The Spook House (The Spook Series Book 1) (16 page)

I moved toward it until it was directly in front of me. At first, I felt a spark of hope.

This is it! I thought. It’s the door! This is what I’ve been looking for!

I pointed my light inside. The flicker of hope was quickly stomped out. The space beyond the open portal was pitch black. I instinctively knew I was not going in there. My survival instinct screamed, “NO!”

It’s like how you know you’re not supposed to cross the railing of a high balcony or a bridge. That edge is the actual dividing line between life and death, with life and safety on one side and a drop and certain death on the other.

That’s how it was with this door. I knew I was not supposed to go in there. I slowly backed away from the danger, just like I had that time in the woods when Sampson and I had encountered the mountain lion.

Something moved in the blackness beyond the doorway. I froze. It was the rough sound of something dragging itself along the ground.

My heart was hammering in my chest. “Just back away,” I told myself. “Back away.”

Then there was a low moan. I was not imagining it. I aimed my gun into the darkness. The light disappeared in the blackness beyond on the door. It was like shining a light into an abyss. The dragging continued. The moaning got louder. I watched the small spot of light on threshold vibrate as I held the gun and flashlight with shaky hands.

A bloody hand appeared in the small puddle of light, clawing at the ground.

 “OH MY GOD! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!”

The ghastly hand pulled itself forward, followed by a filthy, eerie arm and shaved head. They emerged from the darkness as if rising from a black pool.

“A-Abrams? Is that you?” said a tortured voice.

“FUCK!”

“A-Abe?”

I heard the surrender in the voice when I didn’t answer.

“Identify!” I screamed.

The bloody head struggled to look up at me. I barely recognized the ravaged face through the blood and tears.

“Stillman!”

“Abe! Oh, dear God. Help me! You gotta get me out of here! Abe!”

Stillman raised his bloody hand. I almost instinctively reached for it, but something held me back. My instincts were at war with each other. This was a teammate. Hell, he was a human being. I could not stand by and watch him suffer. But at the same time, I would not cross that threshold. It might as well have been the door between life and death itself. I knew that once I crossed the line, there was no going back.

“Abe!” Stillman cried.

“Just … just come out the door,” I said. “Just a little further.”

“Abe, don’t leave me,” Stillman wailed.

“I … I won’t,” I insisted. “Just come out the door! You can do it!”

“Help me,” Stillman whimpered. His raised hand was shaking. I noticed, however, that it never left the threshold of the door.

Suddenly, his body, only visible from his chest up, was jerked into the darkness like a swimmer being yanked under the surface by a shark.

“HELP ME!” Stillman screamed.

He looked up at me as his face, body, and head were pulled back into the dark pool. His bloody hand clawed the air, still reaching out for mine as it too disappeared into the blackness.

Then there were the sounds – sounds of Stillman screaming, and other noises I couldn’t quite identify. Then the crunching sounds began. And the ripping sounds. Wet, smacking sounds. The din of something slithering or skittering around in ooze.

To hell with Coles’s warning. I aimed my gun and unloaded it into the darkness beyond the door. Yelling like an insane animal, I sprayed the area in every direction. If Stillman were still alive and I hit him, good. It was my final act of mercy. If I hit anything else, even better.

I hosed the area with bullets until the gun ran out. I let it fall from my fingers and picked up one of the others slung across my back.

The hideous noises from beyond the door stopped. Everything was silent now, as silent and still as when I first discovered the door. Emotionally and physically drained from the adrenaline rush, I staggered back from the portal. For the first time, I noticed the words carved into the stone wall above it: “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here”.

I knew immediately where I had seen that before. I had this fruity, New Age-type English teacher in high school who was so hopped up on Dante that he made us read the whole Divine Comedy. I knew exactly what this was.

“The gateway to Hell!? You’ve got to be freakin’ kidding me!”

It didn’t make any sense. But with a growing horror, I realized, suddenly, it all made sense.

Something dripped on to my face. I pointed my light up to the cave ceiling. The stalactites overhead looked different – smoother, flatter, and with a strange, wet sheen to them. It took my brain several seconds to process what I was looking at. They weren’t stone stalactites. They were rows of giant, triangular teeth, all adrip with ichor. More were pushing down from the roof of the “mouth,” as well as up from the ground.

Something in my brain snapped. When the floor felt spongy, I started screaming. Air reeking of blood exhaled out of the portal opening.

I started shooting everything. The whole “room” flinched in response. I slipped and fell to the ground. On my back, I posted my hand on the ground. It was soft and slippery. I looked up at the teeth coming down.

“God help me!” I screamed.

“God can’t help you now,” came the response. “He’s not here.”

The voice was raspy. It was not like a human voice, but more like a rush of air, a hiss, or a whisper. It was the nightmare voice at the other end of terrifying phone call waking you up in the dead of night.

My body started involuntarily shaking. My anus was sputtering. If there that been anything in there, I would have crapped my pants. I was soaked with a chilling sweat like a person jolting awake from a nightmare.

The voice said God wasn’t here, and I believed it. So who was? The Devil? I could almost believe that, but I know her, and this was not her style. This whatever-it-was was not the Devil. It was something else.

Foul saliva dripped off of the fangs. It burned the skin of my arm. I dropped the gun. The teeth were dripping digestive fluids. The tongue-like floor undulated.

I instinctively shouted, “Ashira!”

If I were really at the Devil’s door, she should hear me.

Something stung my arm. I looked down. A giant tooth protruding from the floor had cut me with its serrated edge. I pulled my arm away. It was wet and warm. The blood dripped to the ground. The ground squirmed, invigorated by the taste of blood.

“Ashira! Help me!”

There was no response.

“Can anybody hear me?” I cried.

To my relief and horror, I got my answer.

24

“I can hear you,” said a woman’s sexy voice.

“Fuck! Ashira! Is that you?”

I already knew the answer. I had called her, but somehow, I both did and didn’t expect her to respond.

A flame flickered in the darkness beside me. It momentarily revealed a tall woman with long red hair. She was lighting a cigarette with her fingertip. The flame disappeared, plunging the spot into total darkness again.

The tongue-like floor trembled and knocked me closer to being swallowed by the portal to Hell.

“Ashira! Help me!”

“Now why should I do that?”

“Because … Because … you owe me!”

The smoldering end of the cigarette flared up in the dark, as did two other points of light that must have been the pupils of her eyes.

Ashira said, “Stop.”

The mouth of the monster froze, and I realized she wasn’t speaking to me. I was standing in a cave again.

Ashira stepped into the tiny pool of light given off by my remaining lantern. She stood uncomfortable close. She was wearing her red “slutty lawyer” business suit. The hem of the dress was unprofessionally high and the buttons of her shirt were largely undone, leaving a gaping opening that showed an excessive amount of cleavage. She was beautiful.

“Jacob,” she said in a soothing voice. “It’s been a long time.”

I didn’t know if I should be flattered or freaked out.

She sucked on her cigarette and blew out a plume of smoke. It had a familiar aroma of cannabis.

She held the joint out to me and said, “Wanna hit?”

I stared at the rolled paper in her beautiful hand with the long fingers and nails. Of course I wanted a hit.

“Well, get it over here,” I said.

I took the joint out of her hand, brought it to my lips, and inhaled. Oh my God that was good. I blew the smoke out. I felt my muscles relaxing, and my heartbeat slowing. The drug made it almost impossible not to be relaxed.

I took a deep breath. “That’s good shit,” I said, exhaling. Then I put the buds back to my mouth.

“Hey, don’t bogart that!” Ashira joked. I passed the joint back to her. She took a hit and laughed.

For a moment, I almost forgot where I was. I was happy, smoking weed with an old friend I hadn’t seen for a long time.

“Well, Jacob, I’m not going to ask you what you’ve been up to, because I know. You’re in the Army now. I didn’t figure you for the military-type.”

“Why not?” I said, slightly offended.

“Oh, I don’t know. I mean, the military? Really? How is that going to get you laid?”

“There’s more to life than just fucking things,” I said seriously.

Ashira and I looked at each other and started busting up.

“Oh Jacob,” she said, “You still amuse me.”

I was falling under her spell again. She was so charming.

“Ashira, what’s going on here?”

I look around. The cave looked normal again. I saw water dripping off of some the stalactites. I was beginning to wonder if I had freaked out again like I did upstairs with Paco and Dubois. I mean, here I was, talking to the Devil in person. Again.

“Ashira,” I said, struggling to speak the question. “Am I insane?”

She said, “If you’re sane enough to ask that question, then the answer is probably no.”

I waited for more. She added, “Truly insane people don’t ask themselves that, because they don’t have the self-awareness to think that there might be a problem.”

“So what’s going on here? Is this really the gate to Hell?” I said with disgust. “Is this your idea of a good time?”

“Oh no, I’m not responsible for this, although I do admire the work that’s being done here,” she said. “Human beings come up with more creative versions of Hell than I ever could. You never fail to surprise me.”

“So what’s really going on here?”

The tiny lights in Ashira’s eyes seemed to flare up again in excitement as she smiled and said, “I think you know.”

I thought back to what Paco and Dubois said.

I said, “They’re testing drugs on us.” It was both a statement and a question.

“Well of course they are!” Ashira said.

“But … we’re Americans!” I blurted out.

Ashira started laughing so hard she was in tears.

“Oh Jacob, that’s a good one. ‘We’re Americans.’ Classic.”

She composed herself and said, “‘We’re Americans. We’re the good guys.’ That always makes me laugh.”

I didn’t think that was funny. Ashira looked at me darkly and said, “We’re Americans. And America doesn’t torture people.”

I got her point and I said, “But my team ... We weren’t terrorists, or even terrorist suspects. Why would the Army go after us? We’re the fucking troops! We’re on the same side!”

From somewhere in my shadowy halls in my mind, I heard a ghost from the past. It was a platoon leader in boot, telling the new recruits to obey orders and not to piss anyone off, because “shit happens” and “The military is not some great brotherhood of man.”

I was still resisting Ashira’s assertions, however right she might be. I shot back, “Why would they do this to us?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Ashira said. “Are any of you particularly valuable to the Service?”

I didn’t say anything. She went on.

“Are any of you particularly educated or trained? Do they have a lot invested in you?”

A voice in my head said, “No,” but I didn’t let it come out of my mouth.

“What about your families? Are any of you going to be missed?”

I was about to say yes without hesitation, then she added, “… by a lot of people?”

The answer was no. Nobody in the unit was that into school. Most of us were on military probation, in fact. None of us were married. Nobody had any kids that I knew of. The only family members who would really miss me would be my dad and my dog.

Feeling like I had lost ‘the mental game,’ as they call it in fight training, I gave up. Ashira’s arguments were too strong. She was right.

“So what you’re saying is, ‘They used us.’”

“If you’re going to act surprised that the military threw away lives of its own people to achieve some pointless objective, then I’m outta here,” Shiva said. “This little exercise wasn’t a mistake. Your team didn’t die because somebody fucked up. They died on purpose. They died because your superiors wanted you all to die. They wanted to see if their drug could make you violent and crazy enough to kill each other. And guess what? It did! It works!”

My “superiors.” The word made me want to spit. The very idea sickened me. It was like getting laid off by a boss who was making big bucks, and then finding out that he got a bonus. He wanted to improve the bottom line. So what was his answer? Cut people at the bottom, naturally.

I felt used. The organization I had served had cast me into the abyss and watched me go down. What they didn’t know was, I personally knew the monster at the bottom, and I had a free pass. Now I was clawing my way out. I was going to make it out, and when I did, I was going to find them and throw them into the pit.

“I’m going to get them,” I said, to myself more than to Ashira.

“Excellent,” Ashira said, her eyes flaring with excitement. “Tell me what you want.”

“I want …”

I stopped. I reminded myself to think of Ashira as an evil genie who might interpret the wish literally but not as I intended.

“I want freedom,” I said. That felt right, and I didn’t see anyway that wish could be screwed up.

“OK,” the Devil said quickly, wanting to dispense with that and get to the good stuff. “And?”