Kill Creek

by Scott Thomas

Word spread once more that something was very, very wrong with the house on Kill Creek. Rachel Finch’s death was just another chapter in its dark legacy.

So the house fell silent once more, the yard overgrown with knee-high tallgrass and clinging ivy. The house on Kill Creek still stands. Empty. Quiet. But not forgotten. Not entirely. Rumors are its life, stories its breath.

I took another step into the abyss. “What’s down here?” I called to her. I could sense her presence at the top of the stairs. “Don’t worry,” Rachel replied. “It’s more scared of you than you are of it.” I heard her chuckle, a laugh that stuck in her throat, never quite reaching her lips. As usual, I would have to see for myself. —Dr. Malcolm Adudel Phantoms of the Prairie

THE AIR WAS on fire. Set into the stone wall was a towering Gothic window, the beveled panes of its enormous, narrow body glowing in the afternoon sun. Dust motes swirled in the shaft of light blasting through the glass. Just beyond the light, in the shadows, things shifted restlessly. Faces. Staring. Silent. Hungry.

Lewis’s The Monk, Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer

“Four: Corruption of the Innocent. That’s you guys.” This drew a laugh.

He replaced the cap on the marker, set it on the ledge that ran along the bottom of the board, and returned to the lectern.

“This is perhaps the most important element of any good Gothic horror story. Without it, what do you have? A shitty old dump with a dark history no one remembers or cares about. You need t...

“Last One Out Kills the Lights by Sebastian Cole. You all should have a copy of this now.”

She didn’t let him continue. “You’ve said that writing is personal, that an author always puts a piece of themselves in their stories. So, you know, what’s your secret?”

Sam raised the glass to his lips but did not drink. He stood there, an insect frozen in amber as time marched on without him. He wished he could exist only in this spot.

IT WAS THE house. Something was reaching inside. Surrounding him. Suffocating him. Silence. A silence that made it hard to breathe.

He had other stories in reserve, fragments written on yellow pages of legal pads, scribbled on napkins, stored away in the recesses of his mind.

Change direction. Just write something. Anything. Write a goddamn paragraph. A sentence. A word! Blink, blink, blink.

THE VINES DID not want to give up their hold. Green tentacle-like arms snaked through every empty space of the chain-link gate, securing it in place.

The window looked like a cyclopean eye, staring out at the horizon, unblinking.

The structure loomed over him, the peak of the triangular roof like a fang sinking itself into the purple clouds of the darkening sky. White paint flaked like dead skin from the house’s weathered wood. At its base, thick weeds sprouted, burrowing into the brick foundation wherever they could. Yet for all the time it had been abandoned, neglected, the windows were not so much as cracked. The glass panes remained intact, the light of each passing day reflected upon their surfaces.

Behind the door, something shuffled. He heard it draw a quivering breath. Whatever was there, it was excited. Anxious for him to enter.

“Sometimes stories have too much power. They change who people think you are.”

“Funny thing about rumors,” Sebastian said softly. “It doesn’t matter if they’re true or false, only that people believe them.”

Sam looked out the window, his face long, his eyes tired. He had not slept well the night before. His nerves were like millions of tuning forks humming in different keys.

Blackbirds, grackles perhaps, dotted the trees, their beady black eyes watching as the car rolled past. Every now and then, one would give a shrill squawk at the intruders. You are not wanted here. You should turn back.

It seemed that no man, no matter how determined, could construct such an edifice all by himself. That was what it was, not a house but an edifice. Its very existence seemed impossible without the help of the supernatural.

He was not above calling a book unreadable. But their literary merit wasn’t important at this moment. They were words strung together to represent the firing of neurons and the transferring of information through synapses. They were human minds set into paper, and Sebastian loved every single one of them, even the ones he found disposable.

The kitchen is the heart of the house, Sam thought. It is a place of gathering, of conversation, of love. It should be, he corrected himself. But this house was not a place of love. It was a place of death.

The barren branches high overhead seemed to reach for one another, straining to clasp fingers bare of leafy flesh, pointed fingertips desperate to span the distance as the light wind knocked them gently about.

Daniel reached under the middle plank, and his bare fingers sunk slightly into the deteriorated wood. Thoughts of spiders filled his mind—thin, needlelike legs scuttling in the dark; fangs dripping with teardrops of golden venom; sleek black bodies born of shadows; webs in the nooks and crevices where only they could climb, like a trail of silken nightmares.

Glancing around, he located a stone, jagged like the tooth of some long-extinct beast, and, holding it directly above the slit of blackness, he dropped it down into the well. Its fall seemed impossibly long, the splash as it hit bottom far too faint.

She took a breath and held it. On the screen, the image was exposed perfectly. The richness of the sunlight gave way to the black depth of shadow as she smoothly tilted the camera up. One by one, the stairs led higher.

image forming once again in her mind. The wall wasn’t there, but there was a woman with black hair and she was . . . she was . . . Kate closed her eyes tight, trying to force her mind to make sense of the memory. “She was scratching the air,” Kate said aloud. Of that, she was sure. The woman had been scratching the open air, her fingers curled into claws, fingernails digging into the space before her as if the wall were still there. Kate shuddered. She was trapped. And she wanted out.

“you write like you’re going to battle. So what is it, Moore? What are you fighting?” She leaned back against the railing and considered the question. “The same thing you’re running from, I suppose. Life is fight or flight. I choose to fight.”

The rustling of leaves got Sam’s attention. The branches of the beech tree were swaying, the leaves rippling from end to end. Yet this time, there was no breeze.

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.’

“Horror no longer goes bump in the night. Horror stuffs the bodies of dead hookers in his crawl space and then pulls a twelve-hour nursing shift taking care of your sick mother. Horror sits in his cubicle and fantasizes about sucking the toes of the high school cheerleader he plans to strangle after work. Horror stays awake at night dreaming up ways to hurt you and your family and your pets and everything you hold dear. Horror is perversion.”

That may be the most perverse thing of all: ignoring the horror, even as it happens around you.”

When something bad is swept under the rug, it doesn’t go away. It festers. In horror, there’s no such thing as ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ That thing will be back, and it will take over your life. That’s the root of all fear: the loss of control. Not being able to stop the evil.”

“The wall upstairs, on the third floor.” “There’s a staircase leading to a brick wall,” Kate added. Sam frowned. “A brick wall?”

“Perhaps the house is waking up,” Sebastian teased. Daniel chimed in, “That’s how it happens in these houses. It’s always at night.

He could almost feel the air pulling past him, through the foyer, up the stairs, deeper into the house. Then it was pushed back, only for the cycle to repeat again. Breathing. It’s like the house is breathing. But softly. Like it’s relaxed. Content. Content to what? he asked

“Hold on to those memories, Sam. The good and the bad.” He regarded the liquor in his glass. “Because someday, much sooner than you think, you may lose them from your life. One by one, they will go. The worse, when it happens, will be the memory of love. Love is warmth. It’s like Greek fire; no matter how much others try to dampen it, it only grows more intense. I want to remember love, Sam. I want to remember it forever. Because the thought of losing that, well, there’s nothing more terrifying. Not even in this decrepit old house.”

But Kill Creek circled the house like a moat, and within this keep, this stronghold of silence, nothing stirred. Only the tallgrass made a sound, swaying even when there was no breeze, its dry, husky top bristling like the warning rattle of a viper.

You grow in your sleep, she had once been told. The same was true for a story.

But someone was there, standing within the shadows beyond the moonlight, a few feet away from the foot of the bed. He could hear the person breathing. Shallow, raspy breaths.

He’s not coming out. We’ll never see him again. He’s crossed over into another place, a dark place, a world that devours you whole.

Without looking, Sam reached over and snatched a new ream from a teetering stack. He ripped open the paper wrapping like a lion tearing into its prey.

For a moment, Sam thought he heard a noise. The whisper of voices. The sound of charred hands, twisted by fire into claws, fumbling with the knob of the front door.

The sunlight blinded her. She flinched, blinking, and held up a hand to shield her eyes. Quickly, she backed out of the shaft of light and into the shadows that clung to the edges of the room.

She had nowhere to go. No job. No friends. No life. Only this. Only the claustrophobic isolation of the world behind her locked door. From somewhere outside, drifting in like echoes from an alternate universe, came the sounds of waking life. A car honked. A dog barked. A man yelled curse words at no one in particular.

She remembered ripping them from the wall in a panic, desperate to be rid of that staring hollow-eyed face. Yet there they were. And something was behind the photos, scratching against the back of the wall as if trying to dig through it. A finger broke through one photo. The pale digit poked into the light and squirmed like an unearthed grub.

Contained. The word did not sit well with Sam. It conjured up images of a virus run amuck, of men in hazmat suits working feverishly over doomed patients as dark rivers of blood poured from every orifice. The word made him feel as though they were infected with something unknown and therefore incurable. Three more bodies to throw on the fire.