Creep House: Horror Stories Read online

  After smoking, he lay in bed and stared at the shadows on the ceiling. He’d neglected to start a fire and was happy it wasn’t very cold. He went over his plan again and again. Maybe he should just get out. What was stopping him from doing that? Nothing, really. That would certainly be the easiest thing to do. He could try to get a decent night’s rest and head out that door first thing in the morning and hope like hell he didn’t run across that thing creeping through the woods. But he knew he wasn’t going to do that. This man’s resurrection had been something of a defeat to Figg. He didn’t like to lose. It was one of the reasons he’d never joined the ranks of decent society. He wasn’t on their playing field and would have lost repeatedly because he didn’t have the proper skill set. He wouldn’t have even been able to take the small daily failures. He would have probably ended up in jail. Just to prove he’d beaten his father once and for all, Figg had carried the man’s severed penis in his pocket until he’d lost it during a month-long bout of youthful indiscretion.

  He woke up the next morning unaware he’d even fallen asleep. He drank some water and pissed into the fireplace. The pain in his back was excruciating and the clamor in his head was back with a vengeance. The door and window seemed to be unmolested. He pried the board off the door. The dead man had left something for him.

  In front of the step was the carcass of the dog with the little girl’s head in place of its own. The hair was dirty with leaves entwined in it and her milked over eyes stared right at Figg. Beyond this creation was another one. A stake impaled the girl’s body between the legs. The dog’s head sat atop her body. Both creations were crawling with flies that Figg couldn’t hear over the deafening roar in his head. He went back into the shack and shut the door.

  The things outside bothered him in a profound way. In a number of ways, really. Figg had, over the years, made it a habit to kill people so he could eat them. It seemed like a rational, pragmatic, although perhaps ghoulish, thing to do. There had been some women he had had to kill to keep them from talking. He had usually ended up eating them, too. He would never describe anything he did as senseless or mindless. Not that the constructions outside were completely mindless. He thought there was definite intent there. Which brought him to another thing that worried him. Killing a black man who lived alone in the woods was one thing. Now he had the corpse of a little girl and her dog outside the place he’d overtaken. Not just their corpses, but their mutilated and molested corpses. Even Figg thought it was sick and he had a pretty bizarre code of ethics. Whatever was happening with the man he’d killed was not normal. Maybe he should invent a clause allowing him to leave without feeling as though he’d lost some battle. As far as he knew, he’d never had to deal with the supernatural before.

  But he knew he wasn’t going to leave.

  He still had some rope.

  He could build some kind of trap with that. Snag the monster around the ankles and dismantle him before moving on. Maybe he could even salvage the meat from the girl and the dog and plant himself here for a while. After all, he’d need sustenance and if he planned on staying, he’d need to get rid of the evidence. People would come looking for them. He guessed he’d go out and get started on the trap right away. If he stayed cooped up in this shack all day waiting for that thing to come back, he’d go insane.

  He smoked some more of the herbs and took the rope out into the woods.

  He’d need a sturdy branch.

  This time, passing the jumbled corpses and walking into the woods was like submerging himself in the ocean. Maybe the clamor was still there but it was pushed down to a level just above audible. He heard nothing else and seemed to be only aware of his surroundings by about a three-foot radius. He reached up and tested some branches, searching for the right amount of spring and sturdiness. He’d been here less than twenty-four hours and nothing that had happened had seemed right. He’d seen many strange things but nothing as strange as this. The rope trailed in the dirt and brown pine needles. He thought he saw the monster man at one point and froze up. Figg couldn’t go after him. What would he do if he caught him? There was something off about this place. He knew he’d sought it out, wandered until he found somewhere that felt good to him. Someplace that felt right. This had always worked for him. He’d always had success. Like a farmer finding the right plot of land he’d always had a good yield and managed to pull out before he got caught. He’d never attributed anything otherworldly to this ability, just experience and instinct. It was like a transient’s education. But he was starting to think there was something about this place that had seduced him, even lied to him. He knew he should get out. He should definitely get out. He shouldn’t even bother returning to the shack. There wasn’t anything of his in there anyway. Nothing he really needed. He should keep going. Follow the sun west. Go all the way to the ocean. Maybe even sign on with some kind of vessel and go someplace far away like China. No place would be far enough away from here. Maybe not even the heavens. But even as he thought this, he was wrapping the rope around a branch and testing its sturdiness, creating a sort of slipknot with the other end.

  He saw a man walking toward him. It wasn’t the monster. This was a white man. He held a rifle. His mouth was moving but Figg couldn’t hear anything coming out. He dropped the rope and reached for his knife but something had him around the tops of his arms and he didn’t even realize it was another man until yet a third man reached into his pockets and emptied them of their contents and when he did this Figg’s pants almost came down and he was pretty sure his cheeks colored with shame and, like that, all the pain and all the sounds came back and it was like exploding to the surface of the green ocean.

  “Stay still!” the man in front of him shouted.

  Figg noticed the badge.

  The man behind him bound his wrists behind his back.

  “What is all this? I didn’t do nothin!”

  Figg refused to walk so they dragged him over to the dirt trail that would eventually lead into town.

  The road was lined with unspeakable atrocities.

  The monster had been very busy.

  It was tough for Figg to hear the men over the noise in his head.

  The school had gone on a field trip to the woods.

  No one had returned.

  Worried parents.

  What kind of sick man does this?

  Blood and limbs and flies everywhere, lining the trail like a road of horrors.

  * * *

  The trial was short. Many of the parents cried for hanging. The sheriff agreed with them. Mr. Elias Figg should certainly be hanged. He should probably be drawn and quartered. Possibly even castrated. But the judge had a better idea. Twin Springs was new. It was going to be a growing village, maybe even a town or a city one day. There was work that needed doing. There certainly wasn’t a lack of volunteers to oversee Mr. Figg in his labors. And if ever he should escape there was certainly no lack of volunteers to go looking for him and bring him back.

  There was always someone there to watch him. Even when he was alone in his cell, there was someone watching him to make sure he did not take his own life.

  Figg lived a lot longer than he ever imagined he would.

  He managed to escape a number of times but never got very far. The repercussions were always very severe.

  Now a very old man, every part of his body screaming with pain, he managed to escape and make it all the way back to the shack in the woods. No one had reclaimed it. It was a haunted place and, while it had been somewhat battered and abused over the years, it had never been lived in or destroyed. Still free, Figg struggled up into the shack – the step had long since rotted away. He lay down in the middle of the floor and stared at the shadows moving across the ceiling. He didn’t think about everything he’d done and not done. He closed his eyes and did the one thing he’d come here to do in the first place.

  MAY TO MAY

  Zena Rado knocked on the door and waited. She slid the key into the lock and opened the
door. This was always the part she found most thrilling. The rest of it was exciting in a different way. The excitement of discovery. Like the kind an archaeologist on a dig might have. The initial discovery – unearthing – of the way these people lived was a shot of pure adrenaline.

  Sometimes there wasn’t anything at all. Sometimes the house was simply empty. As it really should be. Nothing except an old scrap of paper or toothpick shoved into the back corner of a kitchen drawer. But this was rare. Most people left something behind.

  A few of the tenants had been hoarders. This, other than the obsessiveness of their condition, offered little clue as to any specific personality. It was just the compulsive acquisition, almost randomly, of stuff. The only thing their hoarding really said about them was that they were consumers, and possibly more sentimental than most. Or they were just lazy. Most people in our modern world were consumers. The only real difference between a hoarder and the rest was how one curates and displays her acquisitions.

  More often than not, she found the perfect balance of things taken and things left behind. This helped her form a far more accurate life of the tenant who’d lived at 523 Glowers Pike, Twin Springs, Ohio 45—-.

  Alan Beaumont was an example of this type of person.

  Zena had to check the lease in her hand to make sure she had his name right. Even though she’d opened his checks for the past twelve months, the name had eluded her.

  She stepped into the dining room through the door in the carport and breathed in the familiar musty earthy smell. One of the tenants had complained about a mold problem a few years back and they’d had to take care of that. Like everything her parents did with their rental properties, it was done cheaply and half-assed. Sometimes a tenant would manage to successfully tamp down that smell that made Zena think of a grave but it inevitably came back. It wasn’t an odor she would describe as a stench. She found it pleasing, comforting, woodsy.

  Everything was in her parents’ name. Zena handled things while they wintered in the Florida Keys. Their winters were getting longer and longer. And why not? They were getting older and, having lived most of her life here in Twin Springs, Zena had heard many people refer to the “damp chill” that seemed to hang around nine months out of the year. Maybe it was because of all the old growth trees or maybe it was because of the creek. “Shady” and “dripping” were two adjectives that came to mind when Zena thought about the Springs.

  “Mr. Beaumont?” she called.

  No answer.

  “Hello. Is anybody here?”

  No answer.

  There was a certain protocol she followed. She didn’t know if it was necessarily legal or not but she figured she could do pretty much anything within reason. Anything that wasn’t completely out of line. She was not the landlord, after all. Merely the flaky art school graduate daughter, offering to pitch in and help in exchange for a free ride through life. Little more than an office assistant. Sounded good to her.

  A rectangular black wooden table dominated the dining room. Probably a four- or, at best, six-seater. There were no chairs. A couple of dead plants cancerously blighted a wrought iron stand. The floor and everything else was gritty with dust.

  She had not always been so brazen about entering the house. Her parents owned many houses throughout the town and surrounding farm country and this was the only one she would ever enter like this. She had been working for her parents since shortly after graduating a prestigious private art school in New England. The school was very similar to Twins Springs’ own Shrine College, the place that, she guessed, really put it on the map. Shrine College was why many people knew the town of Twin Springs when there probably wasn’t really any reason for them to.

  That was ten years ago.

  No one had rented this for more than thirteen months at a time. And it was always May to May. Which meant that it sat vacant for eleven months out of the year. It was something she and her parents never even really thought about anymore. Her father had drawn up a contract from May 1st one year through May 30th the following, the rent was twice what it was for any of their other properties, and it was always taken. Twin Springs was a highly sought after area. The school system was good. Crime was low. There were things to do and restaurants to eat in. It was a welcome liberal enclave in a mostly conservative part of the state. “For Sale” signs rarely lasted more than a month and she had placed rent signs in yards and turned around in an hour to remove them because the property had been taken that quickly. Now, with the internet, she barely needed to put out signs.

  Not so with 523 Glowers.

  Her father told her it had been like this for as long as he could remember. One year he’d put a sign in the yard that said FREE RENT with his phone number beneath it. He left it up for eleven months and didn’t receive a single call. Until late April. Zena was too young to remember it but that was the year that writer guy had lived there. Holger Something-or-the-other. Twin Springs was an artsy, literate place. There were probably many people living here over the years who fancied themselves writers but this guy had actually had some stuff published. Zena couldn’t remember any of the titles. It was trashy, Stephen King-type stuff she’d never really been interested in. The guy disappearing off the face of the planet without a trace didn’t even make his name more known. JD Salinger was just a reclusive asshole and that only helped his popularity. Not poor Holger Writer Guy, though. Maybe it was just the difference between timeless literature and sensationalistic pulp. Hell, maybe it had been a pen name. When her father informed Holger the free rent only applied through April, he said the guy seemed unaware and offered to come in and pay all thirteen months up front.

  So she knew, if it was beyond May 31st and she entered the house, she would be alone.

  Only she never really felt alone.

  At first she’d been terrified of finding someone dead but that hadn’t happened either.

  She was not aware of anyone dying in the house. So she hesitated to think the presence she felt was a ghost. It was probably just her imagination.

  Now she stood in the library. That’s what it looked like Alan Beaumont had used it for, anyway. Some people liked to use it for a study or guest bedroom. One family had even used it as the playroom. It had a large window in one wall and a door that let in as much light as the shady backyard would allow. The door opened to the back patio, if it could really be called that. It was a thing of bizarre . . . not beauty, exactly . . . Existence, maybe. She had no idea who created the patio but it looked like he’d had a bunch of spare bricks and got drunk with his friends while they placed them on the ground. The bricks mostly touched each other. It didn’t look like any mortar had been used and they weren’t at all even. While they may have been drunk when they laid the patio, she had to think that being drunk post-construction was a bad and possibly dangerous idea. So, yes, it was bizarre the patio even existed. Why spend time on something that looked like that? Why not scrap it and hire a professional?

  A desk was pushed against the door. She would never know if it was so he could enjoy the view or if he was trying to keep something out. The window had what looked like a large dreamcatcher hanging from it with a sachet of something fastened to it. She sniffed the sachet. It smelled dry and dusty with maybe an underlying odor of rotting flowers.

  She performed a quick survey of the bookshelves. Since no one had ever left behind anything like a computer or laptop or smart phone or even a diary, the bookshelves were often the best way to figure out what went on in some of these people’s heads. Mr. Beaumont had seemed to like books on various religions with an emphasis on the occult. Or maybe those were the books he was least interested in. Maybe those were the ones he cared so little about that he left them behind.

  She looked at his agreement again to see if it listed an occupation or an employer. She raised her eyebrows. It was like Mr. Beaumont knew his renting this house was in no way contingent to his employment.

  EMPLOYER: FUCK ALL GODS

  ADDRESS: 12
3 Anywhere Street

  Anyplace, Ohio 66666

  PHONE: 1-800-BUTTSEX

  She wondered if her parents kept any of the previous tenants’ agreements on file. If so, it could make for some amusing reading.

  In the middle of the room was a small, uncomfortable looking futon couch. Zena immediately thought of it as a bachelor’s couch. There was a single book on the couch. It was called The Book of Lies by someone named Aleister Crowley. Zena thought the name sounded familiar although it carried a vaguely negative connotation. She thought about taking it since it seemed like this might possibly be the last thing Mr. Beaumont had read before he left. But she figured there would be plenty of time for that. If people didn’t clean out this house before vacating it, they never came back for their stuff. Everything in here was now Zena’s responsibility to get rid of. This had happened plenty of times before. Her parents had once tried to simply open the doors and have an estate sale, perfectly willing to let everything go for free, but no one showed up. Even when Zena listed shit on eBay, it sat there for an inordinately long time before selling. Nowadays, she was more inclined to pay junk men to just come and remove everything.

  She left the library behind, moving back through the dining room and turning left into the narrow kitchen, making another left into the living room. More dust. A faint odor of incense. A couch. A couple of chairs. A low coffee table. A couple more dead plants. No television. No stereo. No DVDs or CDs or records. Not that there was any need for physical media anymore. All one needed was an internet connection to stream everything from space. She imagined every work of art that had ever been created orbiting the earth like an asteroid belt.