Now he realized that the groaning noise had changed. It no longer seemed to be rising from the floor. Now it seemed to be specifically coming from the foyer, as if the source of the noise was collecting itself into a singular location. In his mind, he could almost see something forming there, a vague shape slowly drawing itself together, materializing from thin air.
But this was merely his imagination. He’d always had a good imagination. Until now, he’d always considered it an asset. Now, he could do without the horror movie that was stubbornly playing in his mind, adding to his overwhelming fear.
He didn’t need his imagination to realize that it was getting closer. He could hear it moving toward him. He could almost feel it.
Another hallway led away from the kitchen, toward the back of the house. He took it.
Behind him, the groaning tightened into something like a voice. It became a moaning, and then a wailing. The sound chilled his blood.
Another set of stairs waited at the end of the hallway. Remembering the window by which he’d entered the house, he climbed three flights of steps two at a time, hoping he’d find himself back in the same part of the house.
By the time he remembered that there was no way down from the roof (the whole purpose of actually entering the house in the first place), he’d already found himself in another hallway, making his way past numerous spacious bedrooms.
He paused at an intersection between two corridors and considered his choices.
Something about the layout of the house confounded him. It was less like a house than a hotel, but not nearly as convenient.
Behind him, the wailing began to fade into something more like a murmur. Somehow this struck him as even more unsettling.
He turned left and ran to the end of the hallway. There he found yet another staircase, which he took down one flight to a large, spacious room that might have been either a banquet room or a ballroom.
This didn’t feel right. He had the strangest sensation that he wasn’t traveling through this house in any logical way. As odd as it sounded, it seemed like he was jumping from one side of the house to the other.
He stood in the middle of this room and turned slowly in a circle, listening.
Suddenly he wasn’t sure where the murmuring was coming from. It seemed to be moving, originating from one door, then another on the other side of the room, then back again, then to the far corner.
What the hell was going on?
He considered breaking a window and fleeing the house the way he entered, but there was nothing to break the glass with. There was nothing in the house that wasn’t built in. And the windows in this room were too high to kick out with his foot.
He chose a door at random and fled, hoping desperately that he didn’t run headlong into something horrible. He found himself in yet another hallway.
Now the murmuring was behind him. And it was transforming again, growing, swelling into something even more disturbing, something he could almost comprehend.
Somehow, he was sure that he never wanted to know what this horrible voice was saying.
Desperate, terrified out of his mind, he ran to the end of the hall, descended another set of steps as quickly as he could, and rushed down yet another hallway.
He stopped. The murmuring was now a muttering. And it was coming from in front of him.
Again, he had that weird sensation of traveling through the house in weird ways. Though he’d just descended a flight of stairs, he had the strangest feeling that he had actually ended up on a higher floor.
Another hallway intersected this one at its midpoint. He hurried there and listened, but the muttering seemed to come from every direction at once.
All these choices seemed wrong.
He turned back the way he’d come and was surprised to see a young girl standing in the middle of the hallway, staring back at him.
She was perhaps thirteen, older than the little girls in The Shining, but still he managed to appreciate the similarities. She was dressed for summer in a pair of yellow shorts and a pink halter top, with long, brown hair and a pretty face. She was barefoot.
Seconds passed between them as the muttering rose, words that he desperately did not want to hear beginning to take form. His heart was racing. He couldn’t move. He didn’t know what to do.
Then the girl held a hand out to him. “Hurry,” she said. “Come with me.”
Going with the creepy little girl in the haunted house seemed like a very bad idea. But the alternative was definitely a very bad idea, so he took a leap of faith and ran to the girl.
She took his hand and led him into one of the rooms.
It appeared to be a bedroom, though there were still no furnishings. A single door stood on one wall, leading into a bathroom. She led him through this bathroom, through another door and into another bedroom, revealing both rooms to be part of one suite. Then she led him through the door of this second bedroom and out into the hall, right back where they started. Except that it was not exactly where they started. This wasn’t the same hallway.
Before he could grasp what just happened, she led him into another room, through what looked like it should be a closet but turned out to be a staircase, and then emerged into a living room of some sort, past what he was pretty sure was not the same kitchen he’d visited before, to another hallway that led them to yet another bedroom.
Every time they passed through a room, the mutterings grew fainter, until they were little more than a distant humming.
One last door carried them from a bedroom into some kind of electrical room with several massive fuse boxes mounted to concrete walls. There, the girl let go of his hand and sat down on the floor with her back against the wall and her knees drawn up in front of her.
This room was utterly silent.
“We’ll be safe here for a little while.”
“Okay,” said Eric, looking around. The walls and floor were concrete. Water lines passed from left to right overhead and thick bundles of cables ran across the ceiling and walls in every direction.
“What’s your name?”
“What? Oh. Eric.”
“Eric,” she repeated. “I like that name. I’m Isabelle.”
“That’s a pretty name,” Eric replied.
“Thanks.” She smiled sweetly and stared up at him without saying another word.
Eric stared back at her for a moment. He had no idea what he should say, where to even begin. This was already, without a doubt, the strangest day of his life. It had decisively won that title pretty well as soon as he’d finished that first enigmatic conversation with Annette, but he was repeatedly finding himself facing ever-weirder oddities as the day went on. And this mind-boggling house-hotel hybrid seemed to possess a weirdness of such profoundness that it classified as an oddity among the other things he’d seen.
“So…” he began at last, “you want to tell me what all that…stuff back there…”
“What the hell’s going on?”
“Yeah. That covers it, I think.”
Isabelle smiled. “I can’t really explain all of it. I don’t actually get most of it, honestly. Like, I don’t know why this particular room is safe. There’s no electricity, so it’s not that. But I think maybe it’s all the metal and wiring. Whatever it is, he doesn’t like to come down here.”
“Who’s ‘he?’”
“Altrusk.”
“Altrusk?”
“Used to be Isaac Altrusk. Though, I’m pretty sure that was a fake name. He was a petty con artist turned cult-leader turned creepy recluse turned…well…whatever he is now.”
Eric was surprised by the maturity of the girl’s vocabulary. Most of his high school students wouldn’t be able to come up with such a description.
“He started Gold Sunshine Resort.”
“The nudists?”
“Yeah. It was all a load of crap, though. He was a perv. It was just an excuse for him to look at little girls naked.”