Victor had been near the back of the bookstore where she worked, on his knees, pretending to scan the bindings of old hardcover books. The girl’s voice echoed through the store and teased him with its sensuality like those mythological creatures and their songs that lured sailers to their death.
The girl was no beast. She was an innocent, perhaps marked for death as the old world gave way to the New Time, but he would give her a chance to save herself. At least for a while.
It was the how of this situation he had never fully calculated. He couldn’t simply speak to her. She would see the truth of his nature, discover he was a cleanser, and rebuke him. Then he would have to kill her.
For now, he would stay out of the way. Trail them up the mountain. Hide in the distance. Wait for his opportunity.
Like when the rats came out. He could spend hours waiting in the dark of his basement. His hearing would get fuzzy and then adjust to the silence. His eyes would find the outline of the furniture and then gradually reveal their hidden dimensions. If he waited long enough, his senses grew super keen.
Then the rats had no chance.
Sometimes he killed them outright. Other times he amputated their legs and then gradually sliced open their bellies to see how long they would keep fighting to live.
The struggle could last for some time.
He would trust in his patience, in his senses, in his self-control. In the power the universe had given him.
That was easy to do when his mind wasn’t flooded with images of the girl on her knees before him, mouth wide. In those fantasies, her eyes were black holes that cried tears of blood.
Like the tears the trees cried on the mountain.
The girl and her father were at a table in one of the windows. The glare from the sun painted the girl in a holy aura like a giant halo.
Two teenage boys were smoking on the opposite side of the front stairs. They were laughing about something.
Victor got out of the car and opened his trunk. He checked his supplies. He hoped the rifle would not be necessary. He had never fired one. It was the same kind Hugo Herrera had used. He must have been quick, reloading and firing to kill five people without anyone stopping him.
Too quick to almost be unbelievable. Why didn’t anyone try to stop him?
Because in those final minutes, everyone in that diner knew the bell of a special hour had rung. People spend lifetimes looking forward to things but when destiny catches up with them they are helpless.
We are all helpless before the Great Plan.
Victor caressed his backpack. The hunting knives were in there. Set of seven. Each sharpened and polished. Sometimes he stared at his reflection in those blades and imagined blood traversing the grooves like open veins.
He grinned.
____________________________
For a sample of J.T. Warren’s haunted house novel, HUDSON HOUSE, keep reading …
HUDSON HOUSE
by J.T. Warren
PART ONE—1984
CHAPTER 1
The boys stood together at the end of the gravel driveway with their jackets flapping in the October breeze and the sun setting behind them. Tommy Pomeroy snorted and spat a clump of yellow phlegm onto a patch of crab grass. Eric Hunter and Ed Forlure turned from the looming house, glanced at the spit. They didn’t say anything—the spit summed it all up.
Eric stepped forward, actually onto the driveway. Tommy snorted behind him and spat again. Eric knew what that meant: Hurry up.
Brushstrokes of sunlight painted the front of the house in orange and red; a crimson blade streaked across the second floor windows like a bleeding gash. Those windows were the house’s dead eyes and the porch its rancid mouth, the four pillars its rotting teeth. To go up the front steps onto the porch was to walk onto its tongue and smell its moldy wood breath, to enter the front door …
“Are you fagging out?” Tommy asked.
Eric’s mother said Tommy was a smooth-talker, but sometimes Tommy’s voice made Eric cringe; it was like when his brother Steve called him “a little shit.” Eric shook his head.
“Then go,” Tommy said.
His feet did not want to. If the house were a monster then the two third-floor windows that protruded from the roof were extra eyes that grew from the house’s forehead like tumors. Sometimes things moved in those windows. Sometimes things swayed back and forth.
A girl had hanged herself up there. She used a few of her father’s neckties twirled together, wrapped one end around a roof support beam and the other around her neck. Her father didn’t even know it happened until late that night when the knot broke and her body dropped to the floor. People said she did it because the house made her do it.
Eric took another step toward the house and Tommy applauded. “This is really exciting, Eric,” he said. “Great show, buddy.”
Eric bit his lip and continued walking. He heard his mother’s warning: Stay away from Hudson House, Eric. Don’t go near it. It isn’t safe.
A sheet of wood covered the first-floor window as did sheets for the second-floor windows and, presumably, the ones on the side and in back—but not the windows on the third floor, the ones that stretched out of the roof like frog’s eyes. The gravel driveway petered out into the overgrown lawn. From the driveway, a slate walkway led out into the yard and then turned at a right angle toward the porch steps. The other houses in the neighborhood were not like this; most houses had garages behind them or attached, and if there was a walkway to the porch, it started at the sidewalk.
Eric paused at the edge of the slate path. Evergreen trees lined both sides of the property continuing behind the house, completely blocking the neighbors. A maple tree towered in the front yard like a giant sentry. Its gnarly arms swayed and orange leaves wafted down.
A serial killer had lived here. Hox Grent. Years ago, he terrorized the neighborhood, stealing kids, dragging them back here and slaughtering them. Most of the bodies were never found, only occasional pieces.
Eric stepped onto the slate walkway. Blades of grass stuck out of jagged cracks like the fingers of people buried alive who had managed to break the surface before choking to death on dirt. Somewhere a dog barked; it sounded like a warning.
“Wait.”
Eric had been holding his breath and now released it. Ed ran up the driveway and stopped next to him. He held out a flashlight. “Here.”
“I don’t want to do this,” Eric said.
For a moment it seemed that Ed might respond, perhaps offer some encouraging words or even tell him not to go through with it. Instead, Ed nudged him with the flashlight until Eric took it and then Ed ran back to the sidewalk. Eric hadn’t brought his own flashlight because part of him hadn’t accepted he’d be in this position; the other part of him knew that a flashlight wouldn’t protect him anyhow. Despite that, the weight of the two D-batteries inside the plastic casing reassured him. He turned it on.
“Any day,” Tommy said.
The front steps sagged in the middle like they were made out of cardboard and the color ranged from white on the edges of the steps to dry, peeling tan in the middle where thousands of footfalls had fallen before him. And of those people, how many had stepped here for the last time? How many times had Hox Grent’s feet scuffed these steps?
Strong wind beat around the house and made it groan in a million places like the joints in an old man’s body. Perhaps the house was waking up. Maybe the girl was upstairs, too, swinging. Maybe she’d come down and say hello.