding two torches with long handles, an E.M.F. reader and two long knives. They reflected the moonlight.
The device was emitting a series of loud, rasp, white noises.
“Wow. Some real ghost activity going on here,” she said cheerfully. Judd looked at the device with distrust. She handed Judd and Mark a torch each and a knife.
Mark looked at the blade. “What do we need this for? No offense, but I don’t think we can slice ghosts with this. There’s a reason why they’re called ghosts.”
“Plus I can punch harder than that blade can cut,” Judd added.
“Sillies,” she said mockingly. “It’s for clearing a path.” She turned off the decoder. “You guys go on. I called dad and he’s on the way so I’m expected to meet him here. We’ll join you as soon as he arrives.”
Judd and Mark turned to face the grasses and the house behind it. She felt fear and indecision emanating from them.
She stepped to Mark’s side, bringing her lips close to his ears. “When this is over, we’re going to have a lot of fun.” Then she pulled his hand and made it run all the way up her thighs.
It proved an effective incentive. In a few seconds she heard Judd calling after Mark from the midst of the bushy cluster.
She smiled. Now the carefully designed game was in play.
###
ABIGAIL heard the door slam behind her. She didn’t look up even after the black coated figure dropped beside her on the cold grassy sand. Festus looked up at the house that’d been his once upon a time.
“You did them in, I believe,” he remarked.
She nodded. “Feminine wiles. Boys will be boys, dad.”
“True,” he said. He looked sideways to see her face. She stared with intent towards the thicket.
“They were so trusting; so gullible.”
“They always are, my child. I believe you can take care of them yourself.”
“I brought them all the way here without once using ataxia and mind control. Figures.”
“That’s my girl,” he smiled. He sniffed the air. “Time has passed. Things have changed.”
She nodded. “It’s been thirteen years. The place has developed. I was thinking we should move forward too, dad.”
“You mean?”
“Two bodies,” she said, “just too small now. The population is rising. Three extra will do.”
“I’ll consider that, my munchkin.”
She thought of Mark. When this is over, we’re going to have a lot of fun. Wrong! The fun just got started. And she was going to enjoy every minute of it.
*****
ABOUT THE BOOK
THIS story had lingered in my head before I published my third book, a short story ‘Body Parts For Hire’. I wanted to build the theme around a haunted house, different from all others. A haunted house where people go to kill themselves.
There had to be something drawing them there and it had to be in the form of a ghost. That developed into a sub-story and I thought of necromancy and I was like why not. And why not make it advanced too. The living controls the dead and the dead controls the living.
This provided the plot for Festus and Abigail Bode (though there wasn’t much of her till the late chapters but well, it’s a novelette) and subsequently Joel Broker and Gerry.
I also didn’t primarily plan on using the suspense ending. I actually had a ‘happy’ ending plot that would’ve gone something like (*summarized):
GERRY woke up. The little dead girl slumped on the doorway was the new addition to the bodies lying about. He believed she must’ve been Abigail Bode’s carrier. Had her father gone through to her? Had he been successful? Was he free of being a carrier?
While these questions raked his mind, Festus’ voice slipped into his consciousness.
“It’s done.”
Oh, he was still here. “What’s done?”
“I have reached a compromise with her.”
“Pray tell.”
“This day every year, there’ll be a reoccurrence.”
“I thought you stopped it.”
“I’m not finished yet. I’ll remain here in this house and ensure that she doesn’t enter.”
End point is three years later or less, Gerry has bought the Bode residence in his name and has rebuilt it. People still come there to kill themselves under the influence of Abigail but those that are early enough to hole up within the house would be saved.
A friend told me that ending was predictable and that contradicted with my rule of every horror book I read, or write – predictability. So I did away with it and adopted another one.
I hope you enjoyed this piece. If you did, please feel free to return to my profile to download my other books and leave reviews. Many authors cherish reviews more than sales made (actually I cherish the sales a great deal too). You help them find faults, help them improve.
Check my About the Author to view and link to my social networking sockets.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Irma Berenice Wheeler for all of her encouragements to me in the course of this work.
Also thanks to Adam Patterson for his encouragement as expressed in his review of Body Parts for Hire. He gave me the boost to complete this piece.
/> Biggest thanks to you, dearest readers, for sharing in this chiller with me. The story is never complete without you. I hope I can continue to serve you better.
An Excerpt From Hunted: Jake The Ripper by Artie Margrave
IT was pitch black. The darkness was his friend. The night had worn on. It felt sometime around two. He had jumped all the way through the forest. He had little bearing of where he was but he knew where he was headed and he knew he was safe now. Safe again. But for how long?
Jake looked back. He saw dim lights in the distance twinkling in their tens. The hunters were far away now. He’d crossed the backup without alerting them. They were over two dozen. He’d stretched a fortune of distance between himself and them. Now he had the luxury of thought.
He inspected his two arrow wounds. The older wound had healed completely. Pale, wrinkled flesh had filled the hole that had bled. The second one was still open but it dripped less blood.
The hunters had outsmarted him twice. They’d killed his brood, his brothers, every one of them, even those from bits of his old life. Something that had seemed very much impossible to do.
That was the thing: all of his primary senses were honed to perfection the day he died and resurrected. His eyesight was better than the hawk’s, his sense of smell sharper than the shark’s. He grew hearing sharper than the owl’s. He was also stronger, more flexible, tread long distances meant to take him hours in minutes and endurance, endurance that bettered the Dipodomys.
He also had the gift of thought transference. Telepathy. The Psychic communication. He could read minds, feel thoughts, particularly with people he was in some way connected to. He also had the ability to push thoughts into people but he hated it. There was nothing worse than being controlled. Being used. Forced to do against one’s own will.
Forced to flee.
He was also blessed with the ultimate gift – Immortality. The span of his life was increased hundred-folds. Unending! He could live for decades, centuries even and wouldn’t age a minute.
However, all of these abilities came with a price. A curse. Of course, why wouldn’t they? They were all too good to be true. Every contract had loopholes. His, as well as his kind, had an arcane lust for blood as everlasting as their life span. His body needed blood to stay fit. Blood was the nutrient that kept his pigment fresh and kept him healthy.
For centuries, his kind had lived off people, killing them, infecting others, bringing up a dysfunctional bloodline. There was no denying that huge fact. He was a vampire. It was little wonder they had been hunted ever since. The hunters had studied them over the years. They’d grown smarter. And they had slaughtered them till he was just one left.
He, he’d gathered a bunch of ‘misfits’ together. Many of them hadn’t come to terms with their vampirisms yet. They believed they were lost for salvation and had no place among the free living people. He became their Xavier. Jake Xavier. He brought them together, made them his family. Some of them had killed to survive, killed a mighty few. He turned them around. He gave them hope. He taught them how to live off animals. Animal blood was definitely not as juicy, delicious as human blood but he taught them to take animal blood and go by. And it worked.
The people identified them as Rippers. His merry band of Rippers. Why? They always left a bloody mess in their wake. Cow limbs torn apart, horse bowels flared to the public, one hoof here, a bloody dislodged chest there, probably some spilled random animal’s guts soaked up in pig fats, those sorts of things. It was how they caught their fun, how they lived their life. The people complained bitterly but hey, it was rather the animals than them. They were satisfied. He was satisfied. The hunters weren’t.
They were smart, he gave them that. He was strong, flexible, sharpest in all of his senses, immortal, but they were clever. And they had weapons. Weapons plus brains equals a very formidable foe. There was every reason to fear them and all of those reasons centered on him. He was the last one so figures.
Big Stan was the mad leader of their merry band of hunters. He was there when the hunters had stormed his nest and turned it into a bloodbath. He’d escaped, just barely. He hadn’t seen the Mad Prophet that time and wasn’t as scared of him as he was now.
Half of the moon had been eaten up by the night. He looked behind him. The tens of twinkling lights were still afar off.
Old Compshire was a little less than hundred kilometers before him. He believed he could get there unhurt. Get there and then what? The small town was all of the time quiet, organized, not the kind of place to be suspected for hosting ‘monsters’ like him.
It was a small town and those hunters were a mighty plenty. They could comb the place in seconds. But as small as Compshire was, it had a vast number of hiding places. Other vampires had made nests there; in dried up wells, underground trenches, even some in old forgotten houses with old forgotten dungeons, at the cemetery…
He knew where he had to go. There he believed he could survive the rest of the night and faintly, hopefully, the day. He’d stayed at Compshire several times in the past and knew the town even better than the hunters. The tiny town had its own dark secrets too. Ghouls against Vampires classics. That was many a decade ago.
He sighed, breathed out, and was beginning to relax but his senses tinged startlingly. That familiar sound, he was hearing it again. Soft, whispering drums, beating in twos. Half of a second between the two and a second after the two, intermittent, continuous. Then another, distinct from the first, just as intermittent. Then two others much faster than the first two.
Heartbeats!
He attuned his hearing, just in time. A metallic scraping sound of something slicing through the air. He dodged and the arrow zoomed past his ear.
“Found him, papa,” a sickly voice declared.
*****
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TOBI is a developing writer currently pursuing a degree in Computer Science. Because of his timeless obsession for books, he’s considering becoming a librarian in the distant future. With your reviews he hopes to develop into a better writer. He currently lives in Lagos, Nigeria.
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